Thursday, May 5, 2011
John Ashcroft to advise Blackwater on ethics
5/4/11 12:26 PM EDT
John Ashcroft has been hired to work as an independent ethics advisor for Xe Services, the military contractor that used to be Blackwater Worldwide, the company announced Wednesday.
Ashcroft, who became a controversial figure while serving as George W. Bush’s attorney general from 2001 to 2005, will head the company’s subcommittee on governance, which “will focus on the company’s efforts to maximize governance, compliance and accountability, continuing to build and promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private security industry.”
Employees of the company — then known as Blackwater — were found to have killed civilians and committed other crimes while working for the U.S. government during the Iraq war.
After changing its name in the face of the bad publicity, Xe was acquired in December by a group of investors organized as USTC Holdings, LLC. When the group made the acquisition, it promised to tighten internal oversight in light of a string of scandals, including a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 Iraqi civilians. A judge threw out the case after determining that prosecutors mishandled evidence, but the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled last month that the judge had misinterpreted the law.
In a company statement, the chairman of the Xe’s board, Red McCombs, said Ashcroft’s “experience, unparalleled reputation for integrity and personal commitment to ethics, transparency, and excellence” made him a good pick for the job, bringing big-name legal clout to the company.
“I’m delighted to be involved in USTC’s next phase of ownership and growth, particularly in helping to oversee its commitment to professionalism, compliance and accountability within the security industry,” Ashcroft said in a statement. “This is a company with a strong history of service to its country, and a reputation of best-in-class offerings to its public and private customers. I look forward to helping USTC enhance its governance and oversight capabilities as the company moves forward.”
Ashcroft served two terms as Missouri governor and one term in the Senate before losing a re-election race and being nominated as attorney general.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54283.html
United States Ranks At The Bottom In Total Taxation
By Ray Medeiros
The statistics in this article creates a problem for Republicans who consistently blame taxes going up as a reason for job loss and credit taxes going down as a reason for job creation. It turns out that out of all 34 OECD countries, the United States ranks 32nd out of 34 in the world, only 2 countries have lower taxes than the United States, and they are Mexico and Chile. The highest taxed country in Denmark at 48.2% but has an unemployment rate of 4.3% in 2009
The United States citizens’ total tax bill equals 24% of GDP in 2009. The 2009 statistics is still relevant today, because the US tax code has not really changed overall. In fact the GDP of the United States has actually grown since 2009, thus today’s percentage of taxation to GDP ratio is even smaller.
Measuring taxation in parallel to GDP is a good analogy because the Republican and conservative argument that every dollar that is taxed is dollar taken out of circulation in the economy, thus halts job growth. This of course is a false premise to begin with, but we will use their own logic in this article.
The argument that the conservatives use is raising taxes, halts economic growth, but the statistics do not add up if we look at places like Germany, their unemployment according to the CIA world fact book was 7.4% and their taxes per GDP was a whopping 37%, 13% higher than the United States.Unemployment in the United States in 2009 was 9.3%, yet our taxes to GDP was 24%.
Let’s now look at some other countries that are within percentage points of the United States’ taxation. In 2009 Chile’s taxes were 18.2% of GDP and their unemployment was 9.6%.
In Canada, the taxes were 31% of GDP and their unemployment in 2009 was 8.3%.
You get the point, taxation has little effect on unemployment or employment. The Republicans are using American’s ignorance of economics to further their agenda.
Rather than creating a environment that makes it economically difficult to justify leaving this country, through equalizing American labor with third world labor, they have told the American people, taxes are the problem.
We know better now. As more and more people are beginning to wake up to their scheme, it is getting harder for Republicans to justify lowering taxes. What the Republicans and Democrats need to do is re-write our trade agreements to protect our labor force. That is the real reason for our unemployment.
One last statistic, Mexico’s unemployment was 5.5% in 2009, with a tax to GDP percentage of 17%.
Factories moved down there from Canada and the United States, pay them peanuts and sell the goods to Americans, it’s a good deal for the corporate bottom line but a terrible deal for America’s labor force.
http://www.politicususa.com/en/united-states-total-taxation
Small Business Owners Demand Repeal Of Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich
WASHINGTON -- Michael Teahan, like his father, mother, and uncles before him, is a small business owner. The 52-year-old has spent most of his adult life running his own businesses: a restaurant, a coffee bar and various companies involved in the espresso machine business.
"I was the only person in my family to go to college, because that’s not what we did -- we all opened up businesses," Teahan says. "For some people, that’s a big hurdle ... for us, it was like having lunch."
Teahan currently operates Espresso Resource, a company that imports espresso machine parts from Europe to sell to U.S. restaurants and coffee shops. And he’s doing very well for himself: The two-man operation clears about $1 million a year in total sales, Teahan says -- enough to secure himself annual income in excess of $250,000.
That makes Teahan one of the few small business owners to actually benefit from the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy. He says the cuts save him about $12,000 a year, compared to what he paid before they were enacted. But as debates over the federal budget deficit have intensified, Teahan has found the political discussion increasingly divorced from the reality of his experience as a small business owner.
Tax cuts for the wealthy, according to Teahan, will do nothing to bolster his firm. They won’t affect his hiring decisions, they won’t encourage him to buy new equipment or help him move into a bigger warehouse. He says all of those decisions -- the nuts and bolts of actually running a small company -- depend on the his customers' economic conditions, not his personal tax rate.
"What we do in business, how we spend our money, how we allocate our resources -- that has very little to do with tax policy," Teahan says. "I map my business based on my customers, and what my customers want to buy, and what they can afford to buy."
It’s a common complaint from small business owners. While congressional Republicans and entrenched corporate lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- which is holding a Wednesday meeting on small business priorities -- and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) have been pushing hard to preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy by touting the interests of small firms, much of the small business community is demanding that those very tax cuts be repealed. The tax breaks for the wealthy will add $700 billion to the debt over the next 10 years, according to the White House's Office of Management and Budget. And many small firms say that money would be better spent on direct aid to the middle class.
"We are fed by our consumers, not by our tax breaks," says Rick Poore, owner of Designwear, Inc., a screen-printing business based in Lincoln, Neb. "If you drive more people to my business, I will hire more people. It's as simple as that. If you give me a tax break, I'll just take the wife to the Bahamas."
Poore emphasizes, however, that -- like the vast majority of small business owners -- he isn't among the elite class of taxpayers making $250,000 a year or more. He and his wife take in a combined $80,000 a year from their business. Teahan is an outlier, because most small businesses don’t make nearly enough to benefit from the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
"Most small business owners make less than $250,000 and so the tax cuts don’t benefit most of us, and they’re really taking important valuable resources away from the federal budget," says ReShonda Young, corporate vice president and operations manager for Alpha Express, a Waterloo, Iowa-based company that specializes in transportation services and snow removal.
Young also serves on the executive board of Main Street Alliance, a coalition of small firms. Main Street Alliance notes that 98 percent of small businesses will not be affected by the Bush tax cuts in any way.
"The reality is that most businesses don’t pay the top marginal tax rate,” notes John Irons, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. "Most small businesses won’t be affected at all by a reversal of Bush tax cuts for the rich.”
For his part, Poore, the screen-printer, sees some dark humor in the entire notion of wealthy small business owners. He says that any accountant "that allows $250,000 in profit to get through to my bottom line would be fired."
Teahan emphasizes that even the few firms that do qualify for the Bush tax cuts don't boost their hiring in response to the Bush tax cuts. For decades, small companies have been able to secure tax breaks on the expenses that actually affect their bottom line -- labor, rent, equipment and other necessary costs. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, by contrast, only affect how much of a firm's total profit owners keep for themselves.
"The economic premise, that people won’t hire because they might have to pay more taxes if they make more money, is beyond laughable,” says Lew Prince, owner of the Vintage Vinyl record store in St. Louis, Mo. "You hire when you think there’s a way you can make more money with that hire. The percentage the government takes out of it has almost nothing to do with it.”
So what really affects small businesses? High health care costs, which will likely be ameliorated by President Barack Obama’s health care reform, and limited access to credit in the wake of the financial crisis. Just as important to Teahan, Poore, Prince and other small business owners are federal economic policies that directly benefit their middle class customers. If extending tax breaks to millionaires means denying aid to the middle class, their firms will suffer.
"My customers work for a living,” Teahan says. "They’re working on espresso machines and selling coffee. They’re not these uber-rich Wall Street bankers. [My customers] need the money. If they’ve got money, then I'm doing great."
The upper-end Bush tax cuts are not corporate taxes -- they’re taxes on wealthy individuals. Many small firms are not corporations, and owners report their profits as the individual income of their owners. Some firms, like Teahan’s, choose to incorporate, though they never officially report a profit because all excess earnings are paid out to the owners.
The U.S. Chamber and the NFIB say that, because these business profits are reported as individual income, allowing tax hikes for wealthy individuals will hurt small business. The U.S. Chamber declined to comment for this story but NFIB spokesman Kevan Chapman says his organization has repeatedly polled its members and found that they favor the Bush tax cuts.
"We have over 300,000 members who would disagree with the notion that we don’t represent small business. The last time we balloted this measure was in November, and 89 percent said the federal government should extend those tax breaks," Chapman said.
There were 26.9 million small businesses in the United States in 2008, according to the Small Business Administration, though that figure includes millions of people who work on contract for employers but have no business, in the traditional sense, of their own. There were 6 million small firms with at least one employee.
Another small business groups beg to differ with the NFIB. The American Sustainable Business Council, which represents 70,000 small firms and social groups, maintains that "there is a strong business case for letting the tax relief for the wealthiest expire,” noting that doing so would "reduce the federal budget deficit and lessen the crisis with state and local budgets around the country.”
Frank Knapp, president and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce has written on the Bush tax cuts issue for The Huffington Post. He emphasizes that many of the people who report business income on their personal income tax returns are bond traders, partners in corporate law firms, lobbyists and hedge fund managers -- not the kind of activity that most people think of as "small business.”
These alternative small business groups say that the debate over the Bush tax cuts has been heavily skewed by talking points from the NFIB and the Chamber. The Chamber has a long track-record of backing the economic priorities of corporate elites, while the NFIB has increasingly become a partisan wing of the Republican Party, as HuffPost detailed in January.
While the NFIB continues to support the indefinite extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, it opted last year not to fight for a bill that would expand lending to small firms.
"Any small businessman who is in the NFIB is paying his enemies to stab him in the back,” says Prince, the record store owner.
Alpha Express VP Young agrees. "It's the corporate interests and the wealthy stealing our name to further their agenda," she argues.
While the upper-end Bush tax cuts would increase the federal debt by $700 billion over the next 10 years, the broader class of Bush tax cuts, which affect many middle-class taxpayers, would cost $3.1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
"We should have learned from the last decade that slashing taxes for the richest Americans is a great way to grow the national debt –- not jobs," says Holly Sklar, the executive director of Business for Shared Prosperity, a non-partisan small-business group funded predominantly by the Ford Foundation. "Few small businesses benefit from the top rate tax cuts, but many lose from a shrinking middle class and deepening budget cuts in everything from the Small Business Administration and education to vital infrastructure repair and modernization. The tax cuts are like termites, eating away at our economy and our nation’s future.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/04/small-business-owners-bush-tax-cuts-rich-repeal_n_857204.html?view=print
WI's Supreme Court Election 'Recount' is a Mess
Wisconsin is no Minnesota.
