A Gentleman’s view.

Auction 2012: How The Bank Lobby Owns Washington

When Washington puts policy on the auction block, bankers are consistently the highest bidders.

The industry’s most striking victory has been the watering down of post-financial crisis reforms, to the point that banks are now bigger than ever and the bonuses keep flowing. But Wall Street’s campaign spending and lobbying power is so intimidating that banks have repeatedly stuck the public with the tab for their losses and no one in Washington stops them.

Why hasn’t the government done something about outrageous ATM fees? Or credit card interest rates up to 30 percent? Bankers’ clout is such that common-sense pro-consumer legislation is presumptively dead on arrival at Capitol Hill if it threatens banks’ revenue streams.

An epic recent battle between consumers and Wall Street was fought over a congressional proposal to give bankruptcy judges the legal authority to modify principal balances on mortgages in a way that is fair to both parties. Known as “cramdown,” it would have allowed more than a million ordinary Americans to keep their homes. But because it would have leveled the playing field between banks and debtors — and would have forced banks to officially recognize losses they don’t want to acknowledge — the financial services industry fought cramdown with everything it had.

In May 2009, toward the end of his futile battle for cramdown, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) famously told a radio host, “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

Consider the numbers: The finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector combined to spend $6.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions from 1998 through 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ examination of public records. That’s $1 billion more than any other sector spent on Washington.

A recent study by the Sunlight Foundation found that individuals within the FIRE sector were head and shoulders above those in other industries in making large campaign contributions.

Big banks’ undisclosed contributions also underwrite powerful trade groups like the American Bankers Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

And more than half of the lobbyists working for the FIRE sector are ex-government officials — in many cases, onetime lawmakers and staffers who helped write laws that deregulated the industry. When in need, the banks can call on the firepower of former Senate leaders like Phil Gramm, Trent Lott and Bob Dole and former House leaders like Dennis Hastert, Dick Armey and Dick Gephardt.

CONSUMERS LOSE

Despite widespread public support, an attempt by Durbin and firebrand Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to cap interest rates on credit cards in 2009 was doomed by industry opposition.

Starting in February of that year, reports emerged that millions of cardholders were being told their interest rates would go up — in some cases to 30 percent — if they missed even one payment. Then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) concluded that lenders were “gouging” customers to make up for losses. Readers told The Huffington Post their stories of woe.

By April, the backlash on Capitol Hill led Sanders to propose an interest rate cap of 15 percent. “We both want to reinstitute the notion of a usury law for the United States,” Durbin told HuffPost’s Ryan Grim.

The New York Times in May declared the bill a shoo-in. “Lawmakers say the industry’s time has come,” wrote reporter Carl Hulse. And President Barack Obama’s rousing May 14 town hall meeting excoriating the credit card companies played well in Albuquerque, N.M.

But that very same day, the Sanders amendment died in the Senate with only 33 votes. It needed 60.

The Times somberly explained, “The banking industry, which had some heavyweight representatives monitoring the vote, warned that an interest rate limit could cause a sour reaction in the financial markets.”

A year later, in May 2010, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) introduced an amendment that would have allowed individual states to cap credit card interest rates. The goal was to close a federal loophole that permitted credit card companies to headquarter in states with looser rules, like South Dakota and Delaware, and charge whatever they wanted to charge nationwide.

That proposal was defeated by a 60-35 vote.

Also in May 2010, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) launched a campaign to cap ATM transaction fees. Noting that ATM fees average $2.50 and can run as high as $5 — while the real cost of processing a transaction is about 35 cents — Harkin proposed to cap fees at 50 cents. “The burden falls more heavily on low-income and moderate-income people,” he noted. “That is grossly unfair.”

Banks opposed the idea, arguing that capping fees would just lead to fewer cash machines, including those owned by banks.

Harkin couldn’t even get a floor vote. Two weeks after he first put forth his proposed amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, he took to the Senate floor and asked to be heard. It was his own party chief, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who denied his request — because the Republicans hadn’t agreed to it.

