FBI probe should worry Walker

With new arrests every week, the FBI probe of Scott Walker's closest aides and supporters is continually uncovering stories that would be front-page news in any other political era.

How strained are things around the governor's mansion, where Walker's own spokesman, Cullen Werwie, now has immunity in the FBI probe? No wonder the governor says he wants to hurry up the recall election.

So serious are the charges against some of the people closest to Walker, corruption is rapidly becoming a major issue for the coming recall campaign, eclipsing union-busting, budget-cutting, and the fact that, despite massive corporate tax breaks for "job creators," our state continues to hemorrhage jobs.

But stealing money from the widows and orphans of Wisconsin's fallen soldiers? That is truly a new low.

Read the whole story: The Isthmus

Citizens United vs. the 99%

The War on Political Free Speech

Source: Bradley A. Smith via WSJ Opinion

Two years ago the Supreme Court upheld the right of an incorporated
nonprofit organization to distribute, air and advertise a turgid
documentary about Hillary Clinton called, appropriately enough, "Hillary:
The Movie." From this seemingly innocuous and obvious First Amendment
decision has sprung a campaign of disinformation and alarmism rarely seen
in American politics.

From the start, reaction to Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission has bordered on the hysterical. Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.)
called it the "worst decision since Dred Scott"—the 1857 decision holding
that slaves could never become citizens. In his State of the Union message,
within days of the ruling, President Obama lectured Supreme Court justices
in attendance that they had "reversed a century of law" to allow "foreign
companies to spend without limit in our elections." Neither statement was
true.

In 1907, Congress passed a law—the Tillman Act, named for segregationist
South Carolina Sen. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman—prohibiting corporations from
contributing to political campaigns. This law was extended to unions in
1943, and in 1947 a provision of the Taft-Hartley Act extended the
prohibition to cover spending done independently of campaigns. 

Citizens United overturned only the 1947 independent-spending
restriction, not the earlier prohibition on corporate contributions to
campaigns. Not until 1990 did the Supreme Court uphold a prohibition on
corporate political expenditures independent of campaigns. Citizens United,
therefore, overturned not "a century of law," but a precedent 20 years old.

Moreover, the court specifically noted that it was not ruling on the
viability of the prohibition on foreign political spending—and earlier this
month it summarily upheld a lower-court ruling finding that the prohibition
on foreign political expenditures was constitutional.

Meanwhile, regardless of the 1947 federal law, the majority of
states—including many of the best governed, scandal-free states such as
Virginia, Utah, Oregon, Florida and Washington—have long allowed unlimited
corporate spending in state elections.

None of this has slowed the decision's critics. Then-Senate Judiciary
Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) began a committee hearing in
September 2010 by arguing that in his small state, "it's easy to imagine
corporate interests flooding the airwaves. . . . The rights of Vermonters .
. . to be heard should not be undercut by corporate spending." Vermont has
never prohibited corporate spending in state elections, yet it survived
with its citizens' rights intact.

Mr. Leahy, at least, limited himself to foolish remarks. His junior
colleague, Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), proposed a constitutional amendment
last month that would not only prohibit corporations from speaking on
political elections, but would prohibit any group of citizens organized "to
promote business interests" from speaking about elections. Presumably, this
could extend to everyone from the Heritage Foundation and the National
Federation of Independent Business to the Republican National Committee and
local citizens organizing against a sales-tax referendum.

Because most newspapers are incorporated, UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh
believes that the Sanders Amendment and a companion bill in the House would
even authorize the government to prohibit newspaper editorials about
elections.

A national coalition, Move to Amend, seeks a constitutional amendment
providing that "artificial entities, such as corporations, limited
liability companies, and other entities . . . shall have no rights." The
coalition seems oblivious to the fact that this would apply to campaign
committees and nonprofits such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club, and would
allow legislatures to make the advocacy of Move to Amend's goals illegal
for most of the coalition's "endorsing organizations" (which are themselves
corporations).

These amendments are based on the leftist cry that "corporations aren't
people," but the Supreme Court has never said that they are. "Corporate
personhood" is a legal fiction that allows natural people to sue and to be
sued, to own and transfer property, and to carry on their affairs as a
group. Corporations have rights because the people who own them have rights.

As Chief Justice John Marshall explained nearly 200 years ago in Dartmouth
College v. Woodward, corporations allow "a perpetual succession of many
persons . . . to manage [their] affairs and to hold property without the
perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity, of perpetual
conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand." The
legal concept of a corporate "person" has been with the United States since
its founding, recognized in literally hundreds of Supreme Court decisions.

