The “super PAC to end all super PACs” reached its fund-raising goal in just over two months, but now comes the hard part: winning elections.
The Mayday PAC, a project begun May 1 by the Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, seeks to elect a Congress that will achieve “fundamental reform in the way political campaigns are funded by 2016,” beginning with five pilot races in this year’s House elections. In a July 4 posting to supporters after announcing the PAC reached its goal, Mr. Lessig wrote, “You have guaranteed” change.
The PAC raised $1 million in its first month and reached another $5 million by Friday. A storm of donors posted on social media on the Fourth of July about getting “big money out of politics” and ending political corruption. The $6 million raised is to be matched by other donors, for a total of $12 million to spend on the midterms.
The Mayday PAC’s website says the $12 million will be spent in five House races to be announced on July 15. That amount isn’t insignificant: The reported outside spending so far this cycle in West Virginia’s Third District, one of the more competitive general election contests, is $2 million.
Mayday eventually plans to push for legislation that would replace the campaign finance system for federal candidates with incentives for candidates to raise small-dollar donations that would then be matched by public money (New York City has a similar system).
Category: Corporate Statism
Court-forced arbitration
No wonder they hate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau! Via The Nation:
For more than forty years, the Supreme Court’s conservatives have been engaged in a campaign to shut the courthouse door to consumers, working people, small businesses and others seeking redress for corporate wrongdoing.
In recent years, and especially since Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito joined the Court, a major weapon in this campaign has been the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) of 1925. The conservatives have used the act to prevent victims of such abuses from seeking redress in the courts, forcing them into pre-dispute arbitration instead. In doing so, they lose a public trial, a jury and a neutral judge, as well as an appeal to a higher court; in many cases they may also have to give up discovery rights. It is not uncommon for them to wind up before an arbitrator who is dependent upon the defendant’s business community for work and fees, and who may not even be legally trained. Not surprisingly, those forced into arbitration almost always fare much worse than they would in court.
This past term the Court paused in its campaign to keep ordinary people—but no for-profit corporation “persons”—out of the courts, though it did make it harder to bring class actions by victims of securities fraud. Instead, it concentrated on overturning or undercutting long-established rulings protecting women’s reproductive rights, unions, affirmative action and church-state separation.
The Court didn’t need to issue any more arbitration decisions. Two reports issued at the end of last year show how effective the Court’s arbitration rulings have been. Last December, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a preliminary report, which found that contract clauses mandating pre-dispute arbitration are a “common feature of consumer financial contracts”; a final report is due by year’s end. The agency found such clauses in over 50 percent of credit card loans, 81 percent of prepaid charge cards and in checking accounts covering 44 percent of all insured deposits.
The CFPB found further that about 90 percent of such contracts, including almost all credit card loans, insured deposits and prepaid cards, also prohibit participation in current or future class or other joint actions in both judicial and arbitration proceedings. This usually forces consumers who have been injured in small amounts to drop the matter entirely, even though the defendant may have harmed many others the same way, for too little is at stake for each individual to justify the time, trouble and expense of individual arbitration.
Thanks to Nicole Naum.
Hobby Lobby and Piercing the Corporate Veil…
Definition of the Corporate Veil…
A legal concept that separates the personality of a corporation from the personalities of its shareholders, and protects them from being personally liable for the company’s debts and other obligations.
In other words, people form corporations to protect the business owners’ and shareholders’ personal assets from creditors…
Because corporations exist in order to put up a barrier between a business and its owners, that means that the religious liberty of the owners cannot be violated by anything the corporation is compelled, by law, to do. Business owners want to benefit from the doctrine of corporate separateness when creditors want their money, and start acting like Paulie from “Goodfellas” (i.e., “$@*% you, pay me!”). When that happens, the owners want to be able to throw up their hands and say, “Sorry, that’s not me, that’s the business.” Piercing that corporate veil is supposed to be difficult. But all of a sudden, the Roberts Five is agreeing with business owners who want to turn around and say—when it comes to their interpretation of religion—that the business is the owners. They can’t have it both ways.
