News Release Archive - Electoral Issues

Reuters reports today: “The Supreme Court struck down on Thursday long-standing limits on corporate spending in U.S. political campaigns, such as this year’s congressional races and the 2012 presidential contest.”

ROBERT WEISSMAN, via Angela Bradbery
Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said today: “Shed a tear for our democracy. Today, in the case Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence election outcomes. Money from Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and the rest of the Fortune 500 is already corroding the policy-making process in Washington, state capitals and city halls. Today, the Supreme Court tells these corporate giants that they have a constitutional right to trample our democracy.” Public Citizen played a key role in the Citizens United case.
A video statement by Weissman is available at the just-launched webpage DontGetRolled.org — and Public Citizen is holding a call-in news conference at 12:45 p.m. ET.

JOHN BONIFAZ
Legal director of Voter Action, Bonifaz (who will participate in the Public Citizen news conference) said today: “Free speech rights are for people, not corporations. In wrongly assigning First Amendment protections to corporations, the Supreme Court has now unleashed a torrent of corporate money in our political process unmatched by any campaign expenditure totals in U.S. history.”
Just after the Supreme Court announced its decision, Voter Action and other groups unveiled the new website — FreeSpeechForPeople.org — to “correct the judiciary’s creation of corporate rights under the First Amendment” The webpage includes a video on whether corporations are people.

LAWRENCE JACOBS
Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, Jacobs is author of Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness. He said today: “A great myth is that what drives politicians is polling. It’s not — it’s interest groups, stakeholders, contributors and party activists. Those people in turn drive the nature of the polling in order to sell their preferred policies to pick up public support. This is clear in things like strong public opposition to the Afghanistan escalation or public support for reform of the financial sector.” Jacobs is in Washington, D.C. on Thursday for the annual conference of the National Academy of Social Insurance.

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

ROB RICHIE
Richie is executive director of FairVote and co-author of Every Vote Equal and Whose Votes Count. He outlined eight points toward better elections:

1) “Non-partisan election officials: It hardly matters whether the method of voting is with paper and pen or open-source computerized equipment if election administrators are not trustworthy. In 2004, the secretaries of state overseeing elections in three battleground states — Ohio, Missouri, and Michigan — were co-chairs of their state’s George Bush reelection campaigns. In Missouri, that Secretary of State was running for governor — he oversaw elections for his own race! A highly partisan Republican Secretary of State ran elections in Florida, as did a partisan Democrat in New Mexico. Election administrators should be civil servants who have a demonstrated proficiency with technology, running elections and making the electoral process transparent and secure.

2) “National elections commission: The U.S. leaves election administration to administrators in more than 12,000 counties scattered across the nation with too few standards or uniformity. …

3) “Universal voter registration: We lack a system of universal voter registration in which citizens who turn 18 years of age automatically are registered to vote by election authorities. This is the practice used by most established democracies, giving them voter rolls far more complete and clean than ours. …

4) “‘Public Interest’ voting equipment: Currently voting equipment is suspect, undermining confidence in our elections. The proprietary software and hardware are created by shadowy companies with partisan ties who sell equipment by wining and dining election administrators with little knowledge of voting technology. …

5) “Holiday/weekend elections: We vote on a busy workday instead of on a national holiday or weekend (like most other nations do), creating a barrier for 9 to 5 workers and also leading to a shortage of poll workers and polling places. Puerto Rico typically has the highest voter turnout in the United States — and makes Election Day a holiday.

6) “Ending redistricting shenanigans by adopting forms of proportional representation: Most legislators choose their voters during the redistricting process, long before those voters get to choose them. More than 97 percent of U.S. House incumbents have won re-election since 1996, overwhelmingly by landslide margins. The driving factors are winner-take-all elections compounded by rigged legislative district lines. …

7) “Establish the National Popular Vote plan for president: The current winner-take-all rules governing the Electoral College in states enable presidential campaigns to completely ignore most states in general elections. … States have the power by 2012 to guarantee election of the candidate who wins the most popular votes in all 50 states by joining several states that have adopted the National Popular Vote plan for president.

“Pry open our democracy: Our ‘highest vote-getter wins’ method of electing executive offices creates incentives to keep third-party candidates off the ballot. … Controversies of the New Jersey governor’s race is the latest example of how our system is not designed to accommodate three or more choices, yet important policy areas can be completely ignored by major party candidates. Most modern democracies accommodate voter choice through two-round runoff or instant runoff elections for executive offices, and proportional voting for legislatures. Instant runoff voting is being used today in many American elections, including city elections in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Pierce County, Wash.”