“What kind of games are being played around here?” Harkin asked the Senate chamber. “I’ve had this amendment pending ever since the beginning. And I have not been allowed to bring it up.”

BANKS GET THEIR WAY

So what explains the banks’ ability time and again to kill bills that threaten their bottom line?

Georgetown Law School professor Adam Levitin, who closely followed the cramdown debate, observes that banks push all the levers in Washington.

“They make an awful lot of campaign contributions,” said Levitin. That “would be number one. They aren’t making those just out of the goodness of their heart. They’re hoping that it gets them some influence. It certainly gets them an audience at the very least.”

Then there are the “army of lobbyists,” Levitin said. “I think it’s hard for your average citizen to understand the intensity of lobbying of both people on the Hill and in government agencies.”

Alongside the professional lobbyists come actual bankers — but not necessarily the Wall Street crowd, even though they have the most at stake. The financial industry brings in local bankers, often from the lawmakers’ own districts.

“The banks that really had the big portfolios were not the face of the opposition,” recalled Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who championed cramdown on the House side. “The [American Bankers Association] always sends up the owner of some three-branch community bank instead.”

“The community banks and credit unions have outsized political influence relative to their role in the economy,” Levitin explained. Members of Congress will always make time for them.

In March 2009, after the House Democratic leadership made a “herculean effort,” Miller said, the cramdown measure passed the lower chamber 234-191.

But in the Senate, thanks to ferocious bank lobbying — and a puzzling lack of support, if not outright opposition, from the Obama administration — it was defeated by a wide margin, with the bill falling 15 votes short of the 60 needed to cut off debate and move to a final vote.

After the vote, Durbin despaired to HuffPost reporter Grim, “Frankly, I can’t match what the bankers are doing in terms of lobbying.”

Meanwhile, David Kittle, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, gleefully told the American News Project, “We led the way on this, and we are clearly responsible for defeating this for the third time in the last year.”

Durbin told Grim he still held out some hope for the future: “When the voters speak, some elected officials listen. So I hope that, if we fail on mortgage foreclosure and we fail on credit card reform, I hope that people in this country will stand up and say to Congress, ‘You’ve got the wrong friends.’”

Dylan Ratigan

How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress

How much Americans hate Congress has become cliché. Congress’s approval rating is at an all-time low, and it’s not hard to see why: the institution is broken. Plenty of structural forces have contributed to Congress’s dysfunction: the increasing flow of money in politics, the emergence of the 24/7 cable news cycle, the increasing polarization of the electorate. But perhaps no single person bears as much responsibility as Newt Gingrich.

“I spent 16 years building a majority in the House for the first time since 1954,” Gingrich said during NBC’s Florida GOP debate Monday night, referring to the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Over those sixteen years of personal and partisan striving, Gingrich invented or perfected many of the things that Americans dislike most about Congress. “I think I am a transformational figure,” Gingrich said before the 1994 election. “I am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be hurt by the change, the liberal Democratic machine” will fight it, Gingrich explained.

There is no greater pathology in today’s Congress than obstructionism, from Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) refusal to raise the debt ceiling in July to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) taking disaster relief funds for Hurricane Irene hostage. Both parties have long used Congress’s procedural rules to promote legislation they favor, but Gingrich created something new. “There is the assumption—pioneered by Newt Gingrich himself, as early as the 1970s—that the minority wins when Congress accomplishes less,” Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the number-two Democrat in the House, explained in a 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Gingrich’s proposition, and maybe accurately, was that as long as…our party cooperate[s] with Democrats and get[s] 20 or 30 percent of what we want and they get to say they solved the problem and had a bipartisan bill, there’s no incentive for the American people to change leadership,” Hoyer told the Washington Post after the speech. “To some degree, he was proven right in 1994.”

