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Ralph Nader: Both Parties are part of a Corporate Dictatorship

The Juice News: The Commission on Presidential Debates

Jill Stein: She's got gravitas

Court to Maine Democratic Party: NO MORE BULLYING THIRD PARTIES OFF THE BALLOT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

April 19, 2012

CONTACT:
Oliver Hall – (617) 953-0161
Lynne Williams – (207) 266-6327

MAINE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT UNANIMOUSLY RULES FOR NADER IN SUIT AGAINST DEMOCRATS

High Court Decision Reinstates Lawsuit Alleging Democrats Unlawfully Targeted Nader-Camejo 2004 Independent Presidential Campaign

PORTLAND, ME – Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court (the “Law Court”) today unanimously ruled to reinstate a 2009 lawsuit filed by independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and his 2004 Maine electors against the Democratic Party and several of its allies. The lawsuit, originally filed in Superior Court for Washington County, Maine, was dismissed in November 2010 pursuant to Maine’s anti-SLAPP statute, 14 M.R.S. § 556. The Law Court vacated the dismissal, ruling that the lower court erred by denying Nader and his electors the opportunity to establish their claims for abuse of process, malicious prosecution and civil conspiracy.

“We conclude that the Maine anti-SLAPP statute may not be invoked to achieve dismissal of claims alleging abuses of process without giving the plaintiff the opportunity to establish a prima facie case to support the claims,” the Law Court declared in a majority opinion by Justice Donald G. Alexander. Chief Justice Leigh I. Saufley, Justice Jon D. Levy, Justice Andrew M. Mead and Justice Ellen A. Gorman joined the opinion.

“Accordingly, today we announce a change in the parties’ burdens at the preliminary anti-SLAPP dismissal stage,” Justice Alexander wrote.

Under the new standard, the Law Court ruled that the lawsuit filed by Nader and his electors “should be allowed to proceed,” unless they are unable to show that “any, rather than all,” of the Democrats’ litigation against the Nader-Camejo 2004 presidential campaign was “devoid of any reasonable factual support or arguable basis in law.”

Maine’s anti-SLAPP statute was enacted in 1995, with the intention of protecting activists who are sued by real estate developers for speaking out against proposed projects (such actions are known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation). Typical SLAPP suits have no merit and are filed for improper purposes, such as imposing litigation costs – which, as defendant Toby Moffett admitted, was a primary purpose of the litigation that Democrats initiated against Nader’s 2004 independent presidential campaign with the late Peter Miguel Camejo.

In a concurring opinion joined by Justice Joseph M. Jabar, Justice Warren M. Silver wrote that the anti-SLAPP statute had been “used by different parties than those intended,” and that it had “served an entirely different purpose than the one intended.”

“The ‘Goliath’ who abuses other forms of petitioning to harass ‘David’ has now adopted the [anti-SLAPP statute] as another obstacle to throw in David’s path when he legitimately seeks to petition the court for redress,” Justice Silver wrote.

The lawsuit alleges that Democrats orchestrated a concerted, nationwide effort to interfere with the Nader-Camejo campaign, by filing 29 complaints in 19 states, including Maine, and that many of the complaints included groundless and demonstrably false allegations of fraud. According to Moffett, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist who helped recruit an estimated 95 lawyers from 53 law firms to join the effort, the purpose of the Democrats’ complaints was to “drain,” “distract” and “neutralize” the Nader-Camejo campaign, by “forcing [them] to spend money and resources defending these things.”

Other defendants named in the lawsuit include the Maine Democratic Party, its former Chair Dorothy Melanson, the Democratic National Committee, its former Chair Terry McAuliffe, the Kerry-Edwards 2004 campaign and a Section 527 political organization called The Ballot Project headed by Moffett.

As a result of the Law Court’s decision, the lawsuit will be remanded to the Superior Court for Washington County for further proceedings.

The Law Court also vacated a lower court order awarding Moffet $1 in attorneys’ fees.

Copies of the Law Court’s opinion are available by emailing oliverbhall@gmail.com.

Ralph Nader on Third Parties vs Least Worsts

As part of a discussion during the annual Nation Magazine Cruise Ralph Nader describes the peril if voters continue to vote for the least worst Presidential Candidate against third party candidates because they fear the best candidate won't win the election.

The Corporate Elite are Standing Dead Wood

I don't know if you've ever been in an area of old growth forest, but often you'll come across a stand of trees that look like they are solid, but they are totally dead and rotten. They are filled with termite poop and dust, and even though they may be 6 feet around, a gentle nudge is enough to send them crumbling into piles of dust.

Ralph Nader at Freedom Plaza

Things You'll Never Hear a Republican Say

Meet the Patriotic Millionaires

From the Daily Caller:

H/T to Daniel McCann

The Patriotic Millionaires, a group of millionaires who believe that government should increase the tax rate for millionaires, released a video calling on congress to raise their taxes.

The group, organized by The Agenda Project, seeks to end the Bush Tax Cuts that Obama extended last year, saying that it is unfair to give tax cuts to people in the highest income bracket.

“You decided our country needed less money, and millionaires like me needed more,” says the script of the video, read by a series of millionaires who signed the original petition.

“Less money for roads to transfer our products, for high speed internet to build our technology companies, for science research, education, for universities, and research to spark our innovation,” they say.

“Rich people are not the cause of a robust economy, they’re the result of a robust economy,” one says.

A series of millionaires explain how the government, or government funded entities like public schools, have contributed to their success.

“Tax me,” one concludes, “because my country, our country, means more than my money.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that Ralph Nader is behind this. Why? This is straight out of his book, "Only the Super Rich Can Save Us!" The name, and everything. If you haven't yet, pick up a copy.

How Socialists Built America

"If universal building codes and health protections for children can be successfully depicted by our debased media as assaults on American values and the rule of law, then the right has already won, no matter what the result is on election day."

by John Nichols
This article is adapted from The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism, published in March by Verso.
 
If there’s one constant in the elite national discourse of the moment, it is the claim that America was founded as a capitalist country and that socialism is a dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarranted faith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This most conventional “wisdom”—increasingly accepted at least until the recent grassroots mobilizations in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Maine—has held that everything public is inferior to everything private, that corporations are always good and unions always bad, that progressive taxation is inherently evil and that the best economic model is the one that allows the wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic as they choose before anything trickles down to the great mass of Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose of providing healthcare for kids and jobs for the unemployed are “antithetical” to the nation’s original intent and that Barack Obama’s reforms are “destroying this country as it was founded."

When Obama offered tepid proposals to organize a private healthcare system in a more humane manner, Sean Hannity of Fox charged that “the Constitution was shredded, thwarted, the rule of law was passed aside.” Newt Gingrich said the Obama administration was “prepared to fundamentally violate the Constitution” and was playing to the “30 percent of the country [that] really is [in favor of] a left-wing secular socialist system.”

In 2009 Sarah Palin raised similar constitutional concerns, about Obama’s proposal to develop a system of “universal energy building codes” to promote energy efficiency. “Our country could evolve into something that we do not even recognize, certainly that is so far from what the founders of our country had in mind for us,” a gravely concerned Palin informed Hannity, who responded with a one-word question. “Socialism?”

“Well,” she said, “that is where we are headed.”

Actually, it’s not. Palin is wrong about the perils of energy efficiency, and she’s wrong about Obama. The president says he’s not a socialist, and the country’s most outspoken socialists heartily agree. Indeed, the only people who seem to think Obama displays even the slightest social democratic tendency are those who imagine that the very mention of the word “socialism” should inspire a reaction like that of a vampire confronted with the Host.

Unfortunately, Obama may be more frightened by the S-word than Palin. When a New York Times reporter asked the president in March 2009 whether his domestic policies suggested he was a socialist, a relaxed Obama replied, “The answer would be no.” He said he was being criticized simply because he was “making some very tough choices” on the budget. But after he talked with his hyper-cautious counselors, he began to worry. So he called the reporter back and said, “It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question.” Then, as if reading from talking points, Obama declared, “It wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement, the prescription drug plan, without a source of funding.

“We’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles,” said Obama, who concluded with the kicker, “Some of the same folks who are throwing the word ‘socialist’ around can’t say the same.”

There’s more than a kernel of truth to this statement. Obama really is avoiding consideration of socialist, or even mildly social democratic, responses to the problems that confront him. He took the single-payer option off the table at the start of the healthcare debate, rejecting the approach that in other countries has provided quality care to all citizens at lower cost. His supposedly “socialist” response to the collapse of the auto industry was to give tens of billions in bailout funding to GM and Chrysler, which used the money to lay off thousands of workers and then relocate several dozen plants abroad—an approach about as far as a country can get from the social democratic model of using public investment and industrial policy to promote job creation and community renewal. And when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded, threatening the entire Gulf Coast, instead of putting the Army Corps of Engineers and other government agencies in charge of the crisis, Obama left it to the corporation that had lied about the extent of the spill, had made decisions based on its bottom line rather than environmental and human needs, and had failed at even the most basic tasks.