This may explain why groups that would normally have opinions on such important cases regarding corporations did not file amicus briefs with the Supreme Court opining on the Hobby Lobby case …
Not one Fortune 500 company filed a brief in the case. Apart from a few isolated briefs from companies just like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the U.S. business community offered no support for the claim that secular, for-profit corporations are persons that can exercise religion.
Perhaps most significant, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—by far the most powerful and successful voice on behalf of corporations before the Supreme Court—remained on the sidelines in the case as well. The chamber touts itself as the world’s largest business federation. It regularly participates in major Supreme Court litigation, and its views often carry significant weight with the conservative justices on the Roberts Court. In fact, it’s been widely reported that since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the court, the chamber has had a success rate of more than 70 percent. Yet here, the chamber decided not to support the claim that secular businesses can exercise religion…
Just like the chamber, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) —a group that prides itself on being “the voice for small businesses in the nation’s courts”—also chose not to participate in the Hobby Lobby appeal…Yet, like the chamber, NFIB took a pass on Hobby Lobby’s big challenge to the part of Obamacare that helps ensure that women can protect their health and control their reproductive lives.
Hobby Lobby and its supporters have made much of the fact that a large majority of friend-of-the-court briefs were filed on their side, but the only noteworthy corporate voices to weigh in—the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce—actually came down against them.
Hobby Lobby did have many supporters filing briefs in their support, but, these briefs came from conservative political groups, religious groups, religious “celebrities,” and mostly conservative members of Congress.
So, why is there a quiet, implied split of opinion amongst business parties and religious interests that usually agree on corporate personhood issues like “Hobby Lobby” and “Citizens’ United?” Because this ruling may legally, in the future, take away the “Corporate Veil” that protects business owners and shareholders from creditors and other liabilities…
Burt Neuborne of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, a co-author of one of the amicus briefs filed in support of the government’s contraception mandate, foresees possible consequences to this “piercing of the corporate veil” that recall an old adage: Be careful what you wish for.
If owners indicate that they are not entirely separate from their corporation — by denying corporation employees’ birth control coverage based on their personal religious beliefs — the case could be made in future state-court litigation that they have waived their right to be shielded from responsibility for corporate financial liabilities.
Plaintiffs may seek to have owners personally cover a corporate debt when a business goes bust, for example, or to hold a corporation responsible when an owner doesn’t have the money to pay their personal bills.
That could be a huge business risk for the Green family’s closely-held corporation. This is just another part of the Pandora’s Box in this very awful and activist decision.
Crime pays
A federal agency has fined the company that spilled chemicals into West Virginia’s largest drinking water supply $11,000 for a pair of workplace safety violations.
The Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Freedom Industries $7,000 for keeping storage tanks containing crude MCHM behind a diked wall that was not liquid tight. On Jan. 9, roughly 10,000 gallons of MCHM leaked from one of the tanks and through the riverside diked wall and left 300,000 residents without clean water for days.
OSHA also fined Freedom Industries $4,000 for failing to have standard railings on an elevated platform.
Inspectors classified both of those citations as “serious,” meaning the workplace hazards could cause an accident or illness that would most likely result in death or serious physical harm.
OSHA also issued to Freedom one “other-than-serious” citation, alleging the company did not properly label one of its chemical storage tanks at the Elk River site. OSHA said that one of the tanks — not the one that leaked on Jan. 9 — was labeled as containing glycerin, when it actually contained MCHM.
OSHA issued the citations on July 3. Freedom can pay the fines, seek a meeting to discuss the citations with the OSHA area director, or appeal the matter to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. Freedom Industries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Illegal wage-fixing cartel’
It wasn’t just Apple and Google — it seems to include Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks.
And here’s how that works:
In May, just days after the $324 million Techtopus settlement was reached, a major industry-funded report was published, claiming that more H-1B visas should be issued to foreign tech workers. This, they argued, would lead to higher wages for everyone in the tech industry. The report was funded by the Partnership for a New American Economy a powerful union of CEOs, founded by billionaire media oligarchs Michael Bloomberg (worth $34.4 billion) and Rupert Murdoch (worth $14.3 billion), and co-chaired by tech oligarch Steve Ballmer ($21 billion) and Disney CEO Iger, last year’s second highest-paid CEO ($34.3 million).