In many ways, the obstructionist minority that Hoyer faced two years ago was following a playbook written by Gingrich over a decade earlier. Gingrich, in fact, took the debt ceiling hostage fifteen years before Boehner did, demanding huge, partisan cuts. In that case, the GOP backed down after President Clinton vetoed their spending bills and Moody’s warned of a credit downgrade. When Boehner refused to raise the debt ceiling, the threat of default lowered the US’s credit rating and was resolved by an complicated process involving a “supercommittee” and a two-step raising of the debt limit over a year. And it was Gingrich who, in one of his first acts as Speaker, patented the practice of refusing to approve disaster relief funds if they weren’t offset with spending cuts. Gingrich even held out after the Oklahoma City bombing later that year, prompting the Philadelphia Daily News to write, “Even Newt Gingrich must lose a little sleep at the idea of making political hay out of the mini-civil war that struck Oklahoma City.”

Of course, Gingrich’s greatest act of obstructionist brinkmanship was the 1995 and 1996 government shutdowns. Thanks to his refusal to concede on spending on social services, the government closed for five days in 1995, longer than the previous eight government shutdowns, and for a whopping twenty-one days a year later—the longest shutdown in history. Thanks to Gingrich’s obstinacy, health and welfare services for veterans were curtailed, Social Security checks were delayed, tens of thousands of visa applications went unprocessed and “numerous sectors of the economy” we negatively impacted, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Then there’s perhaps the most universally reviled practice of Congress: earmarking. Spending on earmarks doubled during Gingrich’s reign as Speaker, rising from $7.8 billion in 1994 to $14.5 billion in 1997. “Speaker Gingrich set in motion the largest explosion of earmarks in the history of Congress,” said Tom Schatz of the conservative group Citizens Against Government Waste. The pork binge was part of a Machiavellian plot to use taxpayer dollars to help Republicans get reelected, as Gingrich himself laid out in a 1996 policy memo titled, “Proposed Principles for Analyzing Each Appropriations Bill.” The memo instructed the chairmen of House Appropriation subcommittees to ask themselves if there are “any Republican members” who “need a specific district item in the bill.” This apparently included Gingrich himself, as Cobb County, Georgia, which the Speaker represented, received more federal dollars per resident than any other suburban county in the country in 1995, except for Arlington, Virginia, home of the Pentagon and other federal agencies, and Brevard County, Florida, home to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.

This partisan earmarking has led Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ), a longtime anti-earmark crusader who has endorsed Mitt Romney, to dub Gingrich “the father of contemporary earmarking. ” Senator John McCain (R-AZ) went even further on a Romney campaign conference call Wednesday, saying that Gingrich’s plan to “distribute these earmarks led directly to the Abramoff scandal, Congressman Bob Ney going to jail and the corruption that I saw with my own eyes.”

Meanwhile, Gingrich was busy creating the climate of nearly nihilistic partisanship that reigns today. In May of 1988, against the wishes of the more moderate GOP leadership, Gingrich brought ethics charges against then-Democratic Speaker Jim Wright relating to a book deal. “This was very much Newt’s initiative,” John Pitney, a professor at Claremont McKenna College who has studied Gingrich for years, told The Nation. Gingrich successfully forced Wright to resign “and that really, for the first time, kind of politicized the entire ethics process,” Larry Evans, a government professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, told NPR in December. Ten years later, Gingrich was brought down by a similarly politically charged ethics process, when he was fined $300,000 for flouting tax laws with a tax-exempt college class that Democrats charged was actually political propaganda.

Before Wright, Gingrich tussled with another Democratic speaker and made a name for himself by exploiting the media and the new medium of C-SPAN. Gingrich was sworn in to his first term just a few months before C-SPAN went on the air in 1979, and as an ambitious freshman, he quickly realized the network’s potential. He and a small cadre of young Republicans he led pilloried then-Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill and other Democratic lawmakers nightly with personal attacks, no matter how unfair, like when he accused the Speaker of putting “communist propaganda” in the Speaker’s lobby.

O’Neill was so irritated by Gingrich’s speeches that he once ordered the House cameras to pan across the empty House chamber to expose that Gingrich was speaking to no one but the cameras, and called Gingrich’s exploits “the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress. Gingrich fired back that O’Neil was coming “all too close to resembling a McCarthyism of the Left.” The resulting the two-hour exchange, which was covered on every broadcast news outlet that night, made Gingrich into a national hero for conservatives and a villain to liberals.

It was the “moment that made Gingrich,” as Pitney wrote on his blog, and set the mold of punching up in the media that ambitious upstart firebrands like Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) would follow for years to come.”If you’re not in the Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist,” Gingrich told Newsweek in the late 80s.

With his newfound fame and a small army of fiery conservative lawmakers behind him—the so-called Conservative Opportunity Society Gingrich created formed in 1983—Gingrich set out to remake the GOP. He narrowly won an election to be House minority whip in 1989 over a more moderate Republican from Illinois and with this official position, he ventured to “build a much more aggressive, activist party,” as he put it. He beefed up the party’s fundraising and recruiting operations to get more Republicans elected and hired pollster Frank Luntz to manage the party’s messaging. Five years later, Gingrich led a wave of fifty-four new Republicans into the House and was elected Speaker.

Of course, Gingrich’s greatest act of punching up would have to wait until he was Speaker, when he exploited Congressional power to impeach President Clinton for having an affair while he himself was having an affair with his current wife Callista. When Univision correspondent Jorge Ramos asked Gingrich about this hypocrisy Wednesday, Gingrich replied, “No, I criticized President Clinton for lying under oath in front of a federal judge, committing perjury—which is a felony for which normal people go to jail.” But as Clinton’s overwhelming popularity today attests, Gingrich’s crusade lacked merit and was plainly political. “Their efforts have succeeded only in turning a serious constitutional process into a partisan process that demeaned both the House and the Senate and became a painful ordeal for the entire country,” Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said at the time.

Just as important, but often overlooked today, is the way in which Gingrich centralized power in party leadership. Progressive Democrats, frustrated with Southern conservative Democrats’ controlling committee chairmanships, started this trend in 1970s, Pitney said, but Gingrich consolidated power in himself to an unprecedented degree by making it so the Speaker could appoint key committee chairmanships. This allowed him to tightly control the agenda and sideline dissident factions in his party in a way that every Speaker since has exploited. “There was a lot of heightened partisanship on both sides, but Gingrich was very vivid, was very much a part of this process” of polarization, Pitney told The Nation.

In another structural change that persists to this day, Gingrich shortened the Congressional workweek to three days in order to maximize fundraising opportunities and provide more contact with constituents. But this also cut down on the amount of time lawmakers spent together in Washington where they could make personal connections across the aisle.

All together, Gingrich’s emphasis on partisan warfare über alles sped the demise of the comity that is essential to the functioning of Congress. If the parties refuse to work together, little can be achieved without super-majorities. It was Gingrich who made winning, rather than good governance, the chief currency of success. Earlier this month, James Lardner laid out in this magazine a proposal to roll back much of Gingrich’s work and fix Congress—but now Gingrich is campaigning to takeover another branch of government. One can only imagine the damage he might inflict there.

President Obama Takes Republican Senator Mike Lee To The Woodshed Over His Threat To Obstruct By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

Republican Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) wants to bring America down. How do we know this? He said so during an appearance on Chris Matthews. In that interview, Lee said that he would bring America down if Democrats didn’t vote to force the American people to live under conservative rule via a Constitutional amendment. Now, Mike Lee is continuing his quest to destroy America by obstructing President Obama’s judicial and government agency nominees in the Senate. On Friday, Lee threatened to block all of President Obama’s nominees if he doesn’t remove Richard Cordray from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans think the President violated the Constitution by appointing Cordray during the recess.

Here is what Lee had to say:

“Given this President’s blatant and egregious disregard both for proper constitutional procedures and the Senate’s unquestioned role in such appointments, I find myself duty-bound to resist the consideration and approval of additional nominations until the President takes steps to remedy the situation. Regardless of the precise course I choose to pursue, the President certainly will not continue to enjoy my nearly complete cooperation, unless and until he rescinds his unconstitutional recess appointments.”

