Tag Archives: election

Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Call Burma a Democracy Just Yet

by hongNgocBaoTram Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama and other world leaders are sending their congratulations to Burma, whose biggest pro-democracy party, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory in a historic general election—the first time in nearly half a century that citizens had a hand in picking their rulers. Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, clinched enough seats in the national parliament to form the next government and choose the next president. It’s a moment for celebration, but the fight for democracy isn’t over yet. Here are three challenges Suu Kyi’s party now faces:

Forming a government: In 1990, the last time Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a general election, the results were annulled by the then-ruling military dictatorship, which subsequently threw many of the party’s candidates in prison. Fortunately, the dictatorship ended four years ago, and leaders in Burma’s current government—dominated by former military generals—have congratulated Suu Kyi on her win this week and pledged to respect the results of the vote.

But the new parliament will not sit until early next year, and the new president likely won’t be inaugurated until March. That’s a lot of time for something to go wrong. “Nowhere else in the world is there such a gap between the end of the election and the forming of the new administration, and certainly it’s something about which we should all be concerned,” Suu Kyi told reporters last week at her lakeside residence in Rangoon.

Picking a president: Suu Kyi is Burma’s most popular politician, but she can’t become president. Before the dictatorship ended, the country’s military leaders wrote a constitution with a clause that makes Suu Kyi ineligible for the job because her late husband was British and her two sons hold foreign citizenship. Suu Kyi has vowed to get around this constitutional ban. Last week, she told reporters that she would lead the government in a position “above the president.” This week, she elaborated in an interview that the NLD would pick a president with “no authority” who would “act in accordance with the positions of the party.”

Dealing with the military: The NLD won a majority of contested parliamentary seats, but not all parliamentary seats were up for grabs. In fact, thanks to the constitution, 25 percent of seats are reserved for unelected military representatives who hold veto power over constitutional amendments and have no interest in allowing Suu Kyi to become president. Asked about the military bloc in parliament during a press conference last week, Suu Kyi replied, “I don’t believe in unbreakable blocks, especially human ones.”

The constitution also gives the military control over the defense, border affairs, and home affairs ministries. And in a state of emergency, it allows a special military-led body to assume sweeping state powers. What’s more, the military continues to wage civil wars against ethnic minority groups in the countryside, and Suu Kyi will likely have little control to end these conflicts. “Burma will get democracy,” Aung Thein, a member of the NLD’s campaign committee, told me. “But we will have to work for many years.”

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Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Call Burma a Democracy Just Yet

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More Legal Trouble for Paul Aides

by FabianGorsuch Posted on November 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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The government’s case against the trio of operatives for Ron and Rand Paul who attempted to buy the endorsement of an Iowa state senator just got a second life. A federal judge has set a new trial date for Dimitri Kesari, a longtime Paul family operative whom an Iowa jury found guilty last month of helping cover up the pay-for-endorsement scheme in Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. The same jury deadlocked on three more specific charges, including conspiracy. Prosecutors say Kesari and two others conspired to funnel more than $73,000 to then-Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson in exchange for switching his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul in the days before the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses.

Court filings also indicate that prosecutors might attempt to bring back similar charges against Jesse Benton, Rand Paul’s nephew-in-law, and John Tate, another Paul family ally, who were involved in the 2012 Ron Paul campaign and who, according to emails presented by prosecutors in the earlier trial, worked with with Kesari on the plan to pay Sorenson. Benton and Tate are running a super-PAC this election cycle to back the presidential campaign of Rand Paul. All three operatives were indicted in August, but the judge in the case threw out all of the charges against Tate and most of the charges against Benton, because prosecutors included improper information in the indictments against them. During the October trial at which Kesari was convicted, Benton faced one charge of lying to federal investigators about his knowledge of the plan, but was cleared by the jury.