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

ROBERT WEISSMAN, CRAIG HOLMAN, via Angela Bradbery
President of Public Citizen, Weissman wrote the piece “Tightening the Corporate Grip: The Stakes at the Supreme Court” about Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a case the Supreme Court heard Wednesday that could have far-reaching effects on corporate power. Holman is government ethics lobbyist for Public Citizen.

Writes Weisman: “Overturning the court’s precedents on corporate election expenditures would be nothing short of a disaster. Corporations already dominate our political process — through political action committees, fundraisers, high-paid lobbyists and personal contributions by corporate insiders, often bundled together to increase their impact, threats to move jobs abroad and more.

“On the dominant issues of the day — climate change, health care and financial regulation — corporate interests are leveraging their political investments to sidetrack vital measures to protect the planet, expand health care coverage while controlling costs, and prevent future financial meltdowns.

“The current system demands reform to limit corporate influence. Public funding of elections is the obvious and necessary (though very partial) first step.

“Yet the Supreme Court may actually roll back the limits on corporate electoral spending now in place. These limits are very inadequate, but they do block unlimited spending from corporate treasuries to influence election outcomes. Rolling back those limits will unleash corporations to ramp up their spending still further, with a potentially decisive chilling effect on candidates critical of the Chamber of Commerce agenda.

“Ours is a government of the people, by the people, for the people — not the corporations and their money. Corporations don’t vote, and they shouldn’t be permitted to spend limitless amounts of money to influence election outcomes.”

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

REESE ERLICH
Just back from covering the Iranian election, Erlich is available for a limited number of interviews with major media. Foreign correspondent and author of The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis, Erlich said today: “This isn’t a ‘Twitter Revolution.’ That description trivializes the broad mass movement that has swept Iran. It is not just the affluent of northern Tehran who are protesting. It’s poorer people from southern Tehran — who organize by plain old phone calls and word of mouth.

“The movement has gone beyond protesting election fraud and now challenges the system. Some protesters want a more moderate Islamic government, others want a return to a parliamentary system that existed in the early 1950s under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh headed the last democratic government in Iran, which included freedom for political parties to organize, free press and freedom of religion. It was overthrown in a CIA coup in 1953. That’s why the government is cracking down so hard; it is threatened to its core.

“There’s a big controversy in the U.S. about President Obama’s statements on Iran. But they are largely irrelevant to the people of Iran. Given the long history of U.S. meddling in Iran, it’s best that the U.S. not further intervene and [instead] let the people of Iran deal with their own government. The U.S. has a long history of sanctions [and] supporting terrorist attacks against Iran that bolster the rightwingers in Iran. The U.S. cannot and should not try to intervene in Iran’s upheaval; anything the U.S. does would be counterproductive. It’s much more important that Iranians receive people-to-people support in the form of rallies, marches, etc. from American grassroots groups.”
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EILEEN CLANCY
Founder of I-Witness Video, Clancy has for years documented protests in the U.S. and Northern Ireland. Clancy said today: “Protesters in Iran are managing to get some video out to the broader world that challenges the official Iranian government narrative. We’ve seen similar efforts to expose government repression using cell phone video and the Internet in several countries including Egypt, Turkey and Burma.

“While it’s fashionable right now for U.S. politicians to stick up for the peaceful protesters and citizen journalists in the streets of Iran, those sentiments ring hollow. In the U.S., protest events are typically deemed marginal events by the news media, even when extraordinary things happen there. In 2004, 1,800 people were arrested at the Republican National Convention in New York City; 90 percent had charges dismissed; the city’s legal bill to date is $8.2 million and hundreds of lawsuits are pending.

“In 2008, the Republican Convention was the most repressive I’ve ever seen in the U.S.; police were using concussion grenades. I-Witness Video members were followed by undercover police and we were raided twice, once with guns drawn. It was clear that there was an effort to disrupt people who could get video to the broader world. Local reporters were swept up and charges were later dropped. We were actually told by the police that they were tracking us in real-time using geo-location data from our cell phones. Twitter was key for us doing our work.”

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

BRUCE FEIN
Author of the book Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, Fein was a Justice Department attorney in the Nixon administration. Today he and Ralph Nader sent a letter to Barack Obama: “The United States ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture in 1994. Article 12 of the CAT provides: ‘Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.’

“Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Richard Cheney have both openly conceded that they authorized waterboarding on at least three Al Qaeda detainees. Among others, Attorney General-designate Eric Holder has characterized waterboarding as torture. …

“The federal criminal code punishes torture in accord with the CAT. See 18 U.S. C. 2340A. The United States recently prosecuted and punished the son of Liberia’s Charles Taylor for torture perpetrated in Liberia.