Where Minnesota's post-election hand count of the 2008 U.S. Senate election between then Sen. Norm Coleman and now Sen. Al Franken was, as we wrote at the UK's Guardian at the time, "one of the longest and most transparent election hand-counts in the history of the US," Wisconsin has made it extremely difficult (putting it nicely) to know what the hell is actually going on in their statewide "recount" of the April 5th, 2011 state Supreme Court election between Justice David Prosser and Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg.
Where Minnesota's chief election official, Sec. of State Mark Ritchie, oversaw a process to ensure that updated and accurate numbers were easily tracked and transparently shared with the media on a daily basis, Wisconsin's chief election authority, their Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.), has posted (and even sometimes removed) confusing, misleading, and unclear updates, often with inaccurate information, on various schedules, and frequently with little or no explanation for wholesale changes and deletion of data.
Where Minnesota counted every vote by hand with full public scrutiny, including photographs and video cameras, Wisconsin is tabulating ballots, often by the same oft-failed, easily-manipulated computer systems that counted them in the first place, behind barriers that preclude broad public oversight, under an agreement between both campaigns which disallows the use of video cameras by observers.
The count, which began last Wednesday, often feels as if it's happening in virtual darkness, at least to those of us trying to observe from afar, but the same sentiment has been shared with us by many we've spoken to who are there on the ground. There is an alarming lack of transparency to help the citizenry oversee the process in order to ensure accountability and an accurate count. To make matters worse, if that's possible, chain of custody issues for the ballots appear questionable in a number of reported cases, after ballots have been kept in the same darkness by election officials --- sometimes securely, sometimes not --- for the three weeks following the election and prior to the "recount".
One person we've spoken to who has also been trying desperately, as we have, to closely follow along with the progress, described the situation over the weekend by saying: "Let's call it 'fascinatingly unacceptable'. There are other 'f' words I could use, but we'll leave it at that."
Another Election Integrity veteran was forced to reach for a "bright side" by saying: "It may be worse than Minnesota, but, hey, at least it's no Florida!"
We've not written here about WI's Supreme Court "recount" since it began last Wednesday, largely because we've had such a difficult time making heads or tails of the progress, the accuracy, the integrity of the ballots or the counting, or even of the various reports of bizarre anomalies which continue to occur, often with little explanation for their resolution...
'Necessary and appropriate light'
Two Wednesdays ago Kloppenburg announced her intention to request this count after the unverified results of the state canvass placed her some 7,300 votes behind the incumbent Republican Prosser. The 0.488% margin out of some 1.5 million ballots cast allowed for the state-sponsored count to take place at Kloppenburg's option. The unofficial and unverified canvass results followed on the startling and still-unexplained revelation of some 14,000 votes which were not initially included in the Election Night tallies by Prosser's former colleague, Republican Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus. Those ballots changed the unofficial results from a 204 vote lead for Kloppenburg, to a 7,316 vote lead for Prosser.
When Kloppenburg made her announcement that she was exercising her right to a statewide recount, she declared, appropriately enough: "A recount may change the outcome of this election or it may confirm it, but when it is done, a recount will have shed necessary and appropriate light on an election that right now, seems to so many people to be suspect."
Unfortunately, the process to date risks those hopes being dashed, unless changes are made broadly and quickly in the state's current "recount" process. If not, there is a great possibility that little if any "light" will ultimately be "shed" on the April 5th election results and they are likely to remain "suspect", sadly, for a long time to come.
Just 31 of Wisconsin's 72 counties are counting some or most of their paper ballots by hand. The others counties are running them back through the same machines that counted them --- either accurately or inaccurately --- in the first place, offering little assurance that the results are correctly tabulated.
Where ballots have been counted by hand over the last week or so, a number of anomalies have occurred and/or irregularities been discovered.
Let's review a few of the most noteworthy incidents, in no particular order...
97 uncounted, unsecured ballots in the city of Verona
"There's a table in the clerk's office, and there was a binder and some other papers on top of the ballots," said City Administrator Bill Burns, who found the stack.
...
On election night, all the ballots were supposed to be secured in sealed bags, which were then supposed to be signed by local elections officials. The seals were supposed to remain intact.
Burns found the bundle unbagged. They were bagged and he drove them to Madison. The bag had no signatures or initials.
...
"I just have to ask," [newly appointed Dane County Clerk Karen] Peters asked Masarik: "Just why were these not sealed in a bag on election night?"
But no one could say how it happened.
Despite the mystery of the ballots' provenance and the broken chain of custody for them, the Cap Times reports [emphasis added], "Through precinct stamps and initials on the ballots, the proceeding pretty much established that the ballots were genuine."
"Pretty much." Close enough for government work, then?
The paper continues [emphasis added]: "But the chain of custody was compromised. Not only did Masarik admit that her office was sometimes left unlocked while she was at lunch, a cleaning person had access to the office after hours."
So, no big deal? Apparently not in Wisconsin, for some reason --- even after we learn the results on those 97 votes: "the ballots in question favor Prosser by 30 votes: unexpected because he took a 2-1 beating in the city overall."
In fact, according to Dane County's canvass results [XLS], in the City of Verona (and be careful, because there is also a Town of Verona, as is the case with many WI cities, towns and villages), Kloppenberg supposedly defeated Prosser soundly 2380 to 1204. And yet, 97 votes show up after three unsecured weeks on someone's desk and Prosser gains 30 votes over Kloppenburg when they are counted. Okay.
