JayB

I think he's quite okay with that set of consequences from the Citizen's United ruling. It's the impartiality that's problematic. JayB and the other nincompoops have already forgotten about the Washington post article posted 2 pages ago showing that ad-hoc conservative organizations are outspending liberal ones 7:1, while most of their contributions come form large wealthy donors and corporations. Now we're getting to the heart of your objections. If the distribution of spending favored your side, we wouldn't be hearing much from you, methinks.

Now you're *really* reading straight from the Regressive Handbook.

and 100's of millions will be spent on the elections by liberal ad-hoc organizations, supposedly independent from campaigns... I think he's quite okay with that set of consequences from the Citizen's United ruling. It's the impartiality that's problematic.

Listen, buddy. I'm the libertarian regressive corporate shill around here....

Take it up with this guy, professor: http://www.uic.edu/depts/anth/faculty/keeley.html lkeeley@uic.edu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

All things being equal I prefer the likes of Turgot to Robespierre. I've said before that the primary virtue of modern democratic institutions lies their capacity to preserve essential rights and liberties, rather than in the percentage of the population that votes. If I had to choose, I would prefer a liberal state that limits participation in the political process and preserves the rule of law, defends the rights of minorities, etc to a state where there are zero checks on "the popular will." I'll take Singapore in '96 over Cambodia in '76.

The key relationship there is the long-term fatality rate in a given society, which is a function of the frequency, severity, and duration of conflict in each. A small society that is engaged in constant skirmishes where a handful of people are killed each time there's a battle, raid, etc will generally see a significantly greater percentage of its population killed in war than a much larger society that engages in intense conflicts for limited periods of time. "Noble Savages" tend to kill an awful lot of each other relative to non-primitive societies.

Had Mencken stated that oppressive laws are first aimed at scoundrels, while possessing the knowledge of history we have today, he would be speaking with an eloquent style, while at once acting the part of a muddle-minded pseudo-intellectual. By the blood of millions of innocent people murdered by the practice of laws crafted and executed by scoundrels such as Christopher Columbus, we know that oppression more often begins as an act of evil against not a few, but the many.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-popularity.html Bzzzt. We vote on rules, not rights. Rules are constrained by rights, and we have courts to sort out specific tensions between the two. Not perfect, but better than mob rule. Unless you're Robespierre.

Hey Bill - mostly agree, I just worry about where the lines would be drawn and whether or not they'd be applied impartially. I also think that once you get too far beyond direct donations to political parties or political campaigns you quickly get into zones where the government has no business monitoring citizens. I'd put donations to the NRA, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute, etc, etc, etc in that category. These are definitely groups with clear political agendas that generally line up with one side of the aisle or another, engage in quite a bit of lobbying, etc but don't think that they should be compelled by the government to disclose the identities of their donors or the amount they donated. Some groups out there are closer to the line than others, but it looks fuzzy to me at best, and the picture gets even more complicated when you start analyzing each ad, leaflet, movie, etc, etc, etc.

The actual argument was that we'd be much better off if Congress didn't make special exemptions to whatever set of rules for particular corporations or other economic interests they happen to favor. Since they mostly do that through tweaking the tax code, or passing targeted tariffs, subsidies, etc the best way to diminish their incentives for economic interests to buy off Congress would be to reform the tax code, etc so that whatever they pass applies to all corporations without exception. A flat tax is an easy way to do that on the tax side. Same deal with speech one set of rules for everyone. You've demonstrated a singular incapacity to provide even the remotest inkling of any objective standard that could be used to differentiate "political speech" from speech with political consequences. My argument is that's because no such standard exists, and any attempts to enforce it would be hopelessly compromised by partisan motives. Drug laws are another example. Once the government starts making subjective value judgments about which drugs are worse than others then the law-enforcement hammer arbitrarily falls on some groups more than others. I'd much rather end prohibition all together, but failing that - I'd much rather have a single code that applies to all illegal drugs than the current system.

The only compelling interest that corporations (and limited partnerships, and outfits like the Trial Lawyers, etc) have in taking over the government is to score special tax breaks, subsidies, or other exemptions from competition to enrich themselves at the public's expense. The more power that Congress has to rig the game and pick winners, the greater the incentive for all businesses to distort the laws in their favor. Exhibit A, once again - Corn Ethanol. There's a few thousand others. The great irony here is that the more power that you grant Congress to regulate commerce, the greater the incentives for businesses to "take over" Congress, while the tax and regulatory regime favored by regressives would dramatically reduce them.

Uh - there's plenty of folks from private, non-profit liberal arts colleges that haven't got a prayer of ever paying them off either.