“The public record clearly gives reasonable ground to believe Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their subordinates are implicated in torture. Article 12 of the CAT thus requires that your administration conduct a ‘prompt and impartial investigation’ of the individuals and their superiors involved in waterboarding the Al Qaeda detainees and in interrogating Mohammed al-Qahtani. We urge that the investigation be conducted by a special prosecutor with a Republican Party affiliation appointed by the Attorney General to forestall charges of partisanship. If no investigation is forthcoming, you will have violated Article 12.

“During your presidential campaign, you assailed the unilateralism of your predecessor which flouted international obligations or responsibilities. You promised change. You should not ape former President Bush by defying Article 12 of the CAT.”

MICHAEL RATNER
President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Ratner said today: The Bush years have “been a nightmare especially for those feeling the brunt of the administration’s militaristic, inhuman, and illegal outrages. Law, legality and separation of powers were of no account. For eight years now we have all suffered Bush’s law: his actions were the law. (It has echoes of the Fuehrer’s law of Nazi Germany.) The wars and killings in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza; the torture and detentions of thousands held at prisons in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and secret sites; the implementation of a surveillance and spy state here at home with arrests on trumped-up terrorism charges; and the suppression of speech characterizing a terrible moment in all our lives.

“The country under Bush has moved well along on the road to a police state. … The excitement of Obama’s election can only take us so far. Bush’s unconstitutional practices must be reversed. Constitutional rule must be reestablished. This means an end to:

1. Perpetual detention without trial
2. Torture and inhumane treatment of detainees
3. Trials in kangaroo courts such as the military commissions
4. Off-shore penal colonies and secret prisons
5. The rendition of people to other countries for torture
6. The surveillance state with its warrantless wiretapping, spying and suppression of speech
7. Rule by presidential fiat

“Constitutional rule means that those who grossly violated fundamental rights be prosecuted; that the torture team be brought to justice.”
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DAVID SWANSON
Swanson is in D.C. and was at the “Yes We Can Arrest Bush” rally, which is continuing this afternoon along the route of the inaugural parade at the FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue, between 9th and 10th Streets; see arrestbush2009.com.

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

“I don’t think Dr. King would endorse any of us. I think what he would call upon the American people to do is to hold us accountable, and this goes to the core differences, I think, in this campaign. I believe change does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up. Dr. King understood that. It was those women who were willing to walk instead of ride the bus, union workers who are willing to take on violence and intimidation to get the right to organize. It was women who decided, ‘I’m as smart as my husband. I’d better get the right to vote.’ Them arguing, mobilizing, agitating, and ultimately forcing elected officials to be accountable, I think that’s the key. So that has been a hallmark of my career, transparency and accountability, getting the American people involved. That’s how we’re going to bring about change. That’s why I want to be president of the United States, to respect the power of the American people to bring about change.”
– Barack Obama, Jan. 21, 2008
Transcript
Video

ROBERT JENSEN
Professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Jensen wrote “A ‘Citizens’ Oath of Office’ for Inauguration Day 2009.”

His books include The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege.

JARED BALL
Professor of communication studies at Morgan State University, Ball said today: “We cannot divorce Obama’s election from the fact that it comes 40 years after not only the assassination of Dr. King but the attendant ‘assassination’ (repeated annually) of King’s image and, more importantly, the movement that produced King. Obama is the system’s response to that movement, the antithesis of that movement, not that movement’s successful culmination.” Ball is featured in a video about Martin Luther King Jr. and activism.

ANISE JENKINS
Jenkins is president of the Stand Up! for Democracy in D.C. Coalition (Free D.C.) which has helped put up posters around D.C. featuring the D.C. flag and the text “Yes We Can, D.C. Statehood Now.” Jenkins said today: “Obama told me during the campaign that he definitely supported D.C. statehood. This is long overdue; the people of D.C. are denied a host of basic rights that citizens of every state in the United States take for granted.”

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY
Gray is a civil rights organizer in South Carolina. He is author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics and just wrote the piece “From South Africa to Israel: Time for a New Divestment Campaign,” which states: “King was a politician of sorts, although not so much at the time of his assassination. We love King now, but at the end of his life he wasn’t so popular. Younger activists criticized him and called him names such as ‘Da Lord’ — mocking his once high place in civil rights politics. President Lyndon B. Johnson and a host of government officials, local and national, condemned him when he spoke out against the Vietnam War. King was not universally cheered when he marched, to his death, with the garbage workers in Memphis striking for fair wages and respect. Truth be told, he was jeered, even by some blacks. …

“This year we should honor King in an active sense. We should commit ourselves to organize against the American policy of violence and empire. The anti-war movement should apply pressure on Obama to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. And, just as important, particularly amid the horror that has been visited on the people of Gaza: a broader peace movement must also build real economic and political pressure against Israel’s immoral and criminal acts against the Palestinians. This King Day should mark the beginning of an organized push for American divestment from Israel.”

