Dallas Oilman H.L. Hunt was a billionaire in a time when such massive wealth was unusual, back in the 1950s and '60s. H.L. was also politically bonkers--so far out there on the right-right-right wing that he considered Dwight Eisenhower a commie. In 1960, Hunt published a novel called Alpaca, in which he set forth his utopian vision for the governance of America. In the happy plutocratic kingdom he envisioned, the richer you are, the more votes you get.
Alas, poor H.L. couldn't get any sane people to take him seriously back then. Yet over the years, his wealthatopian fantasy has steadily crept into our political reality, becoming incorporated in today's campaign-funding system. As we've seen in both congressional and presidential races, money doesn't merely talk, it shouts, and it's been drowning out the voice of the people on issue after issue. While wealthy donors make up only a fraction of one percent of the population, they have gained a bigger vote in national public policy than the electorate at large.
The system unabashedly teaches that money is the ballot that counts and big donors are the citizens who matter. This is why a majority of Americans have become disenchanted-- to disgusted with politics during the past few decades. It's also why there is growing support for publicly financed campaigns, which grassroots groups have pushed through in seven states, stretching from Maine to Arizona.
Which brings us to this year's presidential run. While the bulk of the media attention has been on such weighty matters as who's wearing or not wearing flag lapel pins, there's been little focus on the back rooms where the money is being raised. So, in this issue of the Lowdown, we take a peek, finding the predictable, the ironic, and the surprising. [ read more ]
THE WAILING IN OUR COUNTRY ABOUT the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages...Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."
That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the U.S. itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness--around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."
Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery, and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate. [ read more ]
There'll be a crush of cameras at the front door of the White House on January 20 as scores of media outlets scramble to record the moment that the new president walks in. But, wait--who're those people who'll be sliding in quietly behind him? They're the ones who'll spend the next four years whispering in the president's ear, sitting in strategy sessions, running presidential councils, filling agency slots, and pulling the levers of executive power.
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What Obama calls "old politics"
Old Congress critters never die, they just go to K Street.
Take Dennis Hastert. Actually, he's already taken. The longtime Republican lawmaker retired last November, but rather than return to Illinois, he has alighted just a few blocks from the Capitol... [read more]