One would think that fact that the boundaries between speech with political implications and "political" speech are clearly too complex, subjective, and laden with value judgments renders you incapable of marshaling so much as a coherent argument here would temper your enthusiasm for entrusting Congress with that power. Particularly if the evangelo-pluto-fascist hordes ever secure a majority there. The alternative being that your logic is too twisted to justify arguing against it: the existence of nuances and subtleties has never been an argument for letting everything go, but you appear to be an expert at making inferences that have no reason to be. They're actually not too far removed from the real-world case that lead to the Supreme Court's decision: "The case arose out of Citizens United’s January 2008 release of Hillary: The Movie, a 90-minute critical documentary about then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who was a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Citizens United sought to distribute the movie through Video On Demand, but was prohibited from doing so because federal law made it a felony for corporations–including nonprofit corporations–to use their general treasury funds for political advocacy." http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2010/01/26/supreme-court-strikes-down-restrictions-on-corporate-speech/

Speaking of revising history, I heard a pretty interesting interview about that on NPR this morning. The interviewee was a history Prof who was making the case that drunks, prostitutes, and various other ne'er-do-wells played an important role in securing various rights and freedoms in practice. An interesting side-note was his concession/argument that market processes helped this process along by making it profitable to undermine the status quo. Rich madams securing the right to own and dispose of property and Italian mobsters running gay bars were a couple of examples he tossed out there. All the more interesting considering the guy's gold-star leftist pedigree. Haven't read it but it sounds interesting: http://www.amazon.com/Renegade-History-United-States/dp/141657106X

Well...I certainly don't understand the arguments behind your position here, mostly because you haven't stated them.

One would think that fact that the boundaries between speech with political implications and "political" speech are clearly too complex, subjective, and laden with value judgments renders you incapable of marshaling so much as a coherent argument here would temper your enthusiasm for entrusting Congress with that power. Particularly if the evangelo-pluto-fascist hordes ever secure a majority there.

So if an ad is financed by 10,000 people giving a hundred dollars a piece that's substantively different from a billionaire funding it with a million dollars? What arbitrary numerical thresholds for participation and wealth should be exempt from political control - and what specific modes of political expression should be regulated? Should the billionaire be prevented from buying ads on broadcast media, but permitted to self-fund distribution of a political film in theaters? What about direct mail? Internet ad campaigns? Airplane ads over stadiums? How on earth would any of the above emerge from Congress free of the self-dealing and partisan game-rigging that characterizes every single....highway appropriations bill. Determining what constitutes permissible and impermissible political speech, how those restrictions should be implemented, monitored, and enforced is vastly more complicated than laying down pavement. What reason is there to believe that the political forces that distort something as straightforward as determining what highway construction projects to fund won't compromise any legislation that tries to do something infinitely more complicated and laden with so many subjective value judgments? As a general rule, when something is impossible for the government to accomplish at all, let alone in a fair and impartial fashion, we're better off when the government doesn't attempt to do it.

As an ecologist you should be comfortable with complexity, no? There's no single, clear standard that divides speech with political implications from "political speech," and any attempt to draw a line where none exists will be gerrymandered to suit the interests of whichever party has the upper hand at the moment.

There's a subtle but important difference between contributions made directly to a politician for use at his discretion and spending by groups with a political agenda. If the Sierra Club or Greenpeace spends a few million dollars on adds that state that Congressman or Senator X has voted to subsidize oil production every time it's come up for a vote, or if the ACLU takes out an add saying congressman X was a principal architect of rendition policies - then it's not clear to me that the public has the right to force those organizations to personally identify all of the people who gave them the money to put them on the air. Maybe their being funded by a Halliburton trust funder who wants to keep his activity secret because he doesn't want to get written out of the will, etc. Then there's the matter of, say, an editorial that's written by an employee of the New York Times corporation. Should they be put on a Congressional leash because they make statements that are critical or full of praise for a particular politician? How about the talking heads on Fox? Both have significant reach and influence, and have the potential to help or harm the prospects of particular politicians. Are either cases of corporate speech that should be subject to congressional regulation and censure?

That "DISCLOSE" act was quite a beauty. "As former commissioners on the Federal Election Commission with almost 75 years of combined experience, we believe that the bill proposed on April 30 by Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen to "blunt" the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC is unnecessary, partially duplicative of existing law, and severely burdensome to the right to engage in political speech and advocacy. Moreover, the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act, or Disclose Act, abandons the longstanding policy of treating unions and businesses equally, suggesting partisan motives that undermine respect for campaign finance laws. At least one of us served on the FEC at all times from its inception in 1975 through August 2008. We are well aware of the practical difficulties involved in enforcing the overly complex Federal Election Campaign Act and the problems posed by additional laws that curtail the ability of Americans to participate in the political process. As we noted in our amicus brief supporting Citizens United, the FEC now has regulations for 33 types of contributions and speech and 71 different types of speakers. Regardless of the abstract merit of the various arguments for and against limits on political contributions and spending, this very complexity raises serious concerns about whether the law can be enforced consistent with the First Amendment. Those regulatory burdens often fall hardest not on large-scale players in the political world but on spontaneous grass-roots movements, upstart, low-budget campaigns, and unwitting volunteers. Violating the law by engaging in forbidden political speech can land you in a federal prison, a very un-American notion. The Disclose Act exacerbates many of these problems and is a blatant attempt by its sponsors to do indirectly, through excessively onerous regulatory requirements, what the Supreme Court told Congress it cannot do directly—restrict political speech. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Disclose Act is that, while the Supreme Court overturned limits on spending by both corporations and unions, Disclose seeks to reimpose them only on corporations. The FEC must constantly fight to overcome the perception that the law is merely a partisan tool of dominant political interests. Failure to maintain an evenhanded approach towards unions and corporations threatens public confidence in the integrity of the electoral system. For example, while the Disclose Act prohibits any corporation with a federal contract of $50,000 or more from making independent expenditures or electioneering communications, no such prohibition applies to unions. This $50,000 trigger is so low it would exclude thousands of corporations from engaging in constitutionally protected political speech, the very core of the First Amendment. Yet public employee unions negotiate directly with the government for benefits many times the value of contracts that would trigger the corporate ban. This prohibition is supposedly needed to address concerns that government contractors might use the political process to steer contracts their way; but unions have exactly the same conflict of interest. So do other recipients of federal funds, such as nonprofit organizations that receive federal grants and earmarks. Yet there is no ban on their independent political expenditures." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703460404575244772070710374.html?KEYWORDS=disclose+act If what democrats *really* wanted was disclosure of all political contributions they could have tabled a bill one paragraph long. That clearly wasn't the case. "Politics" A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles." ~Ambrose Bierce.

