U.S. Supreme Court prefers monied speech to liberated speech

The U.S. Supreme Court has continued its project of creating coin-operated elections in America, with its decision in the Arizona case of McComish v. Bennett. The Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Arizona law that would increase state candidate financing when an opponent of a clean money candidate financially increased his or her stake in dirty money. Here's how the stricken provision was described in the Court's syllabus:

They are also granted additional matching funds if a privately financed candi- date’s expenditures, combined with the expenditures of independent groups made in support of the privately financed candidate or in op- position to a publicly financed candidate, exceed the publicly financed candidate’s initial state allotment. Once matching funds are trig- gered, a publicly financed candidate receives roughly one dollar for every dollar raised or spent by the privately financed candidate— including any money of his own that a privately financed candidate spends on his campaign—and for every dollar spent by independent groups that support the privately financed candidate.
Dan Froomkin of Huffpo offers this analysis:
Arizona's law was passed in 1998 after a wave of corruption scandals. The idea was to encourage candidates to forgo the scramble for money, with all its inherent invitations to corruption -- to spend more time speaking to the electorate, and less time speaking to potential funders. In that sense, its goal was very much to increase genuine political speech. But to the Roberts court, money as speech takes precedence over speech as speech.
Justice Kagan's Dissent hammers the Majority's pro-corruption position in the form of a story:
Imagine two States, each plagued by a corrupt political system. In both States, candidates for public office accept large campaign contributions in exchange for the promise that, after assuming office, they will rank the donors’ interests ahead of all others. As a result of these bargains, politicians ignore the public interest, sound public policy languishes, and the citizens lose confidence in their government. Recognizing the cancerous effect of this corruption, voters of the first State, acting through referendum, enact several campaign finance measures previously approved by this Court. They cap campaign contributions; require disclosure of substantial donations; and create an optional public financing program that gives candidates a fixed public subsidy if they refrain from private fundraising. But these measures do not work. Individuals who “bundle” campaign contributions become indispensable to candidates in need of money. Simple disclosure fails to prevent shady dealing. And candidates choose not to participate in the public financing system because the sums provided do not make them competitive with their privately financed opponents. So the State remains afflicted with corruption. Voters of the second State, having witnessed this failure, take an ever-so-slightly different tack to cleaning up their political system. They too enact contribution limits and disclosure requirements. But they believe that the greatest hope of eliminating corruption lies in creating an effective public financing program, which will break candidates’ dependence on large donors and bundlers. [More ...]

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Wireless phone company monopoly means 7,314% mark-ups.

Data should be data to a phone company, right?   No, no.  Not when there's big money to be squeezed out of consumers.  Therefore, the data the phone companies transfer as text massages will cost you 7314% as much as data sold to you when you transfer data through your phone operating as a modem. Having the functional equivalent of one big wireless phone company, which is where we're headed, is like living in a communist country.  The gouging consumers take in the markup of texting is proof.   The other proof is that the FCC in the process trashing net neutrality in the wire markets.    If our politicians weren't functional psychotics, they would clean up this mess in a week by breaking up the phone companies so that we had real competition, and then, for good measure, passing a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and forbidding corporations from playing any part in the electoral process.

Continue ReadingWireless phone company monopoly means 7,314% mark-ups.

Our amazingly screwed-up budget priorities

You all know how NASA eats up a huge portion of the federal budget, and that's why we need to cut lots of NASA fat, right? Actually, that's a misguided public perception--many people assume that NASA accounts for 20% of the federal budget. In reality, NASA only accounts for half of one-percent of the federal budget; for this past year, the NASA budget amounted to $20 billion. What else can you get for $20 billion? How about this? According to Steve Anderson, a retired Brigadier General who was General David Petraeus’s chief logistician in Iraq, the United States spends $20 billion every year air conditioning U.S. military tents and other temporary living quarters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two starkly unnecessary wars, and even a small portion of the expense of these wars equals the total budget for NASA, which, for decades, has inspired all rational-thinking people with its space exploration missions. Priorities like this force me to conclude that our leaders are functional psychopaths.