Lee is one of the most destructive Senators on Capitol Hill. He opposes child labor laws, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, programs that help the poor, FDA, EPA, and just about the entire federal government. He thinks everything is unconstitutional, despite what the Supreme Court has ruled. But President Obama struck back at Lee today during his weekly address:

”Just two days ago, a senator from Utah promised to obstruct every single American I appoint to a judgeship or public service position – unless I fire the consumer watchdog I put in place to protect the American people from financial schemes or malpractice.

For the most part, it’s not that this senator thinks these nominees are unqualified. In fact, all of the judicial nominees being blocked have bipartisan support. And almost 90 percent have unanimous support from the Judiciary Committee.

Instead, one of his aides told reporters that the senator plans to, and I’m quoting here, “Delay and slow the process in order to get the President’s attention.”

Lee certainly has President Obama’s attention now. This is exactly the kind of fight that the American people have wanted to see from the President and now he’s using the bully pulpit to take Republicans to the woodshed over their repeated temper tantrums that have placed the country in serious jeopardy. Some Republicans are already beginning to back off of their threat to obstruct and are leaving useless and chaotic Senators like Mike Lee to twist in the wind in front of the American people as the 2012 Election approaches. If Republicans are smart, they’ll begin cooperating with President Obama and will tell their colleagues to back off and start playing ball. If not, let’s hope President Obama continues to embarrass every Republican in public by telling the American people what they are trying to do to them.

1.  Marijuana is not a gateway drug.

“It’s a gateway drug” is an argument that anti-pot people often use when they run out of false health concerns, as if marijuana’s relative harmlessness is void because getting stoned will automatically turn people on to heroin. But the truth is that marijuana is not a gateway drug, and the vast majority of people who smoke pot will never move onto harder drugs. In 2009, 2.3 million people reported trying pot, but only 617,000 said they had tried cocaine, and just 180,000 said they had tried heroin.

Multiple studies have failed to prove that marijuana is more of a gateway drug than other substances like cigarettes, alcohol or prescription drugs. But we’ve known this since as far as back as 1999, when government researchers said, “There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.” Pot and other drug use can correlate, but not necessarily due to characteristics of pot itself, but something more powerful.

As Maia Szalavitz wrote in Time,

“People who are extremely interested in altering their consciousness are likely to want to try more than one way of doing it. If you are a true music fan, you probably won’t stick to listening to just one band or even a single genre —  this doesn’t make lullabies a gateway to the Grateful Dead, it means that people who really like music probably like many different songs and groups.”

While pot is not a gateway drug, pot laws may very well be a gateway to alcohol use, as people who fear the law may turn to booze. And for those who choose to use pot even though it is illegal, pot’s criminal status may nudge them closer to criminals, by putting them in contact with dealers.

2. Pot smoke is relatively benign and does not cause lung cancer.

The “anything you smoke can’t be good” meme helps keep prescription pot stigmatized, and supports pot’s classification in the strict drug category Schedule I (with hard drugs like heroin), where substances are said to show lack of safety in use, among other qualifications like lack of medical value.

But a study released earlier this month proved that marijuana is not actually linked to breathing problems. Researchers studied the effects of marijuana smoke on lung function, and found that smoking pot does not cause the same irreversible breathing problems as cigarettes.

This information is not new; multiple studies have concluded that marijuana is not associated with similar health problems. As Paul Armentano, also a co-author of the book Marijuana is Safer, wrote for NORML:

“In 2006, the results of the largest case-controlled study ever to investigate the respiratory effects of marijuana smoking reported that cannabis use was not associated with lung-related cancers, even among subjects who reported smoking more than 22,000 joints over their lifetime.”

Alcohol, however, is linked to many cancers, including liver, mouth, throat, and breast cancer.

3.  Pot does not cause schizophrenia.

Many drug war advocates allege that marijuana use causes schizophrenia or other mental health problems, but science continually shows otherwise.

A study led by Dr. Serge Sevy, an associate professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, found that controlling for factors known to increase schizophrenia risk eliminated the association between disease onset and marijuana use.