IMO the amount of money that corporations, unions, and interest groups spend in an effort to influence the outcome of elections is dwarfed by the amount of money that politicians have control over and spend for the same purposes. Promising to increase the wages and benefits of public sector employees doesn't count as political spending? Think that there are no political calculations that influence millitary procurements, earmarks, or entitlement spending? Moreover, what incentive do those who currently hold office have to construct campaign spending rules that aren't biased in their favor? Think all groups that run afoul of whatever spending rules get constructed will be subjected to the same level of legal scrutiny irrespective of which party is in power?

1. Logical consequence of the health care reform bill that you championed. Dramatically increase coverage without increasing price transparency or competition and...voila. Plenty more where that came from. Budget accordingly. 2. Why leave food, clothing, and shelter to the private market? Is high speed internet a more significant human need than food? 3. You are confusing things that actually measure clinical efficacy with things that don't. Neither life expectancy nor infant mortality have any meaningful connection with clinical efficacy or value for money when comparing advanced countries. Life expectancy stats are confounded by factors that doctors and hospitals can't do anything about, and international infant mortality stats are rendered meaningless by vastly different standards for what counts as a live birth. A severely underweight premie or a baby that dies for whatever reason within 24 hours or less counts as an infant death in the US, but most other health systems take those as mulligans. The stats that you are relying upon also fail to account for morbidity. You can live to a ripe old age with an untold variety of injuries and illnesses that make your life suck quite a bit more than it would have otherwise, and they'll never register anywhere on an international statistical record.

I've yet to see tax-deductible fly-fishing junkets advertised to engineers. Nor have I ever seen engineers conferences hosted at the Awahnee. The entire bio/medical industrial complex is a triumph of soft living and the power of welfare spending; not a surprise they fight cost discipline so fiercely. BECAUSE IT NEVER OCCURS THAT WAY EVER IN REAL LIFE Hell, Toyota is a prime example of state partnership and heavy subsidies. I struggle to think of any major industry that isn't supported by government subsidies; movement across borders is currently more of a whose willing to subsidize more effort. I'm sure you're a fun of the unsustainable race to the bottom, I'm not. 1. Talk to the folks who control the budgets for buying the stuff that engineers make. Or head to Vegas for an industry convention. My best friend is a sales manager for a lighting controls company, and spends quite a bit of time and the company's money taking people who aren't MD's out to dinner, etc because they control the purse strings. I'm not quite sure what your beef with me is on this point, though, because I'm fairly certain I'd take the liberalization of the entire medical economy far further than you would be prepared to. 2. It's clear that the people getting the subsidies are better off than they would be otherwise. That's never been a matter of contention. The question is whether it's a good deal for the people who are having money taken out of their pockets to fund the subsidies. Iowa is clearly vastly better off as a result of the gargantuan agricultural subsidies it gets. It's far from clear that the rest of the country is better off forking over billions of dollars that they could have used for a gazillion other purposes for ethanol and high fructose corn syrup. It's also far from clear that the torrent of subsidized crops spewing onto the global market are a good thing for the rest of the world. The fact that all major industries are subsidized to one degree or another doesn't mean that subsidies are either necessary or beneficial. There are a gazillion sectors of the economy that are either too small or too dynamic to make it worth their while to look for handouts from the government, or for legislators to rig the game in their favor - and the dynamic, specialized patterns of production and exchange that they engage in constitute the vast majority of all economic activity and drive most of the innovation and growth in developed economies. Taking money from businesses that have figured out to sell things for more than they cost to make, and handing it over to companies that can no longer do so is like hooking up an IV from a thousand newborns to a giant, 98 year-old Keith Richards in order to keep his bloated, supperating carcas out of the graveyard for another day. Great for Keith, not so great for the newborns or the society they'll inhabit in the future. GM = 98-year-old Keith Richards. Have a listen: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi