MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Republican war against voting

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The GOP’s Blame-ACORN Game By Peter Dreier & John Atlas This article appeared in the November 10, 2008 edition of The Nation.

An increasingly desperate Republican attack machine has recently identified the community organizing group ACORN as Public Enemy Number One. Among ACORN’s alleged crimes, perhaps the most serious is that it caused, nearly single-handedly, the world’s financial crisis. That’s the fantasy. In the reality-based world, it was ACORN that sounded the alarm about the exploitative lending practices that led to the current mortgage meltdown and financial crisis.

Since the 1970s ACORN, which has 400,000 low- and moderate-income “member families” in more than 100 cities in forty states, has been warning Congress to protect borrowers from the banking industry’s irresponsible, risky and predatory practices–subprime loans, racial discrimination (called “redlining”) and rip-off fees. ACORN has persistently called for stronger regulations on banks, private mortgage companies, mortgage brokers and rating agencies. For years, ACORN has alerted public officials that the industry was hoodwinking many families into taking out risky loans they couldn’t afford and whose fine print they couldn’t understand.

Now John McCain and his fellow conservatives are accusing ACORN of strong-arming Congress and big Wall Street banks into making subprime loans to poor families who couldn’t afford them, thus causing the economic disaster. McCain’s campaign is running a one-and-a-half-minute video that claims Barack Obama once worked for ACORN, repeats the accusation that ACORN is responsible for widespread voter registration fraud and accuses ACORN of “bullying banks, intimidation tactics, and disruption of business.” The ad claims that ACORN “forced banks to issue risky home loans–the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.”

For months, the right-wing echo chamber–bloggers, columnists, editorial writers and TV and radio talk-show hosts–has pitched in with a well-orchestrated campaign to blame the mortgage crisis on ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), the 1977 anti-redlining law. In a September 27 editorial, the Wall Street Journal wrote that “ACORN has promoted laws like the Community Reinvestment Act, which laid the foundation for the house of cards built out of subprime loans” and then falsely claimed the bailout bill would create a trust fund “pipeline” to fill ACORN’s coffers. On October 14 the Journal‘s lead editorial, Obama and ACORN, described ACORN as a “shady outfit” and accused the group of being “a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting ‘strikes’ against banks so they’d lower credit standards.”

Continue . . .

October 25, 2008
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Sorry, Senator.

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No, Sen. McCain, the election will not be suspended just because circumstances do not currently favor your ascension to the presidency.

One way or another, Republican misrule must end. John McCain cannot postpone the inevitable. If he has any idea how the nation should navigate these treacherous economic waters, he should propose them. One thing is clear: the administration’s current proposal that Congress hand over $700 billion without oversight is not going to work.

They need to either come up with a more realistic plan, or negotiate one with the Congress.

September 24, 2008
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A sucker . . . born every minute

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First came the looting of savings and loans across the nation, which, by the standard of today’s economic failures, was a quaint little hold-up.

It still gave us this delicious title: The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One by William K. Black.

Have you heard of a better title for anything?

Maybe “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

But here, on pulp and in black and white, Black shows how our elected officials conspired with rogues to rob depositors, investors and workers of earnings and life savings.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain was there, acted as Charles Keating’s lookout for regulators.

Black, as Director of Litigation for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, investigated the looting of the savings and loans industry. He reveals in his book how Keating and hundreds of other S&L rogues took advantage of a weak regulatory environment to perpetrate accounting fraud on a massive scale. In his expert insider’s account of the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, Black shows how corrupt corporate executives—in collusion with regulators—defrauded  whole industries for their own personal gain.

Using the latest advances in criminology and economics, Black develops a theory of why “control fraud”—looting a company for personal profit—tends to occur in waves that make financial markets deeply inefficient.

He then pointed out how CEOs, using the same destructively fraudulent tactics, caused the business failures of the early 2000s that continue until today.

His prescription for stopping the periodic looting is active, independent regulators.

McCain, although he’s making different noise today, calls himself a free marketer still. He wants no regulations of the markets or industry.

Even as McCain was escaping censure by the skin of his teeth in the savings and loans debacle, McCain’s best bud in the United States Senate, Phil Gramm, was stalking a bigger quarry: Glass-Steagall Act.

Improper banking activities, such as commercial banks’ involvement in the stock market, was blamed for the 1929 stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. To prevent another depression, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and commercial banking activities. The nation recovered, these industries functioned the way they were supposed and the American economy grew strong again.