So we should take the president at his word when he says he’s acting on free-market principles. The problem, of course, is that Obama’s rigidity in this regard is leading him to dismiss ideas that are often sounder than private-sector fixes. Borrowing ideas and approaches from socialists would not make Obama any more of a socialist than Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower. All these presidential predecessors sampled ideas from Marxist tracts or borrowed from Socialist Party platforms so frequently that the New York Times noted in a 1954 profile the faith of an aging Norman Thomas that he “had made a great contribution in pioneering ideas that have now won the support of both major parties”—ideas like “Social Security, public housing, public power developments, legal protection for collective bargaining and other attributes of the welfare state.” The fact is that many of the men who occupied the Oval Office before Obama knew that implementation of sound socialist or social democratic ideas did not put them at odds with the American experiment or the Constitution.

The point here is not to defend socialism. What we should be defending is history—American history, with its rich and vibrant hues, some of them red. The past should be consulted not merely for anecdotes or factoids but for perspective on the present. Such a perspective empowers Americans who seek a robust debate, one that samples from a broad ideological spectrum—an appropriate endeavor in a country where Tom Paine imagined citizens who, “by casting their eye over a large field, take in likewise a large intellectual circuit, and thus approaching nearer to an acquaintance with the universe, their atmosphere of thought is extended, and their liberality fills a wider space.”

America has always suffered fools who would have us dwindle the debate down to a range of opinions narrow enough to contain the edicts of a potentate, a priest or a plantation boss. But the real history of America tells us that the unique thing about our present situation is that we have suffered the fools so thoroughly that a good many Americans—not just Tea Partisans or Limbaugh Dittoheads but citizens of the great middle—actually take Sarah Palin seriously when she rants that socialism, in the form of building codes, is antithetical to Americanism.

* * *

Palin is not the first of her kind. There’s nothing new about the charge that a president who is guiding “big government” toward projects other than the invasion of distant lands is a socialist. In the spring of 2009, just months after Obama and a new Democratic Congress took office, twenty-three members of the opposition renewed an old project when they proposed that “we the members of the Republican National Committee call on the Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the American people by acknowledging that they have evolved from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename themselves the Democrat Socialist Party.”

Cooler heads prevailed. Sort of. At an emergency meeting of the committee—which traces its history to the first Republican convention in 1856, where followers of French socialist Charles Fourier, Karl Marx’s editor, and their abolitionist comrades initiated the most radical restructuring of political parties in American history—it was suggested that the proposal to impose a new name on the Democrats might make “the Republican party appear trite and overly partisan.” The plan was dropped, but a resolution decrying the “march towards socialism” was passed. Thus, the RNC members now officially “recognize that the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals” and that the Democrats have as their “clear and obvious purpose…proposing, passing and implementing socialist programs through federal legislation.”

The Republican Party is currently firmer in its accusation that the Democrats are steering the nation “towards socialism” than it was during Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s, when the senator from Wisconsin was accusing Harry Truman of harboring Communist Party cells in the government. Truman had stirred conservative outrage by arguing that the government had the authority to impose anti-lynching laws on the states and by proposing a national healthcare plan. But what really bugged the Republicans was that Truman, who had been expected to lose in 1948, had not just won the election but restored Democratic control of Congress. To counter this ominous electoral trend, conservative Republicans, led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, announced in 1950 that their campaign slogan in that year’s Congressional elections would be “Liberty Against Socialism.” They then produced an addendum to their national platform, much of which was devoted to a McCarthyite rant charging that Truman’s Fair Deal “is dictated by a small but powerful group of persons who believe in socialism, who have no concept of the true foundation of American progress, and whose proposals are wholly out of accord with the true interests and real wishes of the workers, farmers and businessmen."

Truman fought back, reminding Republicans that his policies were outlined in the 1948 Democratic platform, which had proven to be wildly popular with the electorate. “If our program was dictated, as the Republicans say, it was dictated at the polls in November 1948. It was dictated by a ‘small but powerful group’ of 24 million voters,” said the president, who added, “I think they knew more than the Republican National Committee about the real wishes of the workers, farmers and businessmen.”

Truman did not cower at the mention of the word “socialism,” which in those days was distinguished in the minds of most Americans from Soviet Stalinism, with which the president—a mean cold warrior—was wrangling. Nor did Truman, who counted among his essential allies trade unionists like David Dubinsky, Jacob Potofsky and Walter Reuther, all of whom had been connected with socialist causes and in many cases the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, rave about the evils of social democracy. Rather, he joked that “Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, ‘socialism.’”