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Dismantling Citizens United

Electoral politics have become the playground of billionaires and corporations bent on ruling, not governing. Identifying and getting out the voters in elections for political offices against the rich and corporate interests is noble but, under our current corrupt political fundraising system ordinary citizens don’t and won’t have the money…

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A country run by psychopaths

At Common Dreams, David Schwartz points out that the United States is now run, for the most part, by psychopaths, people who are "smart, personable, and engaging, but who have no consciences . . . [They] suffer no remorse, no guilt, no shame." They look normal from the outside, and you can only really know them by the effects of their actions. In short, they are quite capable of appearing affable, and their PR machines are well-tuned to make it look like these psychopaths "care." The problem is that they have become busier than ever creating a world in their own image and likeness, and we are all paying a huge price for this, both in actual damage, but even more in lost opportunities to invest in an economically and socially sustainable version of America.  He points out that the corporate/government of the United States has become "a perfect habitat for psychopaths." He quotes Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without a Country, in point out the main problems with psychopathic leaders:

. . . they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich!
The pyschopaths in charge of the U.S. have the perfect skill sets for destroying most of the country in order to profit from it:
In a country in which much of human culture has been rendered into machines for the manufacture of money, psychopaths are the ideal leaders. They are very focused. They are outcome oriented. They are frequently charming, and usually very bright and able. They can lay off thousands of people, or deny people health care, or have them waterboarded, and it does not disturb their sleep. They can be impressively confident. Psychopaths can be dynamic leaders of enterprises, but are handicapped by their lack of feelings for relationships. They may be accomplished captains of industry, or senators, or surgeons, but their families are frequently abused and miserable. Most psychotherapists have seen the wives or husband or children of such accomplished people. Since psychopaths are usually very smart, they can be quite competent at impersonating regular human beings in positions of power. Since they don’t care how their actions affect people, they can rise to great height in enterprises dealing with power and money. They can manufacture bombs or run hospitals. Whatever the undertaking, it is all the same to them. It’s just business.
Our existing political/corporate/media dystopia has now become so incredibly inhospitable to well-intentioned empathetic normal people rising to leadership positions that it's difficult to envision how to bring about substantial and lasting improvement anymore.  In short, very few good people are willing to destroy their families and reputations running for national office. The trick is to reverse this trend.  I would attack the problem by getting private money out of the elections system.  I would do this by promoting clean-money elections, for instance.  This particular problem is where the United States Supreme Court has become, perhaps, the most nefarious contributor to the problem (and see this statement by Bernie Sanders).  And note that the United States Supreme Court has already dealt a death knell to meaningful clean-money election systems. Of course I'm not arguing that our political and corporate leaders are diagnosed psychopaths; rather, they are functional psychopaths.  I'm assuming that their psychopathy is situational, though it's not necessarily conscious, and it's driven by the money and authority/threats of which the politicians and corporate leaders are exposed every day. That's my assumption--that if you yank these terrible decision-makers out of their current environments, they would be defanged. They might make decent child-rearing tax-paying neighbors. I agree with Hannah Arendt that the majority of heinous evil flows from the failure to think, consequently the failure to empathize. These people are daily exposed to situations that very much encourage them to wear attentional blinders. This situation also reminds me of the Milgram experiment , where authority figures similarly functioned as attentional blinders, leading to terrible decision-making. I've written extensively on my belief that many dramatic "moral lapses" result from ill-advised attentional strategies; we engage in heuristics to get us through the day, for good and bad, and our attention is easily warped by the existence of money and power.  For a lot more on low level lapses leading to "moral" lapses, consider also this excellent talk by Phillip Zimbardo. The bottom line is that Washington DC is a toxic stew into which we immerse vulnerable human beings, some of them severely damaged goods even before they set foot in DC. I wish I could say that the People will rise up to clean out this insanity, this psychopathy, but they would need a vigorous, wide-open, well-intentioned media to carry this out, yet our media is largely corporate-owned, which means that it is extremely hard for non-monied outsiders to get any momentum.  The logical next-step would be to use the powerful tools of the Internet to consolidate the power of ordinary citizens to deal with this issue, but the People are so wrapped up in abject consumerism that it is difficult to get sufficient numbers of people to care, and the FCC has been more than happy to sell out on net neutrality, putting at risk what is perhaps the last potential means to take on the psychopaths in an organized way. These are all extremely difficult hurdles, but they are surmountable, especially when the psychopaths bring us down to a low enough point . . . I believe, they are close to doing when they blatantly propose "reforming" Medicare and Social Security in ways that pisses off even members of the Tea Party.

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