Phil Gramm, who is now one of Sen. McCain campaign’s most influential economic advisors, fought to destroy Glass-Steagall and break the back of the American workers. It took him years but he eventually, in 1999, succeeded in passing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

Out of that Gramm law flowed the calamitous collapses that followed–Enron, WorldCom, ImClone, Tyco, followed in recent days by the demise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehmann Bros., Merrill Lynch, and, momentarily, AIG should soon follow.

The collapses, of course, mean ruined the lives of countless investors, depositors, and employees.

Another McCain top economic advisor is Carly Fiorina who, when she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard, nearly drove the company into the ground after forcing through a controversial merger with Compaq Computers. By the time she left in 2005, the company lost half its value and suffered heavy job losses.

Somebody needs to ask McCain if he subscribe to Fiorina’s attitude about American workers, which she relayed to members of Congress on January 7, 2004:

“There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore. We have to compete for jobs as a nation.”

The statement infuriated workers who felt that lower wages overseas encouraged U.S. corporations to use less-qualified, offshore workers, instead of better-qualified American ones.

The assaults on American workers by corporations, aided by elected officials who should be looking out for them, continue, of course. Industry after industry have devalued work that sustained American communities and shipped those jobs overseas to countries.

Unions, especially after World War II, led the growth of the American middle class, the largest economic expansion in history.

Elected leaders like McCain, acting as handmaidens for American corporations, against led the assault on unions and the jobs that sustained us as a nation.

But, if John McCain is now to be believed, he is going to be the bulwark that American families and workers should rely on. He had this to say at a rally in Florida today:

Mr. McCain vowed to take aim at what he called the “unbridled corruption and greed that caused the crisis on Wall Street.’’

And, guess how he plans to do this?

Yep, McCain wants to set up a commission to study the problem. You know, like the 9/11 Commission, whose recommendations were largely ignored by the administration that commissioned it.

What is the saying, there’s a sucker born every minute?

McCain knows by experience that Americans are suckers and that they will fall for anything. Afterall, how does a man who wallows in corruption and debacle after debacle, who is surrounded by the very worst offenders of what ails our nation, come out smelling like a rose every time, despite never changing his ways?

Doesn’t McCain shine bright as a paragon of virtue despite bedding down with corporate lobbyists preying on Americans even as we speak?

September 16, 2008
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Jew Baiting

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This deserves much more attention than it’s getting.

Congressman Steve Cohen is Jewish. He represents the majority-black district in Memphis, Tennessee, vacated by Harold Ford in 2006. Cohen is among the House’s most liberal members, and he recently gained some notoriety for getting Congress to apologize for slavery and Jim Crow.

Cohen is being challenged in the Democratic primary by Nikki Tinker, a young African-American attorney whom Cohen defeated in 2006. Tinker has been endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus and Emily’s List.

Tinker’s campaign has now descended into full-on Jew baiting.

Just days after airing a racially charged ad connecting Cohen with the Ku Klux Klan, the Tinker campaign is up with the vilest ad of the campaign season yet.

“Who is the real Steve Cohen, anyway?” a narrator says as a child is heard praying in the background . “While he’s in our churches clapping his hands and tapping his feet, he’s the only senator who thought our kids shouldn’t be allowed to pray in school. Congressman, sometimes apologies just aren’t enough.”

Tinker’s campaign has removed the ad from YouTube since the story broke yesterday afternoon. Emily’s List has issued a statement condemning the ad but stopping short of withdrawing its endorsement. No word yet from the CBC.

More on this here, here, here, and here.

Spread the word.

Has anyone heard anything from the Obama Campaign?

Cross-posted from Facebook

August 7, 2008
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McCain’s Unscrupulous Start in Politics

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From the beginning, John McCain traded heavily on his “heroism” in Vietnam to make his way as a politician. Now, we’re are being asked to not only look past the defects of this deeply flawed and corrupt man, but actually elect him president because of his past.

If only he were running against a Republican. What use would they make of that past?

McCain Used POW Past Heavily In First Election by JACQUES BILLEAUD,

PHOENIX — A newcomer to Arizona, John McCain used his wife’s wealth, ties to powerful Washington figures and, most of all, the emotional power of his five years in a Vietnamese prison to launch his political career 25 years ago.

