Is money allowed to cry 'fire' in a crowded theatre?

The US Supreme Court's recent call to let their Citizens United decision ride reinforces  a kind of Animal Farm persuasion that taints elections in this country: simply put, that all votes are equal but some are more equal than others. Take heart--billionaires will remain unfettered in their efforts to buy elections.

Those who defend Citizens United blinklessly assert that corporations are people, too, my friend--an argument so specious as to be worthy of drunks and defiant children. Who has yet to address the twisted irony about today's corporation--whose purpose is to manage personal liability (meaning, avoid personal culpability) for its members; and now they cling to the Bill of Rights? Not only do elite, moneyed interests want to have their cake--they want to inhale it as well.

If you have any doubt that corporations enable the abandonment of personal responsibility, you should read about the Wachovia money laundering scandal that no one remembers anymore--that not one official from the bank was even arrested doesn't improve anyone's chances of recollection.

Need a more recent reminder? Not one member of any financial institution that misled investors and spread toxic mortgage assets--leading to the 2008 economic meltdown--has been arrested.

Fast forward to 2010: the British Petroleum oil spill--no arrests. Oh, wait, the feds did recently file some fey obstruction of justice charge against a low ranking engineer for deleting text messages. It's an arrest certain to strike fear in the hearts of would-be polluters all over the world.

What to do? Many progressives are spreading the message about a constitutional amendment that would reverse Citizens United. It's a great idea, however, said amendment would have to pass through the congressional and statehouse machinery that is largely already owned by elite, moneyed interests.

The solution will require a de facto effort on the part of those who care for the common good. The challenge appears almost impossible: ignorance and apathy have joined forces to comprise the 40% of eligible voters who fail to show up at the polls come election time. We are failing to teach the 40% a civics-minded media literacy, the kind of knowledge informing each voter about his or her choices--that there is no obligation to support candidates for public office who trade their decision making for large, bundled campaign contributions. Ultimately they must learn (and it may come to the hard way) what is at stake for his or her quality of life and well being.

It's a goal comparable to Thomas Jefferson’s hope for an educated citizen--someone prepared for the tasks of self-government and encouraged “to judge for himself what would secure or endanger his freedom.”

No bully left behind

Rush Limbaugh and the conservative hacks who savaged and defamed Sandra Fluke for urging Congress to protect contraception coverage in The Affordable Care Act, deserve our pity; just as any other bully does.

All the smoke and sparks about sponsors, free speech, and religious freedom veil what Rush and all other agents of torment are telling the world about themselves. As well, all the PSA talk about bullies as a social menace, how to survive them, or about how "it gets better" (though that's a crucial message)--misses the message conveyed by their acts of cruelty. What they illustrate are the lengths (or depths) bullies are willing to go to forget or smother the memory of their own suffering (always endured as children).

Most certainly not one member of Rush Limbaugh's radio audience (numbered in the tens of millions) was present at any moment of humiliation or deprivation he experienced as a child. Yet his massive appeal owes to the bond he shares with listeners as individuals who rile up over any reminder of their own pain or vulnerability; summoning a pox upon anyone who might dare let their difference from prevailing norms, show.

Anyone who might scoff at this reality have no other way to account for how a grown adult could recklessly and repeatedly speculate on the sexual habits of a woman he knows nothing about. Oh, but Rush is an entertainer--a provocateur--wanting to reach the widest audience possible, his defenders explain away.

Indeed, leave it to Rush and his drones to 'give away the goods' as it concerns their own sexual hangups or unexplored psyches: sexual pleasure and self-empowered women rank as intolerable aspects of our culture that must--must!--be ridiculed, debased, caricatured.

The struggle against bullies demands another, mostly unexplored front--that is the threshold of their psyches. All responses to hostility should point out that the bully is just as wounded as the victim he attempts to afflict. Instead of allowing the brute imagine his actions come from a place of strength, the social menace should endure a gauntlet of reminders that the victim's greatest offense was reminding the agressor of his own weakness.

Rush Limbaugh and petty tyrants of his ilk may not reform their behavior as a result of being thus confronted; this approach at the very least reframes the prevailing conversation about bullies--that they share a deep kinship with the victims they torment to forget.

Suddenly Santorum (now hoping the money comes in)

Rick Santorum's surprise showing at the Republican Iowa caucus and his prospects for competing in New Hampshire, switches focus to the dollar figure his campaign has spent; finance folks like to bandy about those ROI (return on investment) numbers factoring the investment value of each vote.

This kind of talk illustrates what fundamentally afflicts this country's decision making when choosing its decision makers. Now that Santorum's campaign is suddenly competitive the question becomes, will he or won't he raise the cash to remain viable beyond this Iowa surge?

Why couldn't the good citizens of New Hampshire, or of any other state, muster a broad enough voting presence that forces the millions in big dollar donations into political irrelevance?

What the 'free speech' of wealthy campaign donors ultimately represents is a built-in voter apathy that tilts electoral politics into the 1%'s favor. Voters should view Rick Santorum's unlikely success as what is possible when a plurality of citizens casts aside prevailing thought to cast their vote.