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

The following commentators offer different perspectives on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the meaning of Obama’s inauguration:

Rev. GRAYLAN S. HAGLER
Hagler is national president of Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice of The United Church of Christ. He said today: “In many respects what is happening early next week with King’s birthday and Obama’s inaugural are the culmination of historical struggles and it is good to celebrate those struggles which have brought us to this place.”

Hagler is senior minister of the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C., which will host a “Continuation of Hope and Real Change” event on Sunday, Jan. 18 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.; the church is located at 5301 North Capitol Street NE.

GLEN FORD
Executive editor of BlackAgendaReport.com, Ford regularly produces audio commentaries. He has been a noted critic of Obama in the African-American community.

One recent piece of his is: “Bankers and Military Hog Power Under Obama.”

He has also written “Black Caucus Abandons King Legacy and Black Opinion, Votes For War on Gaza” and “Give the Candidates the MLK Test.”

Background:
“A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. …

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores. … A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.”
– Martin Luther King Jr. from his “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” address, delivered April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, a year to the day before his assassination

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

Timothy Geithner, President-elect Obama’s nominee as Treasury Secretary and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since 2003, has had his Senate hearing postponed until Jan. 21.

ROBERT AUERBACH
Professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, Auerbach wrote the book Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan’s Bank.

He said today: “During the nomination hearings for Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner should be asked for the details of the negotiations that have been conducted by the Fed that may now amount to over $2 trillion in loans. Have the Fed’s recent loan policies been conducted in the backroom without a complete paper trail for the taxpayers and elected officials?

“Last week it was reported that New York Federal Reserve President Geithner was involved in the 1998 Fed-orchestrated private bailout of LTCM [Long-Term Capital Management] by private-sector banks. LTCM had earlier rejected a bailout offer from Goldman Sachs, AIG and Berkshire Hathaway. When he appeared before the House Committee on Financial services, Greenspan could not or would not tell Congress the details of the bailout, apparently because the nation’s central bank produced no detailed public records. The testimony of the Greenspan Fed did not indicate the existence of a paper trail. Members of the Committee on both sides of the aisle attacked the backroom deals of the nation’s central bank.

“These actions put the Fed in the same league as the tycoons of an earlier age, such as John Pierpont Morgan, whose financial deals in the 1907 financial crisis were made out of sight of the public or its elected officials.”

Auerbach was an economist with the House Committee on Financial Services including during a period when Texas Congressman Gonzalez attempted to achieve a level of meaningful oversight over the Fed. Gonzalez was continuously thwarted by Greenspan.

For background, see Robert Scheer’s new piece “Wall Street Robber Barons Ride Again.”
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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

Hillary Clinton’s hearing in the Senate for Secretary of State is scheduled for Tuesday. The Financial Times recently reported that Dennis Ross has been selected by President-elect Obama for Mideast envoy, a position Ross held in the Clinton administration.

STEPHEN ZUNES
Professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus, Zunes has written the recent articles “Congress Backs Israeli Invasion, Redefines International Law” and “Hillary Clinton Brings Militaristic Record to State Department.”
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ROBERT NAIMAN
Naiman, senior policy analyst and national coordinator at Just Foreign Policy, just wrote the piece “Would Dennis Ross Set the Stage for War with Iran?”

Background:

See: Glenn Greenwald’s recent piece “Obama v. the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran”

Also, see from the Institute for Public Accuracy: “Anti-War Candidate, Pro-War Cabinet?”

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

President-elect Obama is nominating Chicago public school CEO Arne Duncan (hearing Tuesday) to be secretary of education and Eric Shinseki (hearing Wednesday) to head the Department of Veterans Affairs.

AARON GLANTZ
Author of The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans, Glantz is Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism at The Carter Center.

He said today: “About 200,000 veterans sleep homeless on the streets every night in this country. According to the VA’s own numbers, 18 veterans commit suicide every day. Veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan are already falling through the cracks.

“President-elect Obama and Gen. Shinseki have the power to end this national disgrace. They have the power to streamline the VA bureaucracy so it helps rather than fights those who have been wounded in the line of duty. They can ensure that this latest generation of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan does not receive the bum rap the Vietnam War generation got.”

PAULINE LIPMAN
Lipman is professor of policy studies at the College of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her books include High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform. She is available to address Arne Duncan’s record in Chicago and education policy generally.

Critical background information on Duncan is available from these Chicago-based groups:

Parents United for Responsible Education

Substance News

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