Steve Fox told AlterNet,

“These mental health issues are generally as baseless and misleading as past prohibitionist claims, such as the claim that marijuana contains carcinogens that increase the users risk of lung cancer. The truth is that there has never been a documented case of lung cancer among marijuana-only (as opposed to marijuana and tobacco) smokers. Similarly, the rates of schizophrenia in society have not increased as marijuana use has become widespread, as one would expect if marijuana use caused the condition. There may be a correlation between people with mental health issues and marijuana use, but that is far different than causation.”
The long-term cognitive effects of marijuana use are difficult to measure, because they are evident during highly demanding brain functions, according to the California Association of Addiction Medicine. But even the most long-term weed smokers will not face health problems comparable to those linked to long-term alcohol use, which include liver cirrhosis and Korsakoff’s syndrome, a disease that causes debilitating brain damage and the inability to form new memories.

Of course, any substance abuse is potentially more detrimental to a developing brain than to an adult brain. Prevention, or delaying use, is a great way to reduce harm. But prohibition does not guarantee increased safety, especially when alcohol is legal.

4. Driving high is not very dangerous. 

Driving an automobile while high is another example of the fear-mongering used to facilitate harsh pot laws. Jill Cooper, the associate director of the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center at the University of California, Berkeley, argued with good intention in the New York Times that while alcohol is still “a very real threat to teen drivers,” an increase in marijuana use also threatens threatens safe driving. She says,

“We should not feel that teens are safer stoned than drunk. Why would we want anyone with diminished skills, either as a result of cannabis use or alcohol use, operating a machine made of two tons of steel?”

But her logic is ill-informed. You would be hard pressed to find someone who advocates putting a driver with diminished skills behind the wheel. But marijuana use may actually cause a decrease in traffic fatalities. A study by the Institute for the Study of Labor, a research center for science, politics, and business in Bonn, Germany, showed that in states where medical marijuana is legal, adults were smoking more marijuana and drinking less alcohol, and the result was a 9 percent decrease in traffic fatalities.

Another study, conduced by Andrew Sewell, found that quantity affects ability, but “marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively while driving by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies,” like driving slower. The study concluded:

Epidemiological studies have been inconclusive regarding whether cannabis use causes an increased risk of accidents; in contrast, unanimity exists that alcohol use increases crash risk.”

Mix alcohol and pot together, however, and the effects may be more intoxicating than either drug alone.

5. Pot does not make you lazy.

You’ve seen the image a million times: A pothead slumped on the couch surrounded by a cloud of weed smoke, paralyzed by his high. But marijuana is not a couch-potato creator. The technical name for marijuana-induced laziness is “amotivational syndrome,” and research suggests it has a lot more to do with other factors than with pot. A study on marijuana use and amotivational syndrome shows circumstances unique to a person, or some underlying problem, are more to blame for amotivational syndrome than the drug itself. Like research on pot and schizophrenia, the challenge is separating pot use from other variables that may take place at the same time, and attributing the correct cause to effect.

But even if marijuana did make people lazy, pot is not associated with violent crime or sexual assault. Alcohol, on the other hand, is a contributing factor in many cases of violence, as well as sexual assault and rape. According to the National Center for Alcohol Law Enforcement:

• Almost one in four victims of violent crime report that the perpetrator had been drinking prior to committing the violence.
• Over one-third of victims of rapes or sexual assaults report that the offender was drinking at the time of the act.
• It is estimated that 32 to 50 percent of homicides are preceded by alcohol consumption by the perpetrator.
• Between 31 percent and 36 percent of prisoners convicted of a violent crime against an intimate reported that they were drinking alcohol at the time of the offense.

Alcohol is linked to reckless behavior and to serious injuries, and it is highly associated with emergency room visits. But marijuana is rarely associated with emergency room visits, and is not proven to increase reckless behavior or cause injuries.