If Move to Amend got its way, police could search businesses, unions, clubs
and nonprofits at will, without a warrant. The state could seize business
property without due process or just compensation, leaving pension funds
and individual shareholders holding worthless stock. Partnerships and
corporations would have no legal rights in court. Incorporated churches
would have no right of worship.

The absurdity should be obvious. Yet city councils around the country,
including New York and Los Angeles, have passed resolutions calling for
such an amendment.

Super PACs have become the latest villain du jour of the anti-speech crowd,
which plays off the general public distaste for the political rancor that
surfaces every election year. Critics including Mr. Sanders say that Super
PACs don't disclose their donors and rely on "secret" money. This is simply
not true. Super PACs, like the traditional political action committees that
have existed for decades, disclose all expenditures and all donors over
$200.

There are organizations that spend on politics but don't disclose their
donors: traditional nonprofits such as the NAACP, the NRA and Public
Citizen. These groups have never had to disclose their donors—and the
Supreme Court, over 50 years ago, upheld their right to keep supporters
anonymous. But reformers intentionally seek to blur the lines between these
traditional groups and Super PACs in order to whip up criticism of Citizens
United.

The goal of this misinformation is clear. Reformers, who sit mainly on the
political left, and their Democratic Party allies hope to silence voices
that they perceive to be hostile to their political interests.

Two years after Citizens United, American democracy seems as robust as
ever. This may be what its critics fear most—a vibrant debate that they
cannot control and fear they will lose.

The U.S. government argued in Citizens United that it had the right to
ban the publication of books, pamphlets and movies that advocated the
election or defeat of a candidate if they were produced or distributed by
unions or corporations, such as Random House, Barnes & Noble and
DreamWorks. That position is the one that deserves scorn. Fortunately, no
new amendment was needed to defeat it—only the First Amendment and a
Supreme Court willing to uphold it.

Mr. Smith, who served as commissioner of the Federal Election Commission
from 2000 to 2005, is chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics and
professor of law at Capital University.

Should We Feel Sorry for the Wealthy?

Ari Fleischer, the former White House Press Secretary for U.S. President George W. Bush , has been trying to make the case on Twitter that the wealthy are taking on more of the tax burden than ever.

Of course, the argument is incomplete without knowing how the share of income changed over these years. He uses the CBO as a source, so I'll use the same same data to respond to his claims:

CBO finds that, between 1979 and 2007, income grew by:

• 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households,
• 65 percent for the next 19 percent,
• Just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and
• 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent.

The share of income going to higher-income households rose, while the share going to lower-income households fell.

• The top fifth of the population saw a 10-percentage-point increase in their share of after-tax income.
• Most of that growth went to the top 1 percent of the population.
• All other groups saw their shares decline by 2 to 3 percentage points.

Let's take the top 1% first. Between 1979 and 2007 income for this group grew by 275 percent, and the share of income doubled from around 10 percent to around 20 percent of total income. However, the share of taxes for this group less than doubled. Thus, a doubling of income resulted in less than a doubling of taxes. Given that income growth outpaced tax growth, it's hard to see how we can describe this as an increase in the tax burden for the top 1%.

What about the middle of the distribution? As noted above, the share of total federal tax paid by middle income taxpayers dropped from 21 percent in 1979 to 16.5 percent in 2007. However, over the same time period the share of income for this group went from 51.1 percent to 43.5 percent. When the fact that the share of income for the middle income group has fallen is accounted for, it's no surprise that the share of taxes has fallen as well. On net, the two roughly cancel -- the fall in income and the fall in taxes are roughly proportional. Thus, the notion that the rich are paying more, and middle income families are paying less -- that income is being redistributed from the rich to the middle -- does not hold up to further scrutiny. The rich are doing better than ever, tax rates are at historic lows for this group, and their share of taxes has not risen by as much as their share of income.

What about the bottom of the income distribution? First, it's highly misleading to just look at federal taxes for this group. The federal tax burden is relatively low for this group, but when state taxes, sales taxes, and the like are factored in the burden is relatively high. For example:

Data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy show that the poorest fifth of households paid a stunning 12.3 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes in 2010

When all federal, state, and local taxes are taken into account, the bottom fifth of households paid 16.3 percent of their incomes in taxes, on average, in 2010.

Mitt Romney pays 15 percent, or thereabouts (probably a bit more when state and local taxes are accounted for), while this group pays more than 15 percent in taxes even though their incomes are very low. Enough said about who faces a larger tax burden.