And this:
A secret no-poach agreement between Pixar and Dreamworks Animation would be particularly remarkable given the company’s famed fierce rivalry in almost all other areas. Even more significantly, the participation of Dreamworks Animation in an illegal wage-fixing cartel would take the politics of this story to a new level, considering the mega-millions in campaign donations that Dreamworks’ CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has shoveled into the Obama campaign.
Yeah, I can see why they’re eager to settle this and keep it out of court.
Quote of the day
From a New York Times article on Hillary Clinton and Wall Street:
“I think there’s a potential window for Democrats to come back, but if it is one wing of the party pushing the populist line — anti-big banks, punishing people whether or not they had anything to do with the crisis — they’ll lock this crowd into a Republican alternative,” said Bill Daley, a former chief of staff to Mr. Obama and commerce secretary under President Bill Clinton who is now a hedge fund executive.
What is the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership?
A big old shitpile of plutocracy, that’s what:
See? We didn’t really offshore all that manufacturing!
Is an iPhone made in China and exported to Europe a U.S. export? Is an Apple executive a manufacturing worker? Yes, and yes. At least those could become the answers if a new proposal afoot among some in the administration is allowed to take effect. Federal agencies grouped under the bland-sounding Economic Classification Policy Committee (ECPC) are proposing to radically redefine U.S. manufacturing and trade statistics.
Under the proposal, U.S. firms that have offshored their production abroad – like Apple – would become “factoryless goods” manufacturers. The foreign factories that actually manufacture the goods – like the notorious iPhone-producing Foxconn factories in China – would no longer be manufacturers, but “service” providers for the rebranded “manufacturing” firms like Apple.
It appears the administration has been reading Orwell.
But the problem with this proposed redefinition is not merely that it offends common sense. The “factoryless goods” proposal would deceptively deflate the size of reported, but not actual, U.S. manufacturing trade deficits, while artificially inflating the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs overnight.
Obama has lunch with economists
Must. Hit. Head. On. Desk.
I’m sure you’ve read that the rate of U.S. growth has slowed to a crawl. President Obama must be concerned — he and Joe Biden met with a group of economists yesterday for lunch. Look at the guest list.
I’m hearing so many people rage about Theoretical President Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street ties, but pay attention: this is the president we have right now.
See any real progressive economists on there? Maybe two.
See any neoliberal, Wall Street-loving economists on there — you know, the kind of people whose stupid advice dug us deeper and deeper into the austerity hole? Uh huh.
- Luigi Zingalies, an economist and professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago School of Business. There’s some things to like (he speaks strongly against crony capitalism and regulatory capture, but he also supported eliminating all American income, corporate, and payroll taxes and replacing the system with a broad consumption tax. It’s the kind of thing that could work with the right progressive adjustments, but anything that makes it fairer is unlikely to be supported by Republicans.) Not necessarily a liberal, but not one of the wingnuts, either.
- Kevin Hassett, conservative economist with the American Enterprise Institute and AEI’s director of economic policy studies. . (He was the chief economic advisor to both John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and says income inequality is just not a big deal.) He’s also a columnist for the National Review. (He was last seen making shit up about French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book.) Salon has called him “Romney’s dumbest economist.”
- Robert Hall, Professor of Economics at Stanford University’s right-wing think tank, the Hoover Institution. Another big supporter of the flat tax that’s so beloved of wealthy conservatives!
- Edward Glaeser, Professor of Economics at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, another wingnut think tank that specializes in urban economic research that blames individuals, rather than systemic problems. Yay!