Lawyers for Kesari and Benton did not deny that the Ron Paul campaign paid Sorenson the money, nor that it was funneled through a third party in an effort to obscure the money trail. Benton’s attorneys argued their client, who was chairman of Ron Paul’s national campaign, was largely unaware of what was happening and couldn’t be shown to have had an active role. They also worked to separate Benton from Kesari, who was the deputy campaign manager, suggesting he was largely responsible for the scheme. Kesari’s attorney took a different tack, trying to make the case that the pay-for-endorsement idea and the use of an intermediary were not crimes or particularly out of the ordinary.

Prosecutors presented hundreds of pages of emails showing the three men discussing payments to Sorenson, and both Benton and Tate seemingly approving the payments to a third party that Kesari had set up. Witnesses included Ron Paul himself and a number of current employees or consultants to Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign. Sorenson, who has pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from his role in the case, also testified, but jurors may not have found him particularly persuasive. The jury acquitted Kesari of one charge that he obstructed justice for allegedly trying to get Sorenson to alter a key piece of evidence once investigators began looking into the case. That accusation relied almost entirely on Sorenson’s testimony.

Because the jury deadlocked on the charges against Kesari, prosecutors were able to ask for a new trial for him, but must seek new indictments against Tate and Benton. In a filing today, the federal judge in the case set a new trial date for Kesari of December 14. However, the judge also noted that the government has the right to re-indict Tate and Benton, and if prosecutors do so, the judge ordered Benton and Tate’s new trial to be scheduled for February 14, two weeks after the Iowa caucuses.

For the one charge he was convicted of, Kesari already faces up to five years in federal prison.

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More Legal Trouble for Paul Aides

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James Bond Gives $50,000 to a Sketchy Bernie Sanders Super-PAC

by BerenicPaling Posted on September 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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James Bond’s latest attempt to save the world didn’t involve blowing things up or chasing down bad guys. Instead, Daniel Craig, the Englishman who plays Bond, acted with his wallet, making a healthy donation to support his preferred presidential candidate: Bernie Sanders. But in doing so, he may have played into a villain’s hands.

Over the summer, Craig donated nearly $50,000 to a super-PAC called Americans Socially United, which claims to support the Vermont senator’s dark-horse bid for the Democratic nomination, according to the Center for Public Integrity (CPI). The pro-Sanders super-PAC is run by a self-described lobbyist, Cary Lee Peterson, who “has routinely run afoul of creditors and the law,” with two outstanding warrants in the state of Arizona. The group was initially called “Ready for Bernie Sanders 2016” and “Bet on Bernie 2016,” both illegal uses of the candidate’s name that caused confusion for Sanders supporters who accidentally donated to Peterson’s PAC instead of the campaign. Peterson’s group has not filed the legally required campaign finance disclosures, CPI reports.

Moreover, Sanders, who supports campaign finance reform, doesn’t want super-PACs supporting his campaign and has asked Americans Socially United to stop its efforts on his behalf. His campaign sent Peterson a cease and desist letter in June, which Peterson continues to disregard.

But Peterson contends that he is simply trying to support his favorite candidate. “You don’t need to look back on my past,” Peterson told CPI. “I’m going out there trying to make a difference.”

Thus far, Craig is sticking to his guns, too. “Currently, I have been informed of no evidence to question that my donation has not been used as intended,” he told CPI. “Should that situation occur, then clearly, I will review my position.”

Super-PACs, which are largely unregulated by the Federal Election Commission, can get away with a lot. As attorney Paul Ryan explained to CPI, the people running these super-PACs could legally use the money they raise “to buy a yacht and sail off into the sunset.”

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James Bond Gives $50,000 to a Sketchy Bernie Sanders Super-PAC

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Social Security Cuts Are Fairly Popular If You Talk About Them Right

by MahaliaJGJN Posted on August 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman writes today that Republicans are engaged in an act of “political self-destructiveness.” They consistently support entitlement cuts, including cuts to Social Security, despite the fact that only 6 percent of Americans want to cut Social Security while 51 percent want it increased. Why are they doing this? Krugman suggests that it’s because they’re trying to curry favor with wealthy donors, who generally favor cuts.

I want to push back on this a bit. Krugman’s comment is based on a post by Lee Drutman, which in turn is based on data from the 2012 National Election Studies survey. But there have been lots of other polls about Social Security too. Here are three taken at random from PollingReport.com:

Opinions about Social Security are very sensitive to question wording. If you flatly ask “Do you think we should cut Social Security benefits?” almost everyone will oppose it. But if you preface it with a question about the solvency of the system, more people are in favor of cuts. And if you ask about, say, raising the retirement age, you get even more people in favor—because most of them don’t automatically associate that with “cuts.”

This is the context for understanding the Republican position. First, they talk loudly and endlessly about how the system will collapse unless changes are made. Second, they make sure never to propose changes for retirees already receiving benefits. Third, they don’t talk overtly about cuts. They talk about raising the retirement age. They talk about slowing the growth of benefits. They talk about means testing. They talk about private accounts.

None of this is to say that cuts to Social Security—even when couched in veiled terms—are popular. They aren’t. But support is a lot higher than 6 percent. Usually it’s somewhere between 30-50 percent, and it’s often a substantial majority among Republican voters.

So that’s how Republicans get away with this: they appeal to fellow Republicans and they’re careful about how they frame their proposals. In other words, politics and salesmanship. But I repeat myself.

POSTSCRIPT: Why did I bother writing this post? Because it’s important not to kid ourselves about what the public really thinks. Opinions aren’t shaped in a vacuum. They’re formed in the context of time, place, tribal affiliations, external events, and framing. Simple, isolated questions don’t capture any of that.

We do ourselves no favors if we blithely assume that Republicans are committing obvious suicide without understanding exactly how they maintain support for a position that seems pretty unpopular at first glance. The answer is that they do it very skillfully, and if we want to fight back we have to understand that.

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Social Security Cuts Are Fairly Popular If You Talk About Them Right

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You Can Thank Fox News for the Rise of Donald Trump

by LillianM49 Posted on August 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Donald Trump takes center stage at the first Republican presidential primary debate Thursday night, he will likely begin his remarks by issuing the standard thank you to Fox News for hosting the event. But he really should be thanking the conservative news network for a whole lot more than that.

It’s no secret that Fox News both boosts the GOP and wields significant influence over the party—the so-called Fox News Effect. It covers the news that Republicans want covered long after the mainstream media have moved on (Benghazi! IRS targeting! Planned Parenthood tapes!). But the network, where many Republican voters get most of their news, is also partly responsible for setting the party’s agenda and boosting its major players, including Trump. And by helping Trump maneuver to the front of the GOP pack and putting him in the spotlight Thursday night, Fox may be doing significant damage to the party it has long favored.

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You Can Thank Fox News for the Rise of Donald Trump

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Paul Ryan’s Vision of a Dickensian Hellhole Is Up For a Vote Next Year

by PearleneJenks Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

Jon Chait points out today that it doesn’t really matter very much whether Hillary Clinton moves a little leftward, a little center-ward, or frankly, in any other direction during the upcoming presidential campaign. Oh, it might help her get elected, but once in office Republicans aren’t going to pass any of her proposals, no matter what they happen to be. Nonetheless:

The presidential election carries hugely important stakes, not just in policy realms where the president wields significant influence on her own, like foreign policy and judicial appointments, but also on domestic policy. It’s just that the stakes have nothing to do with Clinton’s proposals. What’s at stake is the Paul Ryan budget.

….Jeb Bush has already endorsed the Ryan budget. Marco Rubio has voted for it and said, “by and large, it’s exactly the direction we should be headed.” The other candidates have positioned themselves to their right….The overall thrust is perfectly clear: deep cuts in marginal tax rates along with large reductions in means-tested spending, and a deregulation of the energy and financial industries. Its enactment would amount to the most dramatic rollback of government since the New Deal.

….News coverage has oddly failed to frame this question as the center of the election. Journalists like personal drama, and they prefer to place the candidates and their individual ideas in the center of the portrait.

In fairness, the general election is a long way off. It’s pretty understandable that campaign reporters are currently spending most of their time on primary jockeying and not on the details of policy proposals—especially since most of the candidates haven’t yet done more than outline their domestic agendas anyway.

That said, no one took this very seriously in 2012, even though the Ryan budget was at stake then too. I’ll toss out three reasons I suspect the same thing will happen this time too:

  1. The eventual Republican candidate will insist that the Ryan budget is “a great roadmap” and “the direction our administration will move in,” or some such waffle. But he will refuse to flatly endorse the document itself (“As the Constitution requires, details will be negotiated as part of the congressional budgeting process blah blah blah”), and this refusal will be taken at face value.
  2. As I’ve mentioned enough times to be a bore about it, Republicans generally get a pass from the press corps when they advocate some militantly right-wing position. It’s taken as little more than an applause line they “have” to deliver to appease the base, not something they’ll actually do once they’re in office.
  3. And in the case of the Ryan budget, the truth is that when Republicans are out of power they do always say that the budget is a looming apocalypse and needs to be slashed—but when they’re in power it usually turns out they like spending money too. Sure, they always have a period of remorse and backbiting after they’ve been turfed out of office, swearing that next time they’ll slash the budget for sure. But they never do. They just run big deficits. So it’s hardly surprising that seasoned campaign reporters take this stuff with a grain of salt when they hear it.

So are Republicans serious about it this time? Beats me. I don’t really want to risk finding out, but I honestly have no idea.

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Paul Ryan’s Vision of a Dickensian Hellhole Is Up For a Vote Next Year

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If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different

by DaniellSpringer Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the mortality rate for black Americans about 18 percent higher than it is for white Americans, premature black deaths have affected the results of US elections, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Oxford.

The study, published in Social Science & Medicine and highlighted on Friday by the UK-based New Scientist, shows how the outcomes of elections between 1970 and 2004—including the presidential race between John Kerry and George W. Bush—might have been affected if there hadn’t been such a disparity in the death rate. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 8.5 million black people died during that 35-year period. But if the mortality rates had been comparable, an additional 2.7 million black people would have been alive, and of those, an estimated 1 million would have cast votes in the 2004 election. Bush likely still would have won that race. But some state-level races might have turned out differently: The results would have been reversed in an estimated seven US Senate elections and 11 gubernatorial elections during the 35-year period, the researchers found, assuming that the hypothetical additional voters had cast their ballots in line with actual black voters, who tend to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates.

And that’s before even getting to incarceration. Additional elections potentially would have turned out differently if voting-age black Americans who were previously convicted of felonies had been able to cast a ballot. As New Scientist explains:

Accounting for people disenfranchised by felony convictions would have likely reversed three other senate seats. In at least one state, Missouri, accounting for just excess deaths or felony disenfranchisement would not have been sufficient to reverse the senate election – but both sources of lost votes taken together would have.

While everyone’s attention right now is on racial injustice in the context of policing, one of the study’s authors, Arline Geronimus, noted that most premature black deaths were linked to chronic health conditions that afflict black people more than white people. “If you’re losing a voting population, you’re losing the support for the policies that would help that population,” she told New Scientist. “As long as there’s this huge inequality in health and mortality, there’s a diminished voice to speak out against the problem.”

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If Black People Lived As Long As White People, Election Results Would Be Very Different

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It’s Not the 1 Percent Controlling Politics. It’s the 0.01 Percent.

by Jamie Cox Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Even before presidential candidates started lining up billionaires to kick-start their campaigns, it was clear that the 2016 election could be the biggest big-money election yet. This chart from the political data shop Crowdpac illustrates where we may be headed: Between 1980 and 2012, the share of federal campaign contributions coming from the very, very biggest political spenders—the top 0.01 percent of donors—nearly tripled:

In other words, a small handful of Americans* control more than 40 percent of election contributions. Notably, between 2010 and 2012, the total share of giving by these donors jumped more than 10 percentage points. That shift is likely the direct result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down decades of fundraising limits and kicked off the super-PAC era. And this data only includes publicly disclosed donations, not dark money, which almost certainly means that the megadonors’ actual share of total political spending is even higher.

