Reclaim Democracy!

Presidential Debates Should Serve Citizens and Democracy, Not Political Parties

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Why We Should Replace the Commission on Presidential Debates with an Independent Non-partisan Body
presidential debates, debates presidential, obama, romney
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney at 2012 CPD event

The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) sounds like an official body, but in fact it is a private non-profit corporation owned and controlled entirely by Republican and Democratic party operatives. Most of the CPD budget is provided by for-profit corporations and their lobbying groups. The CPD undermines the interests of Americans in many ways, including:

  1. It deliberately excludes viable independent and third party candidates from participating in any debates (the opposite of the parties’ practice in their own primaries of enabling all serious candidates to appear in at least one debate.)
  2. It creates restrictive formats with minimal follow-up, and pre-determined topic areas allow the candidates to memorize and recite soundbites to an excessive degree, diminishing substantive debate.
  3. CPD-chosen moderators ask questions that emphasize solely the differences between the two controlling parties and their candidates while ignoring critical issues on which they concur, or at least share disinterest in confronting. See our analysis of the 2000 Bush v Gore debates, for example.

Since the 2020 election seems unlikely to feature a credible third-party or independent candidate, it’s an ideal opportunity to illuminate why replacing the CPD will better inform the public, regardless of who participates.

CPD Documents

Reporting on the Debates

Other Resources on the Debates

So what’s the alternative? 

A Citizens’ Debate Commission which employs criteria resembling that proposed by the Appleseed Citizens’ Task Force on Fair Debates.

Photo from barackobamadotcom  flickr page

Snuffing Runaway Corporate Power at the Source: Our Money

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“If you don’t like the growth of giant corporations, stop giving them your money,” said Jeff Milchen (Reclaim Democracy’s Executive Director at the time) in 1997. While this does not suggest exercising our power as consumers is sufficient by itself to solve the problem of runaway corporate power, we too often find the importance of our spending choices overlooked or diminished in the work to revitalize democracy. Since most of the world’s largest corporations sell directly to consumers, we certainly do have much to gain by finding opportunities to decentralize power with our own purchases.

indie-week-douglas-quote

Milchen later went on to found the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA), a non-profit organization helping communities build vibrant local economies based on independent community-based businesses rather than absentee-owned companies. It also builds a genuine pro-small business / pro-community voice to counter the corporate advocacy of entities like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which often pretend to speak for small business. While AMIBA focuses heavily on providing direct support to the community organizations that comprise its membership, it also coordinates two national campaigns each year.

Independents Week is a campaign that occurs the first week of July each year. While AMIBA provides a wide array of templates and support material, the campaign is executed through community organizations and individuals around the country. Independents Week engages citizens in celebrating entrepreneurial spirit and the freedom to control one’s own livelihood, rather than being dependent corporations. It also emphasizes the importance of local ownership and control for communities and affirms citizens’ role in shaping their community’s future.

We encourage readers to recognize both the value of integrating a pro-local business perspective with work to revoke illegitimate corporate power, and make clear that one can be an active advocate for community-based businesses while working to stop corporations from wielding illegitimate power.

Taking advantage of the ready-made tools for Independents Week is one simple step that just might spark interest in more ambitious initiatives, such as starting an Independent Business Alliance to differentiate between the interests of Wall St. and Main St., and help your hometown businesses prevent corporatization of your community.

Exxon CEO Now Concerned About Local Fracking Impacts…In His Community

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By Dr. Walter Brasch

Rex W. Tillerson, a resident of Bartonville, Texas, like many of his neighbors was upset with his city council. That’s not unusual. Many residents get upset at their local governing boards. And so they went to a city council meeting to express their concerns that the council was about to award a construction permit.

The residents were upset that the Cross Timbers Water Supply Corp. planned to build a 160-foot tall water tower. That tower would be adjacent to an 83-acre horse farm Tillerson and his wife owned, and not far from their residence. The residents protested, and then filed suit to stop construction. The tower would store water to be sold to companies that needed it for high-volume horizontal fracturing of oil and gas wells, the process known as fracking.

Each well requires three to nine million gallons of water, up to 10,000 tons of silica sand, and 100,000 gallons of toxic, often carcinogen, chemicals. The process of horizontal fracking, about a decade old, to extract oil and gas from the earth presents severe health and environmental problems.

The residents, all of whom are in the visual distance to the water tower, said that construction of the water tower would impact their views. They argued that during construction and after the tower was built, there would be excessive traffic and noise.

Michael Whitten, who represents Tillerson, told the Wall Street Journal his client was primarily concerned about the impact the tower would have upon property values. The plaintiffs bought their homes so they could live in an “upscale community free of industrial properties, tall buildings and other structures that might devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy,” according to the suit.