Savvy Republicans moved to abandon the campaign. The return to realism was led by Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who feared that her party was harming not just its electoral prospects but the country. That summer she would issue her “Declaration of Conscience”—the first serious challenge to McCarthyism from within the GOP—in which she rejected the anticommunist hysteria of the moment:

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism—

The right to criticize;
The right to hold unpopular beliefs;
The right to protest;
The right of independent thought.
Republicans might be determined to end Democratic control of Congress, Smith suggested in her declaration:

Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.
   I doubt if the Republican Party could—simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest.
Most Republicans lacked the courage to confront McCarthy so directly. But Smith’s wisdom prevailed among leaders of the RNC and the GOP chairs of Congressional committees, who ditched the Liberty Against Socialism slogan and reduced Taft’s 1,950-word manifesto to a 99-word digest that Washington reporters explained had been cobbled together to “soft pedal” the whole “showdown on ‘liberty against socialism’” thing. Representative James Fulton, who like many other GOP moderates of the day actually knew and worked with Socialist Party members and radicals of various stripes, was blunter. The cheap sloganeering, he argued, had steered the party away from the fundamental question for the GOP in the postwar era: “whether we go back to Methuselah or offer alternative programs for social progress within the framework of a balanced budget.”

Imagine if today a prominent Republican were to make a similar statement. The wrath of Limbaugh, Hannity, Palin and the Tea Party movement would rain down upon him. The Club for Growth would organize to defeat the “Republican in Name Only,” and the ideological cleansing of the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Margaret Chase Smith would accelerate. Some of my Democratic friends are quite pleased at the prospect; as today’s Republicans steer off the cliffs of extremism that they avoided even in the days of McCarthy, these Democrats suggest, the high ground will be cleared for candidates of their liking. But that neglects the damage done to democracy when discourse degenerates, when the only real fights are between a party on the fringe and another that assumes that the way to win is to move to the center-right and then hope that fears of a totalitarian right will keep everyone to the left of it voting the Democratic line.

* * *

If universal building codes and health protections for children can be successfully depicted by our debased media as assaults on American values and the rule of law, then the right has already won, no matter what the result is on election day. And a nation founded in revolt against empire, a nation that nurtured the radical Republican response to the sin of slavery, a nation that confronted economic collapse and injustice with a New Deal and a War on Poverty, a nation that spawned a civil rights movement and that still recites a Pledge of Allegiance (penned in 1892 by Christian socialist Francis Bellamy) to the ideal of an America “with liberty and justice for all” is bereft of what has so often in our history been the essential element of progress.

That element—a social democratic critique frequently combined with an active Socialist Party and more recently linked with independent socialist activism in labor and equal rights campaigns for women, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities—has from the first years of the nation been a part of our political life. This country would not be what it is today—indeed it might not even be—had it not been for the positive influence of revolutionaries, radicals, socialists, social democrats and their fellow travelers. The great political scientist Terence Ball reminds us that “at the height of the cold war a limited form of socialized medicine—Medicare—got through the Congress over the objections of the American Medical Association and the insurance industry, and made it to President Johnson’s desk.”

That did not just happen by chance. A young writer who had recognized that it was possible to reject Soviet totalitarianism while still learning from Marx and embracing democratic socialism left the fold of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement to join the Young People’s Socialist League. Michael Harrington wanted to change the debate about poverty in America, and perhaps remarkably or perhaps presciently, he presumed that attaching himself to what was left of the once muscular but at that point ailing Socialist Party was the way to do so. In a 1959 article for the then-liberal Commentary magazine, Harrington sought, in the words of his biographer, Maurice Isserman, “to overturn the conventional wisdom that the United States had become an overwhelmingly middle-class society. Using the poverty-line benchmark of a $3,000 annual income for a family of four, he demonstrated that nearly a third of the population lived ‘below those standards which we have been taught to regard as the decent minimums for food, housing, clothing and health.’”

Harrington succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The article led to a book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which became required reading for policy-makers, selling 70,000 copies in its first year. “Among the book’s readers, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who in the fall of 1963 began thinking about proposing antipoverty legislation,” recalls Isserman. “After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson took up the issue, calling in his 1964 State of the Union address for an ‘unconditional war on poverty.’ Sargent Shriver headed the task force charged with drawing up the legislation and invited Harrington to Washington as a consultant.”

Harrington’s proposals for renewal of New Deal public works projects were never fully embraced. But his and others’ advocacy that government should intervene to address the suffering of those who couldn’t care for themselves or their families underpinned what the author described as “completing Social Security” by providing healthcare for the aged. It urged on the Johnson administration’s Great Society, including the Social Security Act of 1965—or Medicare. Johnson took his hits, but Americans agreed with their president when he argued that “the Social Security health insurance plan, which President Kennedy worked so hard to enact, is the American way; it is practical; it is sensible; it is fair; it is just.”

Could a plan decried as “socialized medicine” by the American Medical Association because it was, in fact, socialized medicine really be “the American way”? Of course. During the Medicare debate in the early ’60s, Texas Senate candidate George H.W. Bush condemned the proposal as “creeping socialism.” Ronald Reagan, then making the transition from TV pitchman for products to TV pitchman for Barry Goldwater, warned that if it passed citizens would find themselves “telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” But Bush and Reagan managed the program during their presidencies, and Tea Party activists now show up at town hall meetings to threaten any legislator who would dare to tinker with their beloved Medicare.