- Martin Feldstein, Professor of Economics at Harvard. Chief economic advisor to Ronald Reagan and a full-blown deficit hawk. (Can you say “Social Security cuts”? I knew you could!) He was a board member for AIG Financial Products, supposedly exercising oversight of the division of the international insurer that contributed to the company’s 2008 crisis. (Remember how they rated the toxic mortgage derivatives and credit default swaps that led to the crash?) For you conspiracy buffs out there, in addition to being one of Obama’s economic advisors, he’s also on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and he’s usually invited to Bilderberg.
- Ben Bernanke, Distinguished Fellow in Residence, Brookings Institution. What can we say about Helicopter Ben? Some progressive economists hoped he’d extend the same economic stimulus to the suffering public that he did to AIG and the banks, but it was not to be. He was accused of some funny business re: Bank of America, but of course nothing came of it. More importantly, remember that as a member of the Fed board, he didn’t see the crisis coming, and we still don’t know the real numbers about how much he pumped into Wall Street.
And finally, the one honest-to-God liberal of the bunch:
- Melissa Kearney, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, on leave this year as a non-resident fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project. She specializes in inequality and a full range of anti-poverty issues. (We like her because she pushed for extended unemployment benefits.)
And of course, she was the lone female. I don’t like the odds that her voice was heard. Let’s hope so.
Why one reporter left 60 Minutes
Not all that shocking to me, since I was in the news business, but indicative of just what we’re up against with TV news. (What some people won’t do to avoid the horrible Hamptons traffic!) If you’ve paid attention to 60 Minutes stories through the years, you’ve noticed that 1) they punch down, not up and 2) they lean on questionable leaked info. Charles Lewis in Politico:
But I had also seen things at two networks that had troubled me profoundly: nationally important stories not pursued; well-connected, powerful people and companies with questionable policies and practices that were not investigated precisely because of the connections and the power they boasted.
My last 60 Minutes segment, “Foreign Agent,” featured well-known former U.S. officials and presidential campaign aides from both parties who were cashing in on their political connections by working as lobbyists or investment bankers for foreign entities. One of the latter was former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson, at the time the CEO of the New York-based investment firm Blackstone and, more important, one of Don Hewitt’s closest personal friends. The two men were so close that Don would often join Peterson on his company helicopter for Friday-night flights to the Hamptons, thereby avoiding the summertime bumper-to-bumper traffic.The script we’d written included the line, “For Japan and other foreign interests, finding former U.S. officials to do their bidding is not at all difficult,” accompanied by the image of a Japanese newspaper advertisement with five smiling Blackstone officials, extolling their prior U.S. government service and connections. The translation of the ad read, “If you are thinking about developing a new business or an investment strategy … that will be effective in the U.S., by all means, consult us!”
During the production process, when I showed Mike Wallace the photo I’d had shipped from Tokyo, Mike said, “That’s not our story—you’re not filming that.” And I countered, “Mike, what are you talking about? This is the nut of the story—former officials trading on the prestige of their former positions, trying to make a buck with foreign companies and governments.” Wallace and I had a huge expletive-filled shouting match, toe to toe, our faces close; I refused to back down, and he stormed out. We put the picture in the piece.
The first time Don screened the piece, he quipped, “I guess I’m not going to get any more rides on Pete’s helicopter.” But as the days and weeks wore on, with the piece not green-lighted for air—ostensibly because it was “too long”—I realized that I had no choice but to find some sort of editorial compromise, which was offensive to me then and, quite frankly, still is.
One day, while I was on the phone, Don walked into my office and asked whether I’d found a way to “fix” the piece.
“Yes,” I said, and I suggested that we remove Peterson’s name from the script and replace it with the name of another well-known Blackstone official, former Reagan budget director David Stockman. It was a nanosecond shorter—two syllables instead of three—and it solved the unstated, real problem that Don had with the story. Don smiled, said “Terrific,” and left the room, which meant the segment had just been approved for air that Sunday.
I picked up the open phone receiver and resumed my conversation with one of the segment interviewees, Pat Choate, the Ph.D. economist and author who later ran for vice president on the Ross Perot ticket in 1996. I asked Pat, “Did you hear all that?” And he replied, “Every word.”
Go read the rest. You’ll never feel the same way about 60 Minutes again.