It’s pretty fair to assume that most of these top donors are also sitting at the top of the income pyramid. Out of curiosity, I compared the share of campaign cash given by elite donors alongside the increasing share of income controlled by the people who make up the top 0.01 percent—the 1 percent of the 1 percent. The trend lines aren’t an exact match, but they’re close enough to show how top donors’ political clout has increased along with top earners’ growing slice of the national income. Again, note the bump around 2010 and 2011, when the Citizens United era opened just as the superwealthy were starting to recover from the recession—a rebound that has left out most Americans.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a few hundred people control 40 percent of election contributions, based on my own calculations. According to Crowdpac, the number is around 25,000.

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It’s Not the 1 Percent Controlling Politics. It’s the 0.01 Percent.

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My Stake In the 2016 Election Is Way More Personal Than Usual

by UTQAlexand Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore:

I’m increasingly convinced that by the end of the Republican presidential nominating process the candidates will have pressured each other into a Pact of Steel to revoke all of Obama’s executive orders and regulations. The post-2012 GOP plan to quickly implement the Ryan Budget and an Obamacare repeal in a single reconciliation bill will almost certainly be back in play if Republicans win the White House while holding on to Congress. Republicans (with even Rand Paul more or less going along) are all but calling for a re-invasion of Iraq plus a deliberate lurch into a war footing with Iran. And now more than ever, the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court would seem to vary almost 180 degrees based on which party will control the next couple of appointments.

This is more personal for me than usual. Scary, too. There are no guarantees in life, and there’s no guarantee that MoJo will employ me forever. If I lose my job, and Republicans repeal Obamacare, I will be left with a very serious and very expensive medical condition and no insurance to pay for it. And I feel quite certain that Republicans will do nothing to help me out.

Obviously lots of other people are in the same position, and have been for a long time. But there’s nothing like being in the crosshairs yourself to bring it all home. If Republicans win in 2016, my life is likely to take a very hard, very personal turn for the worse.

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My Stake In the 2016 Election Is Way More Personal Than Usual

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Report: Florida Banned State Workers From Saying “Climate Change”

by JessRTFdyxsu Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Officials with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the agency in charge of setting conservation policy and enforcing environmental laws in the state, issued directives in 2011 barring thousands of employees from using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming,” according to a bombshell report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR).

The report ties the alleged policy, which is described as “unwritten,” to the election of Republican governor Rick Scott and his appointment of a new department director that year. Scott, who was re-elected last November, has declined to say whether he believes in climate change caused by human activity.

“I’m not a scientist,” he said in one appearance last May.

Scott’s office did not comment on Sunday, when contacted by the Guardian. A spokesperson for the governor told the FCIR team: “There’s no policy on this.”

The FCIR report was based on statements by multiple named former employees who worked in different DEP offices around Florida. The instruction not to refer to “climate change” came from agency supervisors as well as lawyers, according to the report.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,'” the report quotes Christopher Byrd, who was an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013, as saying. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”

“We were instructed by our regional administrator that we were no longer allowed to use the terms ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ or even ‘sea-level rise,'” said a second former DEP employee, Kristina Trotta. “Sea-level rise was to be referred to as ‘nuisance flooding.'”

According to the employees’ accounts, the ban left damaging holes in everything from educational material published by the agency to training programs to annual reports on the environment that could be used to set energy and business policy.

The 2014 national climate assessment for the US found an “imminent threat of increased inland flooding” in Florida due to climate change and called the state “uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise.”

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Report: Florida Banned State Workers From Saying “Climate Change”

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