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Ballot Box Bullies Strike Again In Illinois
Corrupt scoundrels like Republican George Ryan (above) and Democrat Rod Blagojevich have killed any chance for independents in Illinois.
Democrats and Republicans have conspired to lock independents out of the electoral process all over the country. But few states are as bad as Illinois. Nonpartisan contenders for the House of Representatives there have to collect and notarize over 12,000 signatures just to get on the ballot. The result of these draconian laws? In the last election, there wasn’t a single independent House candidate in the entire state–mission accomplished for the Dems and the Reps.
In April, voters will choose a replacement for departing Rep. Rahm “I made $16 million in four years!” Emanuel. And the ballot box bullies in the two major parties have made it even harder for independents to challenge their dominance in that contest. From Ballot Access News:
… any independent candidate, or any nominee of an unqualified party, must submit 12,586 valid signatures no later than January 27 … The state is requiring these signatures to be collected in just 21 days.
That’s right. Illinois’ elections board is forcing independents and third party candidates to collect the same ridiculously large number of signatures they would need to qualify for a regular election … in three weeks.
Here is the link to the state board of elections rules sheet for the contest. It clearly requires independents to collect John Hancocks from at least 12,586 voters in the district.
How many do Democratic candidates need to bring in? 927. Republicans? 319.
What kind of elections board would hand down such a blatantly biased decision? The kind that’s crammed full of partisan stooges, that’s what:
The Board is an 8-member, bipartisan panel consisting of four Republicans and four Democrats
Sigh. Another government agency locked in the chokehold of the two major parties. No matter what, it’s going to have four Republicans and four Democrats. Independents need not apply.
And who–pray tell–got to choose which partisan stooges made it onto the board? That paragon of virtue and good government himself, Bad Hair Blago:
The Governor appoints four members from his own political party and selects four from a list of nominees submitted to him by the highest ranking official of the opposite political party.
And let’s not forget. Before the Democrat Blago, there was the Republican George Ryan. He may not have been as, um, colorful on a wiretap as Blago. But he was just as dirty.
Blago famously shook down a children’s hospital for campaign cash. That’s nothing! When he was still secretary of state, Ryan gave driver’s licenses to unqualified truck drivers in exchange for bribes. One of those truck drivers would up killing six kids in an accident. Ryan used those bribes to fund his winning run for governor.
For the last ten years, these two clowns have been naming the members of the state’s board of elections. Business as usual in our rotten two-party system.
PS: All told, six Illinois governors have been busted for corruption. Six. And those are just the ones that got caught!
PPS: In case you missed it, check out our interview with Ballot Access News founder Richard Winger here!
Stimulus Overload
Neither of these men is willing to do what it would take to solve our dire economic problems.
Finally, a Serious Economist admits what appears to be an obvious point to some of us lay people: as much as everyone hopes and wants Obama’s $1 TRILLION (or thereabouts) stimulus plan to work, it’s yet another stopgap non-solution that will only make the inevitable pain we’re facing that much worse.
The situation is really quite simple. The debt cupboard that we’ve been living on for years–make that decades–is now bare. Actually, it’s not just bare, it was smashed up for kindling and burned along with the rest of our national wealth long ago. From William Buiter at The Financial Times (via Naked Capitalism):
Even before the crisis erupted, around the middle of 2007, the US economy was in fundamental disequilibrium. The external primary deficit (the external current account deficit plus US net foreign investment income) was running at around five or six percent of GDP. The US was also a net external debtor. Its net external investment position (at fair value, or the statisticians best guess at it) was somewhere between minus 20 percent and minus 30 percent of annual GDP. The US economy managed to finance this debt and deficit position quite comfortably because it gave foreigners an atrocious rate of return on their investment in the US - a rate of return much lower, when expressed in a common currency, than the rate of return earned by US-resident investors abroad.
Translation: It’s not like we were in all that great a shape before the recent collapse. We were already a spendthrift, debtor nation strutting all over the globe like some maxed-out dandy ducking into alleyways and taverns to avoid the loan sharks and bagmen coming down the other side of the street.
The only reason we were able to live so profligately for so many years is because the Chinese and the Saudis and all the rest of our world bankers have been willing to accept ridiculously low returns on their investment. When Visa or Master Card have a customer who keeps spending over his limit, they tend to raise that limit–at least for awhile–to push him deeper in hock. But eventually, they tighten up and demand payment, and a higher rate of return:
The past eight years of imperial overstretch, hubris and domestic and international abuse of power on the part of the Bush administration has left the US materially weakened financially, economically, politically and morally … the US will have to start to pay a normal market price for the net resources it borrows from abroad. It will therefore have to start to generate primary surpluses, on average, for the indefinite future. A nation with credibility as regards its commitment to meeting its obligations could afford to delay the onset of the period of pain. It could borrow more from abroad today, because foreign creditors and investors are confident that, in due course, the country would be willing and able to generate the (correspondingly larger) future primary external surpluses required to service its external obligations. I don’t believe the US has either the external credibility or the goodwill capital any longer to ask, Oliver Twist-like, for a little more leeway, a little more latitude.
What does all of this mean? A long overdue crash in the dollar that will make our recent troubles look like mild indigestion compared to colon cancer. And the more debt-financed spending we do now, the worse it’s going to be.
What is the solution? As usual, neither of our two stale old parties in Washington has it. The Democrats want more deficit-financed government spending. But you might as well give an emphysema patient a carton of Marlboros. The Republicans don’t have the answer either. We can’t keep believing in their pie-in-the-sky tax cuts and giveaways to Wall Street either.
What Buiter says we need is what we here at Captive American have been saying we need for … well, for awhile now: namely, discipline and sacrifice. We have to stop putting off the pain. That’s only making the pain to come worse:
First, there will have to be some combination of higher taxes as a share of GDP or lower non-interest public spending as a share of GDP. Second, there will have to be a large increase in national saving relative to domestic capital formation.
Spending less. Saving more. Balancing our books as a nation. Wow. What concepts. Who says economics is hard to understand? Of course, all three of those urgently needed solutions are complete anathema to the career politicians in charge of our government.
Telling Americans the truth about how bad it is, asking them to sacrifice some of their comforts, and actually saying “No!” to special interests and government spending all make it rather difficult to win reelection. And these government lifers simply will not risk the end of their political careers. Politics is all they know. Most of them have never worked a real job. Given all that, is it any wonder that the two parties in power continue to push discredited but pleasant-sounding ideas like tax cuts and debt-financed spending?
Make no mistake: until we change them out, we’re not going to see the kind of change we’ve been promised and we’re not going to climb out of the massive hole they’ve dug for us.
Republicans: Limit Democrats, Er, Presidential Power!
John Yoo: When it comes to serving my party, I'm willing to torture logic, too!
This is rich.
John Bolton and John Yoo, two of the biggest enablers of President Bush’s many abuses of presidential power over the last eight years, now say–get this–that Congress should act to curb the executive branch. Specifically, they call for all foreign treaties to be subjected to a two-thirds vote in the Senate, as prescribed by the Constitution.
Following the Constitution. Wow. What a concept! From the NY Times:
The framers of the Constitution designed the treaty process with a bias against “entangling alliances,” as Thomas Jefferson described them in his first inaugural address. They designated the Senate as the body responsible to protect the interests of the states from being bargained away by the president in deals with foreign nations. The framers required a supermajority to ensure that treaties would reflect a broad consensus and careful, mature decision-making.
On the surface, Yoo and Bolton sound, well, incredibly reasonable. But hold on a sec. We read through their piece several times. They fret about a lot of stuff that President-elect Obama might do. But they don’t seem terribly interested in the stuff the last guy (ie: their guy) actually did. Stuff like this:
Bush and his counterpart in Iraq signed the so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which will keep our troops in the country for at least another 3 years. The Iraqi parliament passed the treaty. Yet our own Congress hasn’t even seen the document, despite the fact that it essentially hands over control of our troops to Iraqi leaders.
It’s hard to imagine a more “entangling alliance” than the SOFA. And yet, forget about such quaint notions as whether or not the Senate needs a two-thirds majority to approve it, the Bush administration didn’t even let anyone in Congress read it.
For some reason, Yoo and Bolton fail to mention this glaring example of executive branch arrogance. Hmm … we wonder why. And it seems mighty convenient for these two Republicans to argue that a Democratic president should seek out approval from two-thirds of the U.S. Senate, seeing as that body is about the only part of our government where Republicans still retain any power at all. Steve Benen over at the Washington Monthly found a good description for this. Chutzpah:
… I had to double check to make sure we were talking about the same Bolton and Yoo. After all, John Yoo has spent most of the last eight years arguing that the president has an unfettered power to do as he pleases on the international stage. Indeed, Yoo argued that the president can literally ignore any law he chooses — including the Constitution — if he decides it’s in the nation’s interests.
But that was then. Now Yoo is worried about executive overreach. Now Yoo wants every letter of the Constitution to be respected and adhered to without exception. The very same people who argued that the president must act without restriction when pursuing his foreign policy are now arguing that the president must honor the Treaty Clause at all costs.
Then again, Steve, Democrats spent the entire Bush years whining about the abuses of presidential power and restoring the prerogatives of the legislative branch. But come January 20th, watch how quiet they get on the subject. And, for once, we tend to agree with Dick Cheney. The other day, he predicted that President Obama will “appreciate” many of the new executive powers he and Bush took by force from our weak-kneed lawmakers. Do you really think Obama will just give them back? Or that his fellow Democrats in control of Capitol Hill would ever make him?
Who Says Main Street Isn’t Getting A Bailout?
This should now read: "We'll be taking your money anyway ... and lending it back to you!"
This is for all you whiners out there hating on Hank Paulson and the federal government for throwing trillions at Wall Street and billions at Detroit.