Ari Fleischer is trying to make you believe that taxes on the wealthy have risen, and that the increase in taxes is being used to fund tax reductions for lower income classes. However, when income gains are factored in the numbers tell a different story. This graph shows what has actually happened to the tax rates for the wealthy:



The next time Ari Fleischer or any other political operative tries to make the case that the wealthy have experienced an increase in their tax burden, keep this graph in mind.

Nobody Understands Debt

Source: Paul Krugman

In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.

This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.

Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!

And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.

But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.

And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

The U.S. Supreme Koch

Constitutional Amendment Not Needed: Congress Already Has a Remedy

Although the Constitution already includes a remedy, certain elected officials and public interest organizations are advocating for a constitutional amendment to overturn recent Supreme Court decisions that have corrupted elections, public officials and government. They are using Vermont town meetings as a springboard for the campaign. Critics of the constitutional amendment approach point out that an amendment would not solve the problem, legitimizes the Supreme Court seizure of power over elections, would keep the Supreme Court in charge and diverts from a solution already in the Constitution that more effectively solves the problem with far less effort. The simpler alternative that is already available in the Constitution deserves attention.

Supreme Court decisions legalizing private interest financing of election campaigns have enabled a vast increase in private interest control over our federal government. The 1 percent contribute hundreds of millions of dollars in election campaigns to empower themselves and disempower the 99 percent. To keep that money flowing to themselves, elected officials waste enormous sums of taxpayer's money on government contracts, subsidies, bailouts, wars and tax cuts for the rich. The 1 percent thus receive enormous returns on their political investments. By contrast, the government uses the resulting deficits to justify cuts in needed spending on education, health care, environment, safety and infrastructure that would benefit the 99 percent who do not buy elections and influence.

Here is why a constitutional amendment is not needed to end this disenfranchisement of the 99 percent. The revolutionary leaders who wrote the Constitution, fresh from overthrowing the tyranny of King George, included sufficient checks and balances on all three branches of government - including the courts - to prevent the kind of tyranny we now suffer.

Under our existing Constitution, Congress already has the power to stop the court from making any more of the decisions that have allowed the 1 percent to buy elections. Then Congress can pass legislation reversing the unconstitutional decisions the court has made to corrupt elections.

Here is the provision the founding fathers included:

The Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact with such Exceptions and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make (US Constitution, Article III, Section 2).

Hence, under the Constitution, Congress has the power to remove Court jurisdiction over financing election campaigns. Removing Court jurisdiction means that the court would not even be able to take up cases involving financing of elections. Congress and state legislatures will then be free to pass laws removing private money from election campaigns. Thus, Congress already has power to curtail the court and the tyranny of private money in elections facilitated by the 5-4 majority of Supreme Court judges whose goal is to empower the 1 percent at the expense of the rest of us.

Read the whole story at Truth-Out

On health reform, the election will matter more than SCOTUS

Think the Supreme Court is where the future of President Barack Obama’s health care law will be settled? Think again.

The real verdict on the future of Obama’s signature achievement will come in November — and the law’s supporters say a Republican sweep could pose a bigger threat to the law than the nine justices ever could.

Read more: Politico

George Carlin - Why You Are In Debt

Inequality: Growth in real after-tax income

Source: Paul Krugman:

Andy Rosenthal gets a bit of a laugh out of Mitt Romney’s insistence that the only reason anyone would talk about inequality is the “politics of envy”, and that if the subject is discussed at all, it should only be in “quiet rooms”.

Indeed. Because there’s no way anyone who isn’t motivated by envy could be interested in and possibly concerned about this:

Trickle-down economics has now become shut-your-trap economics.

ALEC: America’s secret political power

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.—There’s something rotten in the air. A muggy, oniony, chemical smell that wafts over the lines of uniformed riot police, paddy wagons and metal barriers that are holding back a straggle of protesters waving slapdash placards reading “Shut Down ALEC.”

“Get back ma’am, for your own safety,” a courteous voice warns me. “They’re gonna start pepper spraying.”

Pepper spray?

It’s a surreal touch at the lush, sprawling Westin Kierland Resort, where the air is scented with fragrant flowering bushes and the aromatic lotions of the spa.

But the protesters are at the gate, and inside, hundreds of state legislators from all over the U.S., their wives and entourages are meeting with corporate leaders for a three-day annual policy summit. Or, to their banner-bearing foes, a cradle of “corporate profiteering at the expense of our communities.”

“Today only,” blazons a sign hoisted by a silver-haired protester, “Buy One Senator Get One Free!”

Read the whole story at: TheStar.com