Undocumented and torn ballot bags in the Town of Delafield
Last Thursday, according to a volunteer observer in the Waukesha County counting room, the serial number on the protective plastic seal on one bag of ballots was not recorded at all on the "Inspector's Statement", raising serious chain of custody issues for the entire bag of ballots [emphasis in original]...
So Bill (volunteer lawyer) objected. I got my phone out and went to call the campaign. The sheriff wouldn't let me out the back door (even though I went out that door to use the restroom earlier) but made me go around everyone to the front door (front door is for reps, back door is for public). I had to get past the guy sitting out front wanting to know if I was leaving for the day, what my name was...
I called the campaign and they said to tell Bill to tell the judge that we are considering making an objection and want to have legal counsel. They said DO NOT open the bag. I raced back into the room and found Bill. He said the bag had already been opened...
He said he objected and asked the judge to open the other bags first, and not # 3, but the judge said NO. Bill said it's in the minutes and we have a record of it. BUT...they started counting the ballots in bag 3 first. By this time the ...media started pouring in.
...
I don't know how many votes we're talking here, but this is very suspicious. Why couldn't the judge wait? Why did they open # 3 first?
We asked G.A.B. spokesperson Reid Magney for an explanation of these anomalies from last Thursday, but he didn't yet have one.
"I haven't been briefed on that situation and so I can't comment on it at this point," he told The BRAD BLOG this afternoon.
"Generally we don't have information about these things until we get minutes from the county. We don't get the minutes until the entire county has completed their count," he explained.
Aside from the obvious significance of (hundreds of? thousands of?) ballots in Waukesha County having fallen from what is supposed to be a secure chain of custody, the fact that these anomalies occurred out of Delafield is sure to raise even more eyebrows, given Prosser's admission that he spent the day there following the April 5 election.
It was on that very same day, April 6th, that Nickolaus says she discovered the unreported 14,000 votes from the town of Brookfield, though she failed to report that fact to either the G.A.B. or even her own Waukesha Canvass Board which was busy reconciling polling books and ballot totals that same day and the day after. It wasn't until Nickolaus' stunning 5:30pm press conference on April 7th that the canvassers and the G.A.B. learned of the problem (though Rightwing bloggers had been reporting the discovery which would change the course of the election, with very detailed and specific reports in the hours prior to Nickolaus' presser.)
When Kloppenburg filed for her "recount" on April 20th, she also requested that a special investigator be assigned by the G.A.B. to look into Nickolaus' many election reporting inconsistencies. In the complaint requesting the special probe [PDF], as we reported in detail on April 22, the following allegations were included:
18. Governor Scott Walker made public statements on Wednesday, April 6, 2011, commenting that there might be "ballots somewhere, somehow found out of the blue that weren't counted before."
After Kloppenburg's complaint was made public, Prosser vehemently denied the charges, according to Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel. He "angrily" told the paper "The idea that I would go to the governor's office is just patently untrue. There is not a shred of evidence. That is pure malice."
But just one week later, Prosser's story had begun to change. In an interview with Tony Galli of Madison's ABC affiliate WKOW27 Prosser conceded, "It is conceivable that during that week, I stopped down to the governor's office."
"I certainly never went beyond the reception person," Prosser told WKOW27 in his apparent flip-flop, "I never met with the governor personally in his office." (Emphasis in original audio.)
More to the point of this article, while going on record with his changing story and carefully qualified remarks, Prosser added that he'd "spent almost all day in Delafield [the day after the election], where we're trying to figure out what the hell is happening here, are we going to have to have a recount?"
So he spent that day In Delafield? Interesting.
This is a sitting Supreme Court Justice who has already admitted to felony crimes as the Republican majority leader and speaker of the state Assembly as Ernest Canning meticulously documented in our recent exposé, and someone whose story on meeting with his old colleague, Republican Governor Scott Walker, the day after an election which had become a referendum on Walker's union-busting agenda, has changed from indignant denial to "maybe I did", in the period of one week.
So is there anything more behind his presence in Delafield and the two ballot bags which we now learn appear to have somehow fallen out of the chain of custody? Good questions for a special investigator, it seems to us.
Here's the package from WKOW27 News including Prosser's admission, changing his story, as captured on audio tape...
Whatever happened in Delafield, and whatever happened with those two ballot bags, the matter was of enough concern to the Kloppenburg campaign that they sent an attorney to monitor the count in Waukesha County the next day, according to TMJ 4, Milwaukee's NBC affiliate:
Earlier Friday a clerk discovered that one of the bags full of ballots from the Town of Delafield was not properly sealed. The Kloppenburg campaign said that means there was the possibility that people could have had access to the bag of ballots. On Thursday, a different bag containing hundreds of ballots wasn't recorded on the poll inspector's log. That bag was also from the Town of Delafield.
Despite that, poll officials promise the numbers all added up to those obtained on election night. Still, the Kloppenburg campaign sent Maistelman to oversee the recount.
"I was obtained to come down here to ensure the integrity of the process on behalf of the Kloppenburg campaign. "It's my understanding that there's been some issues with bags, ballot bags, identification numbers not adding up, so they just wanted to ensure that all the proper procedures were followed," Maistelman said.
The BRAD BLOG has learned, via a number of Kloppenburg volunteers, that while Maistelman was there on Friday, he was not there in some of the days which have followed since.
And again, the G.A.B. told us they have no comment at all on this matter, and likely would not until they receive and review minutes from the counting room after the counting has completed in Waukesha, where all ballots are being counted by hand, due to the serious concerns about County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus. She has (wisely) recused herself from this hand count.
...