Well-known today, McCain’s harrowing experience during the Vietnam War was new to voters in his 1982 race for an open congressional seat. McCain saturated local TV with an ad focused on his military record that showed him getting off a plane on crutches shortly after his release as a POW.

“It showed he was a hero. It would bring tears to your eyes,” said rival candidate Ray Russell, a veterinarian who finished second in the Republican primary that year.

In his 2002 book “Worth the Fighting For,” McCain himself acknowledged his strategy: “Thanks to my prisoner of war experience, I had, as they say in politics, a good first story to sell.”

The 1982 race to replace retiring Rep. John Rhodes launched McCain’s political career. It cemented his reputation as a tireless campaigner and set the stage for things that would come back to haunt him, including his troubled relations with GOP conservatives and his ties to Charles Keating, a savings and loan financier later convicted of securities fraud.

Although he had moved to Arizona less than a year before announcing his candidacy, McCain overpowered Russell and two GOP state lawmakers in the primary and then trounced his Democratic opponent in what was then the state’s most Republican congressional district. His 6-point edge in the four-way primary was the smallest victory margin of his career in Congress.

August 3, 2008
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A Modest Proposal on Offshore Drilling for Oil

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Obama Shifts, Says He May Back Offshore Drilling by MIKE GLOVER, , August 1, 2008
(AP Photo/Mike Carlson: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. answers an audience member’s question, Friday, Aug. 1, 2008, during a town hall meeting in St. Petersburg, Fla.)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Friday he would be willing to support limited additional offshore oil drilling if that’s what it takes to enact a comprehensive policy to foster fuel-efficient autos and develop alternate energy sources.

Shifting from his previous opposition to expanded offshore drilling, the Illinois senator told a Florida newspaper he could get behind a compromise with Republicans and oil companies to prevent gridlock over energy.

Republican rival John McCain, who earlier dropped his opposition to offshore drilling, has been criticizing Obama on the stump and in broadcast ads for clinging to his opposition as gasoline prices topped $4 a gallon. Polls indicate these attacks have helped McCain gain ground on Obama.

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage _ I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done.”

I imagine everyone who read the above news dispatch was as disappointed as I was to hear Sen. Obama pander this way. I thought Obama, of all people could be on the better side of angels on this issue and point out that any oil that we get from drilling offshore, like in ANWR:

1). is likely to be negligible;

2). will not come online to help us out of the current energy crisis;

3). there’s no guarantee that Exxon and the other cartels would sell anything that is found there to American consumers;

4). if oil is found, it’s just more revenue for the oil cartels that are now funding John McCain’s campaign of personal destruction against Obama;

There are more sensible arguments that could be made against the Republican trope of drilling offshore in the U.S. as answer to challenges to our sources of energy. Obama, I thought, would be the person to make the argument. Unfortunately, since Sen. Obama has now let this pander genie out of its bottle, we should make the best of it.

Before I lay out my modest proposal, I should say that I don’t know anything about oil, I don’t begin to understand peak oil, and that my proposal has been thoroughly panned by everyone I have told it to. And let me also add that I realize that there is no consensus on any remedy to skyrocketing gas prices.

That said, here is my modest proposal:

If drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR ) we must, then all the oil we get from such exploration must be added to our Strategic Petroleum Reserve (more than 700 million barrels of crude oil that are stored in a series of caverns along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico) and kept for the nation’s emergency oil needs. Created after the 1973-74 oil embargo as a way to counter the impact a natural disaster, terrorist attack or massive embargo might have on this country’s economy, the national stockpile of oil was tapped in 1991, 2000 and 2005.

Here is how I propose to do it:

Form a national consortium to be funded by all the oil cartels. They will provide the personnel, resources, research and technology to explore and exploit this endeavor. The best part about this is that they will do it for free without any of the proceeds going to them. Their reward for doing this is to not be known as the rapacious scumbags that they are.

Such a plan will meet tremendous opposition from everywhere, especially the oil lobby. It will take tremendous courage for a politician to propose and for Congress to enact such a plan. So, why not set a up a commission to set up precisely how to implement such a plan. The only condition is that all the oil must go to the national reserve and that the cost for funding this endeavor come from the combined profits of all the oil cartels.

There, I’ve said it, up to you to debate the merits of my proposal.