Rex W. Tillerson isn’t your typical resident. He’s the CEO and the chairman of the board of ExxonMobil, the third largest corporation in the world, and the company that leads all others in exploring, drilling, extracting, and selling oil and gas. It’s also a company that has had more than its share of political, social, and environmental problems. Tillerson was an engineer when the Exxon Valdez fouled the western shore of the United States in 1989. By 2004, he was the company’s president.

In 2012, Tillerson was given $40.3 million in compensation, including salary, bonus, and stock options, according to Bloomberg News. His company had $453 billion in revenue for the year, and a net income of $45 billion.

When you have that much money, every million or so dollars matters, especially if a large ugly tower impacts not just your view but your quality of life and the value of your property.

Large ugly rigs, the kind that go up when ExxonMobil and other companies begin fracking the earth, also affect the people. The well pads average about eight acres, mostly cut from forests and agricultural areas. Access roads, some of which upset or destroy the ecological balance of nature, need to be built. Other roads receive heavier-than-normal damage because of the number of trucks, often more than 200 a day, that travel to each well site.

As early as 2010, a PennDOT official told the Pennsylvania state legislature that the cost, at that time, to fix the roads was over $260 million. Increased diesel emissions, concentrated in agricultural areas, also affect the health and safety of the people.

The noise from the traffic and from around-the-clock drilling affect the people, causing stress and numerous health issues, according to psychologists Diane Siegmund and Kathryn Vennie, both of whom live in the Marcellus Shale part of Pennsylvania.

When the rigs go up, property values decrease. Banks and mortgage companies are refusing to lend money to families who wish to take out second mortgages or who wish to buy property that has wells on it or is even near a well pad. Insurance companies are not writing policies, even if the homeowner opposes drilling but whose home is near those well pads.

In 2012, Rex W. Tillerson said that opponents of fracking are manufacturing fear, and then laid out a corporate truth when he said that his company has in place “risk mitigation and risk management practices . . . to ensure [oil and gas development] can be developed in a way that mitigates risk—it doesn’t eliminate it, but when you put it into the risk versus benefit balance, it comes back into a balance that most reasonable people in society would say, ‘I can live with that.’”

Thus, the energy industry is telling the people there will be accidents. There will be deaths. There will be health and environmental consequences. But, they are acceptable because “mitigation” allows a corporation to accept errors, injuries, illnesses, environmental destruction, and even death if they believe there is a “greater [financial] good” that outweighs those risks.

It is the same argument that Ford used in the 1970s when it decided not to recall and repair the Pinto because it estimated the cost to pay compensation for injuries and deaths from faulty construction would be significantly less than the cost of a recall.

There is something more about Rex W. Tillerson. He’s proud of his association with the Boy Scouts. He’s a former Eagle Scout and was president of the national Boy Scouts of America. (Both the Boy Scouts and ExxonMobil have their headquarters in Irving, Texas.)

Part of the Scout Oath is to “do your duty to God and your country.” A partial interpretation of that is “by working for your country’s good and obeying its laws, you do your duty to your country.” Within the past six months, ExxonMobil has paid more than $5 million in fines and penalties for not obeying the country’s laws.

The 12th part of the Scout Law is to be reverent. A widely-accepted interpretation of that law, according to Scouting Trail, is: “As a Scout experiences the wonders of the outdoors, stormy weather and calm blue skies, pounding surf and trickling streams, bitter cold and stifling heat, towering trees and barren desert, he experiences the work of God. . . . We need to play the role of steward rather than king—tending and caring for our world instead of taking all we can for our own comfort.”

Protesting the construction of a water tower because it might lower property values, even for selfish purposes, is Tillerson’s right as a citizen. But, destroying God’s world to maximize your profits is not his right.

Guest commentator Dr. Brasch, an Eagle Scout and an award-winning journalist, is the author of 20 books. His latest book is Fracking Pennsylvania, an in-depth investigation of the economic, political, environmental, and health effects of fracking.

Whistleblowers Risking It All in Defiance of the Security State

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whistleblowers are under attack

By Dave Wheelock
May 28, 2013

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”  -George Orwell

There has been a steady stream of so-called whistleblowers since 1863, when the United States False Claims Act was enacted to protect the public interest from fraud by corporate government contractors during the Civil War. The sports-oriented term “whistleblower” was coined in the 1970s by civic activist Ralph Nader, expressly to combat the negative connotations terms like “informer” or “snitch” lend to those who won’t go with the flow of corruption. Today, few conscious citizens would argue against the need for whistleblowers, and the need to protect them from the many forms of reprisals that often come their way.