Waukesha County officials discovered that all three ballot bags from a precinct consisting of wards 4, 5, 6, 14 and 22 in Oconomowoc had nothing written on the bag labels.
...
The municipal clerk from that area (not the County Clerk) was asked if she had an explanation. She said she had none.
...
This makes 8 bags of ballots so far in Waukesha County with serious "chain of custody" breaches.
See his report at dKos for more details.
Nearly impossible to follow "recount" updates
There have been various reports by the media, and very occasionally by the G.A.B., of problems and discrepancies elsewhere, as the recount is just over a third of the way done, at best. Some, such as this report on Monday, posted at the G.A.B. website, include more than 100 votes (in this case, for Kloppenburg) that were not included in the original post-election canvass results from Waupaca County.
In that incident report, County Clerk Mary Robbins details problems in two different towns discovered during their "recount". In the town of Larrabee "the original tally sheet from the April 5, 2011 election showed a 0 vote count," according to her email to the G.A.B. The "mistake" was not discovered during the canvass, and was explained by the town clerk Arlene Kratzke who admitted "she just forgot to transfer the numbers onto the sheet. ... The call in sheet, also, only shows 70 for Kloppenburg, the tape shows 167, the actual hand count shows 168 for Kloppenburg."
In the Town of Royalton, Kloppenburg's original count was 80, but the hand count tallied 95 votes for Kloppenburg. According to Robbins, Royalton's Town "Clerk had no explanation other than the election officials forgot to count a stack of ballots cast for Kloppenburg when they reported."
Anomalies, errors or out-and-out failures like the above are being discovered across the state, and have affected both candidates, though usually not in numbers as large as those in one fell swoop.
Problems like this are not particularly unusual in large counts like this. Shit happens, as they say. All a part of the problems that occur when ballots are not counted transparently, at the polling place, on Election Night in front of the public, all parties and video cameras, with results posted decentrally at each precinct before ballots move anywhere. We've come to call that sort of truly transparent process, "Democracy's Gold Standard" and recently posted a video "Special Comment" in regard to that standard being greatly missed in the WI Supreme Court election and so many others like it.
Of more import than the various small errors, is that it has become very difficult --- some would say damned near impossible --- to track the entire mess, thanks to the horrible job the G.A.B. has been doing in the first week of counting, to keep the public up to date with "recount" results as they happen.
On this score, the G.A.B.'s reporting has been a mess.
The failures started from the very first day, when numbers were released by the G.A.B. in a spreadsheet that didn't add up at all in some 25 different rows (each one representing a "counting unit", usually made up of several different wards in one municipality in Wisconsin.)
For example, in this April 27 spreadsheet [XLS], row 74, representing the Town of Sumner (Wards 1 & 2) in Barron County, shows 653 votes cast as counted during the "recount", but just 145 votes were reported from that "counting unit" in the original post-election canvas.
Unless 508 votes showed up out of nowhere in those two wards, it's likely there was a mistake in record keeping by the G.A.B. somewhere. There were similar anomalies seen in another 15 or 20 rows that day.
The next day, the G.A.B. explained cryptically on their website:
For several days thereafter, results spreadsheets were posted with, instead of 3603 rows (one for each "reporting unit" in the state, plus one header line), just 53 rows, or perhaps a hundred or two hundred.
Of course, this made it nearly impossible for those trying to oversee the "recount" to track the updated numbers and changes in vote totals, since one could not easily compare numbers on one spreadsheet against another. The same rows represented completely different "reporting units" in each sheet.
As we said when we began here, Wisconsin is no Minnesota. During the Minnesota U.S. Senate count, tracking changes each day was a breeze, with clear results postings each and every night. That has decidedly not been the case in Wisconsin.
In their terse Monday night "Recount Summary for May 2", the G.A.B. announced:
G.A.B. spokesman Magney offered The BRAD BLOG a bit more detail today. "When we get in results that show more than a 10 vote change in any ward, we do a review internally, contact the clerk, to make sure that's not a typo. Initially, we weren't including it at all if it was under review, but we later decided it was better to include it with a notation."
Thankfully, as of Monday night, their May 2nd, 6:07pm report [XLS], once again had all rows ("counting units") fully restored to it. Finally.
(NOTE: Unfortunately, we failed to SAVE the above mentioned file locally and, as is their maddening custom, the G.A.B. has now removed that file from their system, replacing it with a newer one with a different name, rather than keeping them all available for download, so various versions of the update files could be compared. The G.A.B.'s spokesperson says we may request any particular file, however, and they can send it via email --- a seemingly necessarily burdensome process, as we have now suggested to him. He says it's their way of keeping things free from clutter and easier to follow along with the latest files as posted to the main G.A.B. "recount" information page. Magney notes anybody is free to save any posted files to their own systems locally, if they chose. Of course, as we told him, they need to view it to know about it in the first place, in order to do so!)
The problem seen on row 74 (the Town of Sumner) in the earlier spreadsheet, where 508 extra votes were reported, as noted above, is now cleared up in the latest versions of the spreadsheet, in that the canvass result totals are the same as the "recount" vote totals for that row. No change between canvassed and "recounted" numbers is reported from that "counting unit". The reason for the initially misreported "recount" totals? Unknown. Though the "recount" numbers initially reported for the Town of Sumner (Wards 1 & 2) on row 74, now show up in the same exact totals on row 70, the Town of Rice Lake (Wards 1 - 4) where they were likely supposed to have been shown on Day 1.