Relax! The Washington bailout bonanza is going to trickle down to you. You’re going to get a cut of the spending spree Uncle Sam is taking out on his no-limit Mao Zedong Visa. It’s just going to come as it always does–funneled through the coffers of a politically-connected corporation, in this case the brand, spanking new Bank of General Motors.
From the NY Times:
GMAC, the automobile financing company, said Tuesday morning that it would immediately resume financing to a wider range of car buyers, a day after the Treasury Department injected billions of dollars into the lender.
GMAC said in a statement that it would modify its credit criteria to include financing for customers with a credit score of 621 or above, a significant expansion of credit compared with the 700 minimum score put in place two months ago.
You see? Who says our government isn’t bailing out Main Street? Of course, we don’t get a check in the mail or anything. Who do we think we are, a Goldman Sachs executive or something? No. The benefit we will reap from our own tax dollars, and our children’s tax dollars, is … the privilege of taking out more debt to buy more inefficient, foreign-oil dependent jalopies from Detroit.
What’s that? You just lost your job? Your credit cards are already maxed out? You can barely make the mortgage every month? So what! What you really need is a new Hummer! Or how about that Suburban you’ve been eyeing? You might as well buy them. Your tax dollars are not only being spent to fight wars in the Middle East to secure the oil to run them, that money is now being used to make sure you qualify for a loan even if you’ve lost your job, your credit cards are maxed out, and you can barely make the mortgage! That’s your bailout, the right to go deeper into debt for more junk you don’t need. Get it while the deals are hot!
It’s really quite simple. We find ourselves in the midst of an economic meltdown, caused in large part by too much cheap debt being handed out by too many corporations to too many people who couldn’t afford to pay it off. So naturally, the solution to the problem is to use public money to subsidize more cheap debt, so that corporations crippled by lending to people who couldn’t afford to pay off their debt can … lend money to more people who probably won’t be able to afford to repay the loans! What could go wrong with that brilliant plan?
Really. This is the best our leaders can come up with. This is the best they can offer. Talk about subprime thinking …
UPDATE: Wall Street loves Washington’s gas-on-a-burning-house, bailout via more cheap debt solution. As of this writing, the Dow has gained over 100 points. GM: up 6%. Happy days are here again! Our “free markets” just can’t seem to get enough of our new command economy!
Elitists Welcome
Caroline Kennedy is certainly a member of the elite. But not the kind of elite we need in government.
Columnist Tunku Varadarajan over at Forbes.com says Caroline Kennedy is the least objectionable candidate for Hillary Clinton’s senate seat. While we don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion, we concur with much of his reasoning, especially when it comes to the scourge of the career politician:
Democratic apparatchiks are questioning, openly, her “qualifications,” a word that ought to be used sparingly in political jousts, given the only “qualification” most politicians can boast these days–and boast they do, with a brazen circularity–is their time spent in politics.
Professional politicians would profess the following: I deserve political office because I’ve held office before; and, before that, spent many years pushing and shoving my way through a throng to get to political office; and, before that, many years aspiring and plotting to reach the starting point where the throng gathers to battle for office.
To prove this excellent point, Varadarajan could easily cite our recent study on the House of Representatives. We found that the average representative in the House has spent more than half of his or her adult life in government office. And nearly a quarter of the House’s membership worked as political staffers before becoming professional politicians themselves.
Varadarajan goes on to make a persuasive case for returning control of our government to the most qualified, most successful citizens in the country, people who have proven themselves outside the realm of politics:
American politics is now too much the playground of the professional politician, the elected “salaryman”; it has too few members of the elite who enter politics in pursuit of the public good, and who can afford to mold their politics to the dictates of their conscience.
These are all good points, to be sure. But where we differ with Varadarajan is over the definition of the word “elite.”
There is no doubt that our government is being eaten out from the inside by lifetime politicians. These leeches on the body politic have no real-world experience and, thus, no clue as to how lead us out of the many crises they themselves have created. The solution is to bring new blood to Washington, to elect people who have run something in their lives besides campaigns for office. In short, we urgently need the best and the brightest from the private sector to answer the call to serve again. That is the kind of “elite” we should be seeking out to send to Congress. And Caroline Kennedy is not a member of that exclusive club.
Besides her pedigree, Kennedy is in line for the Senate for two reasons: her ability to raise money and her knack for political patronage. Her supporters point to the millions she has pulled in for charity and act like that somehow qualifies her to govern the most powerful country in the world. Meanwhile, her critical endorsement of Obama during the Democratic primary has definitely given her major leverage over the party and the new administration.
Worst of all, she’s lobbying for the job by calling herself a “loyal Democrat.” Great. Just what we need. Another blindly partisan legislator with a 98 or 99% party-line voting record.
Even though she hasn’t yet served a day in office, Kennedy is already acting like a career politician. If she does wind up winning the appointment, she’ll obviously fit in just fine on Capitol Hill. And that’s exactly why she shouldn’t be sent there.