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 gave hope of reform from the dark days of the Bush II presidency, when W threatened to veto enhanced whistleblower legislation due to, you guessed it, “concerns for national security.” And indeed Obama came in talking a good game: “Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out,” the president-elect cooed to his base. “Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled.”

Ironically, Obama has instead attained notoriety through a heightened rate of whistleblower persecution. According to the April 15, 2013 edition of The Nation magazine, “Since 2009, it (the Obama administration) has employed the World War One-era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information.” Oops, make that seven, with the charges filed in April against Navy linguist James Hitselberger. That is more than twice the total number of Espionage Act indictments filed under all other presidents combined. Especially troubling is that these charges – carrying “enemy of the state” consequences of decades in prison – have been brought not against dangerous spies as the Act originally intended, but against government employees for disclosing official misdeeds to journalists. Not only are the messengers being shot but also journalists responsible for relaying vital information about wrongdoing to the public are being effectively iced as their sources fearfully dry up.

In the war on whistleblowers, we end up living in ignorance of what our government does overseas (in our names) or domestically (with our names). Since the attacks of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, a veil of secrecy has fallen over the “defense” needs of the country, including: steadily increased drone attacks; targeted killings at presidential whim; indefinite detentions and torture; the developing field of cyber-warfare, and warrantless wiretapping. Lest we forget, more than ten years into the War on Terror, we citizens still have no idea to what extent our government spies on us.

In Bluffdale, Utah – a town the size of Socorro, New Mexico – the National Security Agency, responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications, is now building the one million square-foot Utah Data Center. According to James Bamford, who published his first of five books about the NSA in 1982, the data center will be able to eavesdrop on “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Internet searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter’.” But the exact mission of the Utah Data Center remains secret. (Bamford has been threatened with prosecution for writing about the National Security Administration.)

Today former high-ranking NSA officials Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Ed Loomis, and Thomas A. Drake, are sounding the alarm about a rogue national security state operating at wasteful expense and without effective oversight. The so-called NSA Four are all victims of years of government harassment designed to punish them for reporting massive waste and citizen privacy issues connected to a subsequently aborted intelligence gathering program called Trailblazer. In 2010 Drake became an Espionage Act defendant and in 2011 he was cleared of those charges, with the judge calling his prosecution “unconscionable.” What is also unconscionable is that after all the harassment whistleblowers have suffered at the hands of the Justice Department, the real perpetrators – of fraud, corruption, waste, and probable violations of Fourth Amendment privacy rights – skip away scot free.

We are becoming, or have become, the kind of society we Americans used to scoff at – in which the government knows everything about the people’s activities but the people know nothing about those of the government. Since the National Security Agency insists on absolute secrecy, starting with who gets to decide what’s secret, we the people need to educate ourselves. The Government Accountability Project has been instrumental in advising and providing legal defense for whistleblowers. The GAP website offers information on whistleblower protection and on a new film by Robert Greenwald entitled War On Whistleblowers: Free Speech and the Security State.

Dave Wheelock is a member of the Oneida Nation who coaches rugby and directs collegiate sports at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Contact him at davewheelock@yahoo.com.

image courtesy jhmostyn

On Sales Tax, Amazon Wins Even When it Loses

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Jeff Bezos, with a knowing look

By Jacob Weisberg
First published in Slate

Amazon has built its empire on the legitimate advantages it has over retail shopping: an endless range of products at steep discount, personalized recommendations, and stunningly good customer service. It has also benefited from one enormously unfair advantage over its bricks-and-mortar competitors: It doesn’t have to charge sales tax. Depending on where you live in the United States, this can save you nearly 10 percent on purchases—making it foolish not to buy online when you have the choice.

Twenty years after Amazon was founded, Congress is finally addressing this loophole with a bill that would allow states to require e-tailers to collect tax. What’s interesting about this is not the substantive debate around the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013, which is expected to pass the Senate next week. There really isn’t any: Even Amazon concedes in principle that the playing field ought to be leveled. What’s interesting is what the delay tells us about a political system so compromised and sclerotic that it can’t correct even the most straightforward economic unfairness in a timely fashion.

Cyberbusinesses have been able to avoid collecting sales tax based on state laws dating from the era when shopping locally was the norm. Companies without a “physical presence” in a state didn’t have to charge tax if they shipped goods from elsewhere. Instead, it was up to customers to pay equivalent “use taxes” on their purchases. In practice, few customers have ever been scrupulous enough to do so, giving the lie to the commonplace that the American tax system, unlike that of Greece, works on the basis of “voluntary compliance.” In the case of sales taxes, states have no mechanism to track dodgers, so no one pays.