Making matters worse, many counties are failing to report the number of "Total Ballots Cast", crucial to overseeing the process, to the G.A.B., as requested in their April 26 directive [PDF] to Wisconsin County Clerks on the day before counting was to begin. Here's what the G.A.B. told counties to include when reporting numbers to them at the end of each day's counting:
Date
County
Name of Reporting Unit i.e. Town of Madison, Wards 1-7
Total Ballots Cast
Votes for Prosser
Votes for Kloppenburg
Scattering Votes
Note the instruction to include "Total Ballots Cast" with each update. That number is crucial for investigators and overseers to help determine any anomalous undervote totals, often a red flag that there may be a problem in the results somewhere along the way.
Unfortunately, in parts or all of 14 counties (Ashland, Bayfield, Burnett, Chippewa, Crawford, Green, Marquette, Menomonee, Monroe, Sauk, Sawyer, Taylor, Vilas and Winnebago) the "recount" totals are given, but the "Total Ballots Cast" column remains blank as of the latest spreadsheets.
The G.A.B.'s Magney tells us that they are "working to get that information, but it's not always provided to us."
He says, "this is information that the counties are going to be reporting in the official canvas of the recount. What we're providing now is information so people can follow along and see the process. Clerks are sending along the information each night, but there is no form or template. The numbers you are seeing are unofficial."
"At this point," he continued, "we're contacting the clerks and asking them to provide that information [Totals Ballots Cast]. I think those that haven't likely have the higher priority of actually counting the ballots. There's no statutory requirement for them to provide this information."
All the miscounted votes
Lastly, for now, the G.A.B. spreadsheets do not include another crucial set of numbers, though it's one we should be able to cull ourselves after the G.A.B.'s results reports finally settle into a single, reliable format. That is the number of miscounted votes.
As you'll see when following almost any of the reporting on this "recount", or usually any other, the only numbers reported are generally net gains or losses for each candidate.
Of far more interest to The BRAD BLOG --- and likely, election integrity advocates in general --- is the number of votes originally miscounted by the oft-failed, easily-manipulated electronic tabulating systems which are rarely checked for accuracy except in post-election contests such as this.
So if a hand-count discovers that Joe Candidate received 50 more votes in Ward 1 than originally reported by the machines on Election Night, but in Ward 2 Joe Candidate lost 49 votes, the county and the media would both end up reporting: "Hand count finds machines work almost perfectly! Only 1 vote lost by Joe Candidate!"
That, even though some 99 votes were actually miscounted for poor Joe in just two precincts. Had the hand count found that he'd lost a full 50 votes in Ward 2, the county and media would have reported that the "recount" found the original machines results were perfect!
And that's precisely what they do. Watch for it as you're reading reports on the "recount" progress in Wisconsin. We'll endeavor in the weeks ahead to pull together a report on the real number of miscounted votes to give you a better idea of how well the machines made by Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia actually worked, or didn't, in Wisconsin's April 5th election.
Unfortunately, in this contest, just 31 of the 72 counties will actually see some or all of their ballots counted by hand. So we'll only be able to get a limited sample. But it'll no doubt provide an interesting set of numbers to consider for the future as these very same systems are set for use in upcoming state Senate recall elections in Wisconsin, as well as set to tally millions of votes in next year's Presidential election cycle.
And, oh, for those interested, to date, according to the G.A.B.'s latest numbers as of 6pm CT today (Tuesday, May 3rd), Prosser has gained 245 votes net and Kloppenburg has gained 414 votes net. His unofficial, unverified 7,316 vote lead after the statewide canvass is now an unofficial, only-slightly-less-unverified lead of 7,147 votes.
- Jeannie Dean contributed research for this article.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8507
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Florida Senate Sneaks RFID Drivers License, Internet ID into Transportation Bill
By Adrian Wyllie – 1787 Network
TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Senate Committee on Governmental Oversight and Accountability on Wednesday approved an amendment to include “electronic authentication,” as well as “biometrics” to Florida Driver’s licenses. In addition, the amendment to SB 1150, which passed committee on a 12-0 vote, instructs the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to provide a security token that can be electronically authenticated through a personal computer.
This new amendment lays the groundwork for radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to be implanted into drivers’ licenses. In much the same way that merchandise in a warehouse includes RFID tags to track items through the distribution process, RFID tags on drivers’ licenses would give authorities an additional tool to track anyone carrying a drivers’ license within the reception range of an RFID reader.
The Real ID Act of 2005, implemented in Florida on January 1, 2010, has integrated the more expansive personal data set collected by drivers’ license issuing agencies in the participating states into a national database.
In Florida, this database already includes biometrics in the form of computer facial recognition data, collected at the time one’s DHSMV photo is taken. Sheriffs’ departments in at least 22 Florida counties tap into the database as part of their facial recognition system, or FRnet, and feed real-time images from video cameras to instantly identify anyone whose face is in these cameras’ field of view.
This FRnet database, which is accessible to federal, state, and even local municipal agencies, also contains highly personal information, including scans of birth certificates, social security cards, marriage licenses, and other documents.
Also in the amendment is a provision for the DHSMV to provide a “security token that can be electronically authenticated through a personal computer.” It is unclear from the amendment whether the driver’s license itself would act as the token or a key fob/USB device would be issued.
The Obama Administration has recently pushed for the assignment of a single, unique authentication key for Internet users, which many are calling the “Internet driver’s license.” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and White House Cybersecurity czar Howard Schmidt met with computer industry leaders in January seeking input on how this new system would work. Locke confirmed that they in the process of drafting a “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” and said that the Internet ID would likely come in the form of a “smart card.”
The stated goal of the Obama Administration strategy is to provide online consumers an easy way to securely access Internet retailers or financial services without having to remember multiple passwords, while reducing online fraud.
Schmidt brushed off the obvious government surveillance potential of this new technology by saying, “Let’s be clear: We’re not talking about a national ID card.”