Quiet riot brewing

A fascinating read in the Harper's Jan. 2012 issue features the story of foreclosed homeowners challenging lenders in courts across the country. Among organizations that have taken shape to push back against banks is the National Homeowners Cooperative.

As Harper's writer Christopher Ketcham reveals in his report, "Stop Payment", the NHC teaches homeowners how to counteract a bank's foreclosing efforts. Suing for "quiet title" compels a bank to produce evidence of an unbroken chain of title (documenting ownership going back to the time property was first parceled and recorded). If the foreclosing institution cannot prove it owns the loan, then the title in question is considered "clouded".

Enter the Mortgage Electronic Registry Systems, what Ketcham calls "the heart of the clouded title problem." The purpose of the MERS--going back to the mid 1990s when Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and a handful of major banks launched it--has been to keep an electronic record of the sale of mortgages between lenders. In doing so it became the 'in-name-only' owner of the loan for the public record. This allowed mortgage companies an alternative to the time-consuming and costly recording process handled through the county clerk's office.

Ketcham's piece does not mention the specifics of the county clerk's office role after the advent of MERS, except to state that the electronic registry "had single handedly unraveled centuries of precedent in property titling and mortgage recordation...".

A very telling quote from University of Utah law professor Christopher Peterson captures the meaning of MERS's 'achievement' on a wider scope: "What's happened is that, almost overnight, we've switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy real property recording.... There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accompished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it."

Professor Peterson also considers it no coincidence that as more Americans face foreclosure than at any other time since the Great Depression, it happens as the records of home ownership and mortgages shift to a private database.

An estimate of the number of mortgages held by MERS stands at around 62 million.

Get by gridlock with a little help from voters

Former president Bill Clinton appeared on ABC's This Week With Christiane Amanpour on Sunday (Sept. 18) to talk government gridlock and the economy. He imparted two points that capture the crisis of our times.

Speaking to the question of what it will take for Washington decision making to break through the stalemate, he replied that it would require “a little help from the American people.” His answer followed with a reminder to voters of the crop of freshman Congressional nay-sayers elected in 2010--those who impeded such matters like raising the debt ceiling and opposed a balanced approach to the federal budget deficit. Clinton elaborated by saying, "It's very hard for the people in Washington who got there based on pure conflict, pure attack, pure ideology to take it seriously when their same constituents are saying please do something positive."

This is especially true of elected legislators who behave as if their sole mandate is to oppose President Obama. As far as anyone can measure, this agenda has yet to have any direct impact on creating jobs.

On that note about jobs and their 'creators' Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on the same day joined the Fox News Hour discussion to cry 'class warfare' at President Obama's suggestion of raising taxes on millionaires (the White House calls it "The Buffet Rule"). Rep. Ryan also repeated the usual, fraudulent claims against raising federal levies on the wealthy and their impact on how jobs get created. Such arguments loop in the multi-million dollar S-corp. companies among that sacred class of small business owners that must be spared any increases.

His reasoning mashes down to "if you tax more... you get less. If you tax job creators more, you get less job creation." Rep. Ryan would be in the oddest position to explain with a straight face why Bank of America, a beneficiary of Bush-era tax cuts, is fixing to lay off 30,000 employees. All that may remain of Ryan's once-fervent audience is the low information voter.

Speaking of the low information voter, Bill Clinton's second important point emerges. In an attempt to account for the few bright spots of economic development around the country, he emphasizes how crucial "networks of cooperation" are to the success of a local market. As for the rest of the country's lagging economy, a significant disconnect prevails between "the way the economic system works and the way the political system works." In other words, we cannot expect economic success when the political system endures the legislative standstills of the magnitued we witnessed this past summer.

As for other disconnects that figure prominantly into our political dysfunction, the influence gap is one that rarely receives attention. Yes, there are those whining references to "campaign finance reform" that pepper some conversations about how to improve government, however, rarely, if ever, does anyone name the players or what is at stake. 

The influence gap occurs between two classes of citizens distiguished by their earning power. As troubling economic times have ginned up talk about class conflict, increasingly the two groups have been referred to as the elite 2 per cent and the everyone-else 98 per cent. Each election they enter into what has been  called here a zero-sum faceoff--the 2% being in a position to finance the media resources necessary to reach the remaining 98% through television, radio and internet ads.

Conventional wisdom drives Bill Clinton's caution that "until the American people make it clear that-- however they voted in past elections--they want these folks [Democrats and Republicans] to work together and to do something, there's going to be a little ambivalence in Washington."

For the millions of unemployed or foreclosed-upon Americans hanging to their wits by a tattered thread, relief will require something far bolder than conventional thought. 

What voters too often forget or fail to understand is the influence they wield when working in concert. If the 2008 economic meltdown has anything to teach us, it has to be how interlinked or mutually dependent our occupational and financial destinies are. Given that interdependency, won't survival require a serious reconfiguration of the influence gap? It would be up to the 'lower' 98 per cent to insist that candidates and elected officials alike, must honestly bear their concerns.