Americans would not have gotten Medicare if Harrington and the socialists who came before him—from presidential candidates like Debs and Thomas to organizers like Mary Marcy and Margaret Sanger and the Communist Party’s Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—had not for decades been pushing the limits of the healthcare debate. No less a player than Senator Edward Kennedy would declare, “I see Michael Harrington as delivering the Sermon on the Mount to America.” The same was true in abolitionist days, when socialists—including friends of Marx who had immigrated to the United States after the 1848 revolutions in Europe were crushed—energized the movement against slavery and helped give it political expression in the form of the Republican Party. The same was true early in the twentieth century, when Socialist Party editors like Victor Berger battled attempts to destroy civil liberties and defined our modern understanding of freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to petition for redress of grievances. The same was true when lifelong socialist A. Philip Randolph called the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and asked a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., who had many socialist counselors besides the venerable Randolph, to deliver what would come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech.

* * *

Again and again at critical junctures in our national journey, socialist thinkers and organizers, as well as candidates and officials, have prodded government in a progressive direction. It may be true, as historian Patrick Allitt suggests, that “millions of Americans, including many of these critics [of the Obama administration], are ardent supporters of socialism, even if they don’t realize it and even if they don’t actually use the word” to describe public services that are “organized along socialist lines,” like schools and highways. In fact, contemporary socialists and Tea Partiers might actually find common (if uncomfortable) ground with Allitt’s assertion that “socialism as an organizational principle is alive and well here just as it is throughout the industrialized world”—even as they would disagree on whether that’s a good thing. Programs “organized along socialist lines” do not make a country socialist. But America has always been and should continue to be informed by socialist ideals and a socialist critique of public policy.

We live in complex times, when profound economic, social and environmental challenges demand a range of responses. Socialists certainly don’t have all the answers, even if polling suggests that more Americans find appeal in the word “socialist” today than they have in decades. But without socialist ideas and advocacy, we will not have sufficient counterbalance to an anti-government impulse that has less to do with libertarianism than with manipulation of the debate by all-powerful corporations.

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were not socialists. But the nation benefited from their borrowing of socialist and social democratic ideas. Barack Obama is certainly not a socialist. But he, and the nation he leads, would be well served by a similar borrowing from the people who once imagined Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the War on Poverty.

© 2011 The Nation

Taking Progressives For Granted

Why allowing the Democratic Party to take your vote for granted gives them impunity to act like GOP douche-bags.

Originally from Nader.org

Article by Ralph Nader

When liberals and progressives have nowhere to go, New York’s new Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo can move toward the corporatist-right of the political spectrum with impunity. Brandishing an inherited $10 billion state deficit, Cuomo has earned the following description in the April 7th edition of The New York Times:

“He has clashed with unions, who he believes have helped drive the state toward bankruptcy. He has been praised by prominent conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rudolph W. Giuliani. And he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign money from the New York billionaire David H. Koch, who with his family has helped finance the Tea Party movement….

“The man who began public life advocating for homeless people won passage of a state budget that makes steep cuts to schools, health care and social services. In a year when Wall Street posted record profits, Mr. Cuomo finally rejected a politically popular income tax surcharge on the wealthy.”

Praised by the Wall Street Journal and the republican raptor, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who calls Andrew Cuomo “my soul mate,” the son of moral vision orator, former Governor Mario Cuomo, is on a roll unchallenged by his fellow Democrats and the media. Using the deficit—which is far less per capita than Connecticut’s deficit—he revels in being “Cuomo the cutter”: “I am a realist… Forget the philosophy. Here are the numbers.”

Mr. Cuomo picks his numbers so that the cuts fall on the lower economic classes, the powerless along with the reviled public employee unions. Granted, there is waste fraud or ineffectiveness in many social service programs, but Governor Cuomo is cutting the programs indiscriminately without cutting them by squeezing out the waste and eliminating ineffective programs directly.

What results is that the wasteful practitioners know how to fight to preserve their programs better than the efficient ones do. The former have allies like well-connected corporate vendors with their procurement contracts.

But there is a more blatant misfocus by Cuomo. It is his fear of Wall Street whose crooks, speculators and self-enrichment pros collapsed the economy, looting or draining savings and pensions in 2008-2009 leading to much unemployment and many closed businesses that, through the loss of tax revenue, expanded the state deficit. He refuses even to speak about holding these spoiled, back-to-business-as-usual financial giants responsible.

On the contrary he is rejecting an extension of the tax surcharge on New Yorkers and residing foreigners who make over $200,000 dollars in income a year, which expires this December. It is so much easier to tax the faceless masses. Already, lower income New Yorkers pay a slightly higher percentage of their income in all taxes imposed than do the wealthy. Regressive!

It gets worse. During his campaign for Governor, Mr. Cuomo refused to even contemplate keeping the $14 billion (some estimate higher amounts) a year that the state collects from a century-old stock transfer tax, but instantly rebates, what is really a sales tax, back to the stock brokers. New York used to keep this tax revenue until the early Eighties, when Wall Street pressure finally prevailed. Green Party candidate for Governor, Howie Hawkins, during a public debate argued that keeping these revenues would eliminate the deficit and prevent the reduction of necessary programs. On that stage, Mr. Cuomo refused to engage. Mum’s the word on Wall Street’s fair share.

Cuomo calls himself “a progressive Democrat who’s broke.” A progressive Democrat would push for sacrifice at the wealthy top and work down if necessary. Many of the wealthy derived their billions and millions from many favored policies like tax leniency and other privileges and immunities including violation of the law (some of whom Cuomo pursued as Attorney General.)

After all corporate lobbyists work hard to produce many layers of favoritism, including selling products and services to the state government, that are as profitable as they are often wasteful. Consider, for example, the immense gouging in the outsourcing of CityTime—a large ongoing contract to computerize the New York City payroll (http://www.nyc.gov/html/opa/html/about/city_time.shtml).

The costs of health care reflect big time fraud in billing practices. Should a Governor just cut benefits across the board—stranding indigent patients to suffer or die—or should he crack down on the cheating and stealing that too many vendors have refined to perfection?

To be sure it is quicker to slice arbitrarily, but there is no indication that key cost-beneficial law enforcement budgets against business crime are going to increase on Governor Cuomo’s watch.

Mr. Cuomo did relent on one budget provision, which would have enriched the hospital and insurance lobbies placing a lifetime $250,000 cap on serious baby injuries from malpractice. That was too much to defend by this “progressive Democrat” in Albany. Credit the Center for Justice and Democracy for urging that good deed (www.centerjd.org).

How far will elected Democrats from the White House on down go in capitulating to the insatiable corporate dominators if their liberal/progressive base continues to signal that they politically have nowhere to go? These voters seem to have few visible breaking points on the dark horizon of over-reaching corporatism.

Jim HIghtower: STOP PISSING ON WORKING PEOPLE

I <3 Jim Hightower. He's got such a way with words!

The Story of Citizens United vs FEC released TODAY

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

Tuesday evening (tonight) there are two live webinar events - one at 7pm Eastern, another at 7pm Pacific - with Annie Leonard of the Story of Stuff Project and Rob Weismann, President of Public Citizen.

To participate in one of the live webinar events, please register beforehand at one of the links below to get set up.

For the 7pm EST webinar visit:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/665275368
For the 7pm PST webinar visit:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/472298832>https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/472298832

You'll be able to watch and listen to the event on your computer (and even pose questions to the speakers), or, you can use the phone number provided to listen to the webinar on speaker phone if that is preferable.

Action Toolkit

Finally, if you need sample letters, a copy of the petition, ideas for how to organize locally and more, you'll find them all in Public Citizen's Action Toolkit. You can download a copy of the toolkit HERE. Look for "Action Toolkit" in the PDF section.

And make sure to post your event on map at http://bit.ly/SoCUparties.

TAKE ACTION NOW
Click here for a whole list of things you can do:
http://storyofstuff.org/citizensunited/what-you-can-do/

MAD AS HELL IN MADISON by Ralph Nader

VIA Dandelion Salad

by Ralph Nader
The Nader Page
February 25. 2011

The large demonstrations at the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin are driven by a middle class awakening to the spectre of its destruction by the corporate reactionaries and their toady Governor Scott Walker.

For years the middle class has watched the plutocrats stomp on the poor while listening to the two parties regale the great middle class, but never mentioning the tens of millions of poor Americans. And for years, the middle class was shrinking due significantly to corporate globalization shipping good-paying jobs overseas to repressive dictatorships like China. It took Governor Walker’s legislative proposal to do away with most collective bargaining rights for most public employee unions to jolt people to hit the streets.

Republicans take rigged elections awash in corporatist campaign cash seriously. When they win, they aggressively move their corporate agenda, unlike the wishy-washy Democrats who flutter weakly after a victory. Republicans mean business. A ram rod wins against a straw all the time.

Governor Walker won his election, along with other Republicans in Wisconsin, on mass-media driven Tea Party rhetoric. His platform was deceitful enough to get the endorsement of the police, and firefighters unions, which the latter have now indignantly withdrawn.