But effectively, the Real ID Act has turned the individual states’ drivers’ licenses into a national ID card. Should this amendment to SB 1150 become law and be implemented, it would give federal, state and local government agencies the ability to easily and stealthily track all Floridians without warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Schmidt also used a similar claim to one used during the national health care debate, which was that participation would be voluntary. In Florida, that may mean that one would have to opt out of getting a driver’s license to avoid the additional governmental tracking systems.
The Real ID Act already specifies that beginning in 2013, Americans must have a Real ID compliant driver’s license or identification card in order to access government services or buildings. This includes the ability to pass through a TSA checkpoint at the airport or enter a federal courthouse.
Will we soon need a Real ID driver’s license to access the Internet or go to Wal-Mart? Given the White House’s recent plans, and the Florida Legislature’s willing compliance, it seems that it is only a matter of time.
http://deadlinelive.info/2011/05/01/senate-sneaks-rfid-drivers-license-internet-id-into-transportation-bill/
Monday, May 2, 2011
Killing Resolves Nothing
by: David Swanson, War Is A Crime
The plane I was on landed in Washington, DC, Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.
Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being -- which despite the pilot's prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing foreign leaders whom we've previously supported has been an ongoing disaster.
Our killing of Saddam Hussein has been followed by years of war and hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths. Our attempts to kill Muammar Gadaffi have killed his children and grandchildren and will end no war if they eventually succeed. Our attempts to kill Osama bin Laden, including wars justified by that mission, have involved nearly a decade of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan and the rest of the ongoing global "generational" war that is consuming our nation.
The Taliban was willing to turn bin Laden over for trial both before and after September 11, 2001. Instead our government opted for years of bloody warfare. And in the end, it was police action (investigation, a raid, and a summary execution) and not the warfare, that reportedly tracked bin Laden down in Pakistan. After capturing him, our government's representatives did not hold him for trial. They killed him and carried away his dead body.
Killing will lead only to more killing. There will be no review of bin Laden's alleged crimes, as a trial would have provided. There will be no review of earlier US support for bin Laden. There will be no review of US failures to prevent the September 11th attacks. Instead, there will be bitterness, hatred, and more violence, with the message being communicated to all sides that might makes right and murder is the way in which someone is, in President Obama's words, brought to justice.
Nothing is actually resolved, nothing concluded, and nothing to be celebrated in taking away life. If we want something to celebrate here, we should celebrate the end of one of the pieces of war propaganda that has driven the past decade of brutality and death. But I'm not going to celebrate that until appropriate actions follow. Nothing makes for peace like ceasing to wage war. Now would be an ideal time to give that a try.
Our senseless wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya must be ended. Keeping bin Laden alive and threatening, assisted in keeping the war machine churning its bloody way through cities and flesh for years. No wonder President Bush was, as he said, not interested in tracking bin Laden down.
Ending the wars was our moral duty last week exactly as this week. But if the symbolism to be found in the removal of a key propaganda piece can be combined with the recent overwhelming US support for ending the wars, to actually end the wars, then I'll be ready -- with clean hands and with no nasty gleam of revenge in my eye -- to pop open the champagne.
But let's return to the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being. A decade ago that would not have seemed as natural to a US airline pilot. The automatic assumption would not have been that there could be no dissenters to that celebration. A decade ago torture was considered irredeemably evil. A decade ago we believed people should have fair trials before they are declared guilty or killed. A decade ago, if a president had announced his new power to assassinate Americans, at least a few people would have asked where in the world he got the power to assassinate non-Americans.
Is it too late to go back 10 years in time in some particular ways? As we put bin Laden behind us, can we put the degredation of our civil liberties and our representative government, and our honesty, accountability, and the rule of law behind us too? Can we recover the basic moral deceny that we used to at the very least pretend and aspire to?
Not while we're dancing in the street to celebrate death.
Imagine the propaganda that the US media could make of video footage of a foreign country where the primitive brutes are dancing in the streets to celebrate the murder of a tribal enemy. That is the propaganda we've just handed those who will view bin Laden as a martyr. When their revenge comes, we will know exactly what we are supposed to do: exact more revenge in turn to keep the cycle going.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but the blind people think that they still see. The world looks to them like a Hollywood adventure movie. In those stories, killing somone generally causes a happy ending. That misconception is responsible for piles and piles of corpses to which more will now be added.
http://www.truthout.org/killing-resolves-nothing/1304358911
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Bradley Manning Protest: White House Bans Journalist for Doing Journalism
To a degree, this reminds me of the Joshua Claus moment, when DOD banned reporters like Carol Rosenberg and Michelle Shephard because they uttered the name “Joshua Claus” in their coverage of his testimony in Omar Khadr’s trial. (Shephard had interviewed him previously, so they were basically asking her to forget information she had gathered independently to be able to cover Gitmo.)
White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.
The Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times – pulled out a small video camera last week and shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.
She was part of a “print pool” – a limited number of journalists at an event who represent their bigger hoard colleagues – which White House press officials still refer to quaintly as “pen and pad” reporting.
As with coverage of Omar Khadr’s trial, the Obama Administration seems to be demanding that journalists abdicate their jobs and their instincts to play by the rules.
But the event reminds me of something else: how the White House asked (and persuaded) all the big US outlets to suppress the widely discussed news that Raymond Davis was a spy, even while publications overseas and dirty fucking hippie bloggers were reporting on it.
As the account of Marinucci’s treatment makes clear, the rules they want to enforce on pool reporting basically put her at a disadvantage to everyone else in the room who had and used a cell phone video.