As Fox told AlterNet,

“There are very few things in life that are harmless. We understand that McDonald’s, Popeye’s and tuna fish, for that matter, pose certain risks to our health. We don’t ban all of these things because they are not harmless. When it comes to using a substance for recreation or relaxation, alcohol and marijuana are by far the two most popular choices in our society. In many ways they are quite similar. But the most significant difference is that marijuana is far less harmful to the user. More than 30,000 Americans die every year from the health effects of alcohol. The comparable number for marijuana is zero. If making marijuana legal results in millions of Americans shifting from alcohol consumption to marijuana consumption (at least in part), that will result in less physical harm to Americans and possibly fewer deaths. I will let other people judge whether that is a good thing.”

To reduce the harm associated with substance use, Americans need the options and tools necessary to make health-based, informed decisions — not harsh consequences that punish a relatively harmless drug.

Kristen Gwynne 

By Marion

Racism is alive and well in the United States of America. Jan Brewer was more than happy to demonstrate this as she greeted the President on his recent visit, a visit which has been captured for immortality by an infamous picture:

Taken on face value, this shows the governor of a Western state giving the President of the United States the cruelest sort of dressing-down. Has any President ever received such treatment, since General George McClellan snubbed Abraham Lincoln, who was awaiting him in McClellan’s parlour, by announcing he was going to bed?

Taken on face value again, this gesture of the raised index finger is the sort of body language used when an adult takes to telling off a small child … or when any adult takes to telling off another adult whom they consider to be inferior.

Aye, there’s the rub.

One wonders if the President who’d walked down those steps of Air Force One had been Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or John Edwards, if Brewer would have dared to display such a singular lack of deportment and manners? After all, common courtesy dictates that it’s rude to shake a finger in the face of another person. One wonders, as well, if the governor had been Brewer’s Democratic predecessor, Janet Napolitano, welcoming George W Bush, if  she would have behaved in such a manner.

In both instances, I think it safe to assume that the answer would have been “no.”

I also think it’s safe, not just to assume, but to assert that this behaviour, as has a plethora of similar behaviour toward this President on both sides of the political spectrum, has been motivated by the fact that the President is African-American.

And that is a cause for shame for the entire country.

From the frozen frame of the picture, which shows a white woman aggressively dressing down a black man, to Brewer’s whiney response about “feeling threatened,” and the President being “thin-skinned,” you have the classic meme of the poor, little white woman being intimidated by the angry black buck straight in from the fields. And no matter how much blowhards like Rep Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) try to excuse this action as part of the First Amendment, in that the President is not a King, the entire escapade comes down to one thing and one thing only: respect.

Until this President took office, each and every one of his predecessors had been shown the utmost respect by their own party, by the opposition and by the media. Even the crook, Richard Nixon. Even the fratboy incompetent, George W Bush.

From both Right and Left, for the past four years, this President has suffered a level of disrespect heretofore unparallelled. From Newt Gingrich’s Kenyan anti-colonialremarks to monkey pictures from the Right to Firedoglake’s bugaloo Bush and “house nigger” comments to Joan Walsh’s and Glenn Greenwald’s “Obamalover” euphemism to Ralph Nader’s Uncle Tom moment to Democratic Congressman Peter de Fazio’s “fuck the President” moment, all of this disrespect boils down to one thing and one thing only: race.

And that’s to our everlasting shame as a nation that we seem to be headed, not forward, but backwards in the direction the Newts and Ricks and Ron Pauls want to take us, back to the 1950s to a moment frozen in time by an equally infamous picture of another sort:

We really must ask ourselves, exactly, how far we’ve come since that moment?

The answer, I think, is simply not far enough.

Corporations Have No Use for Borders By Chris Hedges

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”

The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”

No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.

“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”

Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.

This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.

Beware Celebrations of Republican Disarray Melissa Harris-Perry 

As a political scientist trained in the late twentieth century, I believe in certain political truths. I trust my colleague David Mayhew’s insight that “congressmen are single-minded seekers of reelection” as the organizing principle of Congressional behavior. From the co-sponsorship of bills to the practice of earmarking, all can be understood as serving the re-election goals of members. I am also persuaded by the much debated but popular theory that every thirty to forty years the United States experiences a critical election that shifts partisan power and realigns the electorate.