These unions should have known better. The Walker Republicans were following the Reagan playbook. The air traffic controllers union endorsed Reagan in 1980. The next year he fired 12,000 of them during a labor dispute. (This made flying unnecessarily dangerous.)

Then Reagan pushed for tax cuts—primarily for the wealthy—which led to larger deficits to turn the screws on programs benefitting the people. Reagan, though years earlier opposed to corporate welfare, not only maintained these taxpayer subsidies but created a government deficit, over eight years, that was double that of all the accumulated deficits from George Washington to Jimmy Carter.

Maybe the unions that endorsed Walker will soon realize that not even being a “Reagan Democrat” will save them from being losers under the boot of the corporate supremacists.

The rumble of the people in Madison illustrates the following:

1. There is an ideological plan driving these corporatists. They create “useful crisis” and then hammer the unorganized people to benefit the wealthy classes. Governor Walker last year gave $140 million in tax breaks to corporations which produced the $137 million deficit for this fiscal year. Note this oft-repeated dynamic. President Obama caved to the Minority party Republicans in Congress last December by going along with the deficit-deepening extension of the huge dollar volume tax cuts for the rich. Now the Republicans want drastic cuts in programs that help the poor.

2. Whatever non-union or private union workers (who are giving ground or losing jobs) think of the sometimes better pay and benefits of unionized public employees, they need to close ranks without giving up their opposition to government waste. For corporate lobbyists and their corporate governments are going after all collective bargaining rights for all workers and they want to further weaken The National Labor Relations Board.

3. Whenever corporations and government want to cut workers’ incomes; the corporate tax abatements, bloated contracts, handouts and bailouts should be pulled into the public debate. What should go first?

4. For the public university students in these rallies, they might ponder their own tuition bills and high interest loans, compared to students in Western Europe, and question why they have to bear the burden of massive corporate welfare payouts—foodstamps for the rich. What should go first?

5. The bigger picture should be part of the more localized dispute. Governor Walker also wants weaker safety and environmental regulations, bargain-basement sell-outs of state public power plants and other taxpayer assets.

6. The mega-billionaire Koch brothers are in the news. They are bankrolling politicians and rump advocacy groups and funding media campaigns in Wisconsin and all over the country. Koch Industries designs and builds facilities for the natural gas industry. Neither the company nor the brothers like the publicity they deserve to get every time their role is exposed. Always put the spotlight on the backroom boys.

7. Focusing on the larger struggle between the people and the plutocracy should be part and parcel of every march, demonstration or any other kind of mass mobilization. The signs at the Madison rallies make the point, to wit—“2/3 of Wisconsin Corporations Pay No Taxes,” “Why Should Public Workers Pay For Wall Street’s Mess?”, “Corporate Greed Did the Deed.”

8. Look how little energy it took for these tens of thousands of people to sound the national alarm for hard-pressed Americans. Just showing up is democracy’s barn raiser. This should persuade people that a big start for a better America can begin with a little effort and a well-attended rally. Imagine what even more civic energy could produce!

Showing up lets people feel their potential power to subordinate corporatism to the sovereignty of the people. After all, the Constitution’s preamble begins with “We the People,” not “We the Corporations.” In fact, the founders never put the word “corporation” or “company” in our constitution which was designed for real people.

As for Governor Walker’s projected two-year $3.6 billion deficit, read what Jon Peacock of the respected nonprofit Wisconsin Budget Project writes at: http://www.wisconsinbudgetproject.org about how to handle the state budget without adopting the draconian measures now before the legislature.

If you're never willing to lose, you're never going to win

Ralph Nader discussing a possible run in 2012 for president.
When he discusses all the bullshit that third party candidates have to go through just to get on the ballot, he seems pissy. But, I don't blame him. I feel pretty pissy myself. It's kind of like how in Egypt other parties are allowed to run, except they are disqualified for technical reasons.

Ralph Nader files suit against Maine Democratic Party in Machias Superior Court

Hearing on August 6, 2010 Will Determine Whether Lawsuit Alleging Unlawful Democratic Party Effort to Bankrupt Nader-Camejo Campaign and Suppress Voter Choice in 2004 Presidential Election Can Proceed.

MACHIAS, ME – On August 6, 2010 at 2 PM, Machias Superior Court Justice Kevin M. Cuddy will hear oral argument in Nader, et al. v. Maine Democratic Party, et al., No. 2009-cv-57, the lawsuit filed by consumer advocate and 2004 Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and his Maine presidential electors, which alleges that the Maine Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee ("DNC") and others unlawfully attempted to bankrupt, sabotage and otherwise damage the Nader-Camejo Campaign, in an effort to deny voters the choice of voting for Nader and his running mate, the late Peter Miguel Camejo, during the 2004 presidential election.