Carla cannot do her job to the best of her ability if she can’t use all the tools available to her as a journalist. The public still sees the videos posted by protesters and other St. Regis attendees, because the technology is ubiquitous. But the Obama Administration apparently wants to give the distinct advantage to citizen witnesses at the expense of professionals.
While there’s a bit of professional snobbery here, it is entirely justified. The White House bizarrely imagines it can manage Obama’s image by imposing rules on journalists it can’t impose on others. Not only does that not do a damn thing to prevent videos like this from getting out. It profoundly corrupts the role of journalists, imposing requirements that ensure they offer only a highly scripted and obviously false view of an event.
It’s simply not fair to require that journalists not tell stories that are already out there in the public sphere. That turns them, once and for all, into stenographers. That’s not what our country needs from presidential press coverage.
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/04/29/bradley-manning-protest-white-house-bans-journalist-for-doing-journalism/
GOP eyes budget bill for anti-collective bargaining law
The Capital Times
Posted: Thursday, April 28, 2011 1:45 pm
Get ready, protesters. The collective bargaining bill could soon be back before the Legislature.
Andrew Welhouse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Thursday that while the "preferred avenue" for implementing the collective bargaining bill is still the state courts, there is a "possibility" the bill will be inserted into the 2011-2013 state budget.
"There is a possibility, and it has been informally discussed among Republican leadership, including the Joint Finance Committee co-chairs, that if the matter can't be fully decided on by the Supreme Court, then it will be inserted into the full budget," Welhouse told The Capital Times.
The legality of the bill, which would strip most collective bargaining rights from state employees, was challenged by Dane County District Attorney Ozanne Ismael on the grounds that a special conference committee violated the state's open meetings law when it approved the collective bargaining bill on March 9.
The lawmakers gave less than two hours notice before commencing the 6 p.m. hearing. State law requires 24.
Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi blocked the law from being implemented while the legal challenge is being hashed out. Putting the collective bargaining provisions in the budget would sidestep the open meetings issue, allowing the bill to become law when the budget passes.
The move also could get a highly controversial topic resolved and out of the public arena at a time when six Senate Republicans are facing likley recall elections over their previous vote in favor of the bill.
They are Alberta Darling of River Hills; Robert Cowles of Green Bay; Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac; Dan Kapanke of La Crosse; Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls and Luther Olsen of Ripon.
"I think there will be a real rush to get the Walker agenda through before the recall elections are held," said Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, D-Monona. "And I won't be surprised if it happened soon. Republicans want to destroy the unions because it is politically advantageous for them. Unions are the only group strong enough to stand up against the WMC."
In recent years, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, or WMC, has raised and spent millions on behalf of Republican candidates and conservative Supreme Court candidates, while unions have been big givers to Democrats.
Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca of Kenosha said he would be surprised if collective bargaining was added to the budget bill.
He cited the fact that Gov. Scott Walker admitted under oath before a Congressional hearing that restricting collective bargaining rights would not save the state money as well as the mounting number of Republicans facing recall elections as his reasons.
"It would be a political miscalculation if they were to take away collective bargaining rights," Barca said.
Despite the recall effort against her, Darling, a Joint Finance Committee co-chair, told WisPolitics in an interview earlier this week she would vote again for the collective bargaining bill. She also said the bill has enough votes to pass the Senate.
In addition to the Republican senators facing likely recall elections, three Democratic senators are as well.
Wednesday, officials with the Government Accountability Board filed a motion in Dane County Circuit Court requesting one statewide recall election date of July 12. The GAB is currently verifying signatures on the recall petitions that have been turned in.
If Democrats come out of the recall election with a net total of three Senate seats, they will have control of the Senate. Currently, Republicans are in control of both houses.
"I think there's a good chance we'll pick up three seats," Miller said.
Democratic control of the Senate would also spell changes on the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee by giving Democrats more seats, including a co-chair position. Right now, the split is 12 Republicans to four Democrats.
Given that Democrats adamantly oppose the restrictions to collective bargaining rights, if the bill remains mired in the courts and Democrats gain control of the Senate, it would no longer stand a chance of passing the Legislature.
Since the open meetings issue has the collective bargaining issue tied up in court, the budget could be the quickest avenue for getting the measure into law, putting the matter to rest before a possible July 12 recall election date.
A repeat of the prolonged protests at the State Capitol that followed Walker's announcement of his effort to curtail collective bargaining in February could pose an electoral pitfall for the GOP.
In the spring Supreme Court election, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg came close to unseating conservative incumbent David Prosser, an unexpectedly strong showing that was driven by a mobilized Democratic base.
A return of the collective bargaining bill likely would lead to another round of rallies at the Capitol, Miller said.
Welhouse dismissed the potential for renewed protests as a factor in inserting the measure into the budget.
"This budget was not developed with politics in mind," Welhouse said. "It was designed because we think this is the right way forward for a state that has gotten off track."
Welhouse said there are two ways the collective bargaining bill could be inserted into the budget.
He said the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee could pass the 2011-2013 budget and the collective bargaining bill could be added as an amendment once it hits the Assembly floor for debate, or a finance committee member could insert it into the bill through a motion before sending it out of committee.
Or, lawmakers could give the proper 24-hour notice and again vote on the bill in conference committee.
"The mechanism for this happening has not been fleshed out yet," Welhouse said.
http://host.madison.com/ct/article_57a01758-71b3-11e0-a4b9-001cc4c002e0.html
Donald Trump's lunacy reveals core truth about the Republicans
Friday, 29 April 2011
He is the Republican id - finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and reality
Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.
Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.
This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "
It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
j.hari@independent.co.uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-donald-trumps-lunacy-reveals-core-truth-about-the-republicans-2276222.html