August 2, 2008
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Study: Poor Ballot Designs Still Affect U.S. Elections

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Study: Poor ballot designs still affect U.S. elections By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Poorly designed ballots continue to plague U.S. elections, even after Congress set aside $3 billion to overhaul voting systems to prevent a recurrence of the flawed Florida ballots that deadlocked the 2000 presidential race, a study out today concludes.

Problems with confusing paper ballots in 2002, absentee ballots in 2004 and touch-screen ballots in 2006 led thousands of voters to skip over key races or make mistakes that invalidated their votes, according to the study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

“In the big election meltdowns … where thousands of votes were lost, ballot design was the primary cause,” says Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center.

Ballot designs could play a big role in mistakes made at the polls this fall because of an infusion of new voters who registered for this year’s presidential race and the introduction of new voting machines in parts of 11 states with 15 million potential voters. Since passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002, states have spent more than $2 billion in mostly federal funds to overhaul their voting systems.

Congress approved spending of up to $3 billion because of problems in the 2000 presidential race in Florida. A deciding factor in that race was the confusion caused in Palm Beach County by the “butterfly ballot,” which required voters to punch a hole beside their candidate’s name in a strip between two facing pages that listed the presidential contenders.

Despite all the spending since then, mostly on new electronic voting systems, not enough attention has been paid to ballot design, the new study warns. “There has not been a documented instance where a computer has fouled up the vote by itself,” agrees Kimball Brace of the consulting firm Election Data Services.

The study’s conclusion, endorsed by many federal and state election overseers, is leading counties and election system manufacturers to improve ballot designs by the November election.

Starting this week in Ohio, ballot design experts will show officials how to avoid the kind of voter confusion in Florida’s 13th Congressional District in 2006. More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters skipped that race, which appeared above a more prominently displayed race for governor on the same screen. Republican Vern Buchanan won the congressional race by 369 votes.

BETTER BALLOT: Varied ballot designs are ‘literacy test for voters’ By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
Since 2000, when conservative Pat Buchanan did mysteriously well in Florida’s Palm Beach County at Democrat Al Gore’s expense, the way ballots are designed and explained has never stopped vexing voters.

About 12,000 presidential primary votes went uncounted in Los Angeles County this year because voters didn’t realize they had to fill in two ovals — one for party affiliation and one for candidate — on what came to be called a “double-bubble” ballot.

More than 18,000 voters in Sarasota County, Fla., didn’t choose either congressional candidate in 2006, in part because a more prominent race for governor was displayed on the same page on the touch-screen machines.

In the 2004 presidential race, nearly 3,000 absentee voters in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County mistakenly tried to line up arrows in a booklet with numbers on a ballot, negating their votes. Voters from Illinois to Iowa to Wisconsin met similar fates in 2002 because of poorly designed ballots.

Heading into the 2008 presidential election, officials who have spent billions on new technology are turning to designers for advice on such basic tenets as large type, clear language and simple layouts.

“Maybe we just should have designed a better ballot way back then,” says Oregon’s John Lindback, president of the National Association of State Election Directors. “It might have avoided the rush to touch-screen voting machines.”

A report scheduled for release today by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law shows that poor ballot design and instructions have caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of votes. Because there are no federal regulations, ballots vary significantly between and within states. “It’s kind of a literacy test for voters,” says Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center.

Studies have shown that those most likely to be confused are elderly, low-income and newly registered voters — factors that could influence this year’s race for the White House. “You tend to find the biggest problem in precincts with large numbers” of those voters, says David Kimball, associate professor of political science at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, a co-author of the report.

Election directors from counties that experienced recent ballot design problems say more attention should have been paid to the issue since 2000 than to the headlong rush to replace entire voting systems. Some counties in California, Florida, Ohio and elsewhere are dealing with their third systems in eight years:

•Los Angeles County Clerk Dean Logan says ballot designs and instructions are “the element of the elections process where we have the most opportunity between now and November to try and prevent inadvertent errors that voters might make.”

•Sarasota County elections director Kathy Dent says the changes from paper ballots to electronic machines and back to paper ballots has forced officials to spend more time on ballot preparation than ever. “We could have continued to use the punch cards in Sarasota,” she says.

•Cuyahoga County elections director Jane Platten says a clear, concise ballot isn’t easy to produce in Ohio, where state law demands ballot issues be printed in full. Every page costs 45 cents per voter — and the county has 1.2 million registered voters.

July 21, 2008
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