The lawsuit charges the defendants with civil conspiracy, abuse of process and malicious prosecution. Abuse of process is an intentional tort that occurs when a party misuses legal processes, such as the subpoena process, for an improper purpose. Malicious prosecution arises when a party files a lawsuit without probable cause.

Democrats and their allies filed 29 complaints against the Nader-Camejo Campaign in 18 state courts and the Federal Election Commission ("FEC") during the 2004 presidential election. The state court complaints challenged the validity of Nader-Camejo nomination petitions, but the Democrats’ true purpose, Nader and his co-plaintiffs allege, was to tie up the Nader-Camejo Campaign in court, drain its resources, and smear the Independent candidates with false allegations of fraud.

"We had a role in the ballot challenges," defendant Toby Moffett told The Guardian UK in December 2004. "We distracted him and drained him of resources. I’d be less than honest if I said it was all about the law."

Moffett was president of a Section 527 political organization called The Ballot Project, which helped coordinate and finance the Democrats’ nationwide litigation against the Nader-Camejo Campaign. The goal of the litigation, Moffett said, was "to drain [Nader] of resources and force him to spend his time and money."

"The Democratic Party is going after anyone who presents a credible challenge to their monopoly over their perceived voters," Nader said. "This lawsuit was filed to advance a free and open electoral process for all candidates and voters. Candidates’ rights reinforce voters’ rights, by giving voters more voices and choices, for a more open and competitive democracy, in which the people, rather than private political parties, determine who our elected leaders will be."

Nader’s co-plaintiffs in the case are Christopher Droznick, Nancy Oden and Rosemary Whittaker, each of whom served as a Maine elector to the Nader-Camejo Campaign.

"The Democratic Party is afraid to allow citizens a genuine choice," Oden said. "Hence, their attempts to keep Nader off state ballots and out of the national presidential debates in 2004."

Oden and other Nader-Camejo electors were subpoenaed in connection with the Democrats’ Maine challenge.
Democrats and their allies filed two complaints against the Nader-Camejo Campaign in Maine, including one complaint filed by Dorothy Melanson, who was then-Chair of the Maine Democratic Party. Melanson admitted under oath that the DNC had retained her law firm and was paying her attorneys’ fees. At the time, DNC officials denied that the DNC was funding the Democrats’ litigation against the Nader-Camejo Campaign. Campaign finance reports now on file with the FEC confirm that the DNC hired several more law firms that sued the Nader-Camejo Campaign in other states.

At least 95 lawyers from 53 law firms nationwide joined the Democrats’ litigation against the Nader-Camejo Campaign. The Nader-Camejo Campaign prevailed in the great majority of state court challenges and in all five complaints filed with the FEC, but at great cost in time, money and other campaign resources. Further, Democrats’ false charges of fraud against the Nader-Camejo Campaign were widely reported in the news media.

Maine elections officials, the Maine Superior Court and the Maine Supreme Judicial Court unanimously concluded that the Democrats failed to provide any evidence to support their allegations of fraud against the Nader-Camejo Campaign. Democrats made similarly groundless allegations in several other states, none of which were proved.

"During the 19th century when ballot access standards were far less onerous, many small parties and independent candidates were able to pioneer reforms opposed to slavery, for a woman’s right to vote, for regulatory restraints on the abuses of industry and commerce, and for improved conditions for workers and farmers," Nader said. "Today’s vastly more burdensome, intricate and discriminatory ballot access barriers in many state laws, enacted by the two party duopoly, have enabled the anti-democratic forces of the Democratic Party to flourish."

Nader and his co-plaintiffs seek compensatory damages and punitive damages. Bar Harbor attorney Lynne Williams is the plaintiffs’ local counsel.

"This case is part of a long struggle to protect voter rights by ensuring that all candidates have an equal right to access the ballot," Williams said. "The Democratic Party’s effort to suppress voter choice in the 2004 presidential election went far beyond the usual dirty tricks, and we are looking forward to proving our case to a jury."

In June 2009, the federal court of appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that a similar lawsuit filed by Nader and his voter-supporters raised "interesting legal issues of first impression," but held that the District of Columbia’s three-year statute of limitations barred D.C. Courts from hearing the case. The D.C. Circuit did not hear evidence or rule on the merits of the case.
"We have the evidence to prove our claims, but we have never had the chance to present it to a jury," Nader said. "We are still pursuing our basic right to do that in this case."
Maine’s statute of limitations is six years.

For Immediate Release: August 3, 2006
Contact: Oliver Hall - (617) 953-0161

Politics and Ethics: What does it mean to be free?

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[VIDEO] We Need Citizen Reform

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Ralph Nader and Judge Napolitano on C-SPAN

View the entire program here:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/id/225457

Unfortunately, the C-SPAN isn't allowing this to be embedded, so you have to watch it over on their site.