Hospitality Republican Party Technology War

These ideas inform some of my foundational beliefs about how the American political system works. They help me feel less panicked about short-term volatility in policy or election outcomes because they make the system seem more orderly in the long view. It’s the kind of optimism expressed by President Obama in sentiments borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I see the arc of American political history as long, but tending toward discernible and predictable patterns. This predictability includes a reassuring lack of permanence. Conservative eras give way to decades of progress. Backlash emerges but movements march forward.

However, the 2012 Republican primary season has challenged some of my core beliefs. Not only has it gone against the GOP’s reliable behavioral tides; the Republican presidential race thus far appears to be significantly altered by the Citizens United decision. And while there were certainly reasons to dislike the Republican establishment, what stands to replace it is far more frightening.

Along with many political observers, I have long assumed that the populism of the Republican Party is more symbolic than actual. Since the Southern Strategy was implemented in the 1960s, Republican presidential hopefuls have talked the talk of racial exclusivity, or evangelical fervor, or militaristic nationalism, while mostly walking the walk of enriching the party’s moneyed establishment. Populist barnstorming kept many voters tied to the Republican Party when their pocketbook interests objectively lay with more progressive taxation and social legislation. This was mostly for show; in the end, presidential nominees would inevitably be chosen by elite decision-makers who put their collective financial resources behind their front- running fiscal friends.

The 2010 midterm wins of insurgent Tea Party candidates did little to shake my faith in this process. The Republicans did have a class of unruly freshmen; however, I presumed that the Mayhew principle of re-election–seeking behavior would swiftly bring them in line. But the debt ceiling fiasco this past summer undermined this expectation. House Speaker John Boehner’s inability to rein in his party members was extraordinary. Republicans can be accused of being many things, but being undisciplined is rarely among them.

Then came the primary season, and suddenly every tool in my toolbox feels woefully inadequate for understanding the outcomes of this election. Republicans follow certain rules in their primaries. They nominate the next guy in line. Being boring or insincere has rarely been a stumbling block for their nominees. Being fabulously wealthy and well connected has only been an asset. A little noise-making, cage-rattling and resistance from the base is to be expected early on, but if the sun still rises in the east, if Wednesday still follows Tuesday and if financial elites are still in control of the party, then Republican primary voters should be making their peace with Mitt Romney right about now and turning their focus to defeating the incumbent Democratic president. That’s just how things are done.

Except apparently that’s not how things are done in 2012. It is unprecedented in the contemporary Republican primary system for the first three races to go to three separate candidates: Rick Santorum in Iowa, Mitt Romney in New Hampshire and Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. The Republican establishment has been surprisingly upended by Citizens United. Super PAC attacks on Gingrich sent conservative voters to Santorum in Iowa. The whims of a single billionaire kept Gingrich in play in South Carolina. The new rules unleashed by the Supreme Court have set loose the possibility that insurgent candidates armed with one rich donor can seize control from a once stable Republican power elite.

For the past forty years the battle between the parties shared some aspects of the cold war: the stakes were high, the differences were real, but each side was constrained by its interest in perpetuating the existing system. If the dissolution of the Soviet Union changed the balance of power so that “rogue states” had access to weapons of mass destruction, the Citizens United ruling shows that today’s rogue candidates have the potential to threaten the existing electoral order.

A challenge to the status quo could be a good thing, of course. It is what animates both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. And as a media observer, I find it exciting to watch the Republicans behaving so erratically. But I am more than a little concerned that no one seems to be steering the GOP ship anymore. Democratic loyalists may gleefully herald the Republican disarray, but they should be concerned that the populism of the right is coalescing around the race-baiting, divisive extremism of Newt Gingrich, which seems likely to prove more rabid than that of the existing elite. A new Southern Strategy, fueled by the multimillion-dollar weaponry of Citizens United, could be enough to make me yearn for the good ol’ days of the Republican establishment.

Melissa Harris-Perry