As its business expanded, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos treated this anomaly as an inherited right and deployed the classic techniques of rent-seeking to protect his advantage. He spent millions of dollars per year on lobbyists, deployed an army of lawyers, and cultivated political allies with large campaign contributions. Diffuse and vulnerable, the mom-and-pop shops disrupted by Amazon lacked the capacity to make their case effectively. Nor was there any customer constituency for tax collection, even though the same consumers paid indirectly through diminished public services.

At the state level, Amazon became a litigious bully, an instance of the modern corporation powerful enough to dictate terms to impoverished sovereigns. When challenged over the collection of taxes, it warned that it could take thousands of jobs elsewhere. As California teetered near bankruptcy a few years ago, Amazon cut ties with local affiliates and threatened to fund a public referendum to overturn the legislature’s decision to make it pay tax. Its strategy devolved into simply delaying the inevitable for as long as possible. When a state looked likely to win in court, Amazon would negotiate and agree to collect taxes, provided that it didn’t have to start for a few more years.

In this cynical game, Amazon has been able to count on the connivance of congressional Republicans who stand for the proposition that representation without taxation is liberty. A principled conservative believes that taxes should be low, consistent, and fair. An American Republican, by contrast, acts out of the belief that both taxation and the effective collection of revenues are government abuses. This ideology is codified in the anti-tax pledge most of the GOP has signed for the libertarian commissar Grover Norquist, whose organization Americans for Tax Reform leads the opposition to taxing e-purchases.

This anti-tax ideology grabs for any argument at hand. In the old days, it was that taxing e-commerce would kill the just-aborning Golden Goose of the Internet. More paranoid elements on the right suggest that allowing states to collect sales taxes was a step on the road to a national value-added tax. Others assert that compliance counts as too much of a burden on small business, which could be victimized by endless state-level tax audits. In fact, proposed legislation has always envisioned an exception for merchants who sell less than $1 million a year in goods. In the past, Amazon’s lobbyists have worked to make the proposed threshold lower, in order to give validity to the argument that compliance would be a burden.

What has now changed? Essentially, Amazon has become so dominant that it no longer cares to fight, leaving its worn-out briefs to eBay and Overstock.com. It has played out the clock longer than it dared hope and would now like to be able to build warehouses everywhere without doing state-by-state battle over its “physical presence.” In other words, this is not a case of Congress finally choosing to act. It’s a case of the owners finally giving it permission to do so.

A different version of this piece appears in the Financial Times.

For more, see the American Independent Business Alliance’s comprehensive resource on state sales tax and internet exemption reform.

image courtesy jurvetson

What We Can Learn About Corporations From the Man Who Sold Shares in Himself

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Mike Merrill

Wired.com recently published an article about Mike Merrill, a man who sold shares in himself in exchange for a cut of his future earnings and for the right to make decisions about his life — that is to say, the shares were voting shares.

The story recounts some entertaining/troubling consequences. For example, when Merrill brought the question of whether to have a vasectomy to his shareholders, his girlfriend became apoplectic. In another instance, one of the biggest shareholders, who didn’t know Merrill personally, successfully pushed him to try a regimented and inconvenient polyphasic sleep schedule. His girlfriend objected, but Merrill felt beholden to his shareholders and carried on anyway. She left him.

The piece’s point (if there is one other than amusement) apparently is to reveal what works for companies doesn’t necessarily work for individuals. But reading it, I was struck by the opposite thought: the problems of Merrill’s system are identical to the problems of real publicly traded companies.

Shareholder interests regularly differ from the interests of employees, customers, and other stakeholders (Merrill’s girlfriend, by analogy here), and shareholders often prevail. The presence of absentee owners creates another conflict of interest (on top of conflicts between management and employees), upping the chance that someone – usually the (relatively powerless) employees, customers, or the public – will get screwed.

This dynamic is so dominant that these latter groups are, in general, permanently, systemically and ubiquitously screwed across the US, which, some argue, is the core reason for our country’s dramatic inequality.

The only difference between public corporations and Mike Merrill is that we’ve come to accept the consequences of absentee ownership as “normal” in the context of publicly traded companies, so we’re blind to their pathologies. When the same thing happens in an unusual context, it’s easy to see what’s wrong with it.

Any dysfunction can seem perfectly normal if we’re sufficiently used to it. But that doesn’t mean the world wouldn’t be a much better place if we woke up to the problem and fixed it.

By Nick Bentley
Organizer, Reclaim Democracy