Voter Suppression

Romney Willing to Win Without Honor

Leo Gerard — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 09:39:03 -0400

Mitt Romney kept quiet last week when the subject was rape and God’s will. He remained silent the week before when the news was all about Illinois factory workers pleading with him to stop his alma mater Bain Capital from offshoring their jobs.

At no time this year did Mitt denounce Republican employers who threatened their workers if President Obama is re-elected or condemn repeated Republican legislative attempts to suppress Democratic votes.

Throughout the campaign, Mitt Romney confronted numerous George Washington moments -- opportunities to establish an aura of honor. It takes moxie to tell fellow Republicans that voter suppression is un-American. Only a guy with strongly held principles would stand up to the firm he founded and insist they stop the morally bankrupt practice of offshoring jobs from profit-making American factories. At every turn, Romney chose the ignoble path. He kept his mouth shut rather than speak up for what’s right.

Just last week, an opportunity for righteousness landed in Romney’s lap. It happened when the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Indiana, Richard E. Mourdock, said he opposed all abortions, even in cases of rape, and suggested that God intends rape to happen. Here’s what Mourdock said:

“Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, it is something that God intended to happen.”

Romney could have specifically renounced this view – that God intends women to be raped and become pregnant as a result. And he could have underscored that position by ending television ads in which he endorses Mourdock.

But he didn’t. A campaign spokeswoman said Mitt “disagreed” with Mourdock on that rape thing, but still supports him. Since then, Mitt has refused to answer questions about Mourdock. And he’s kept airing his Mourdock endorsement ads.

Clearly, Mitt values a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate over a decent stand on rape.

Just the week before, heightened news coverage of the plight of workers at the Sensata factory in Freeport, Ill. gave Romney another opportunity to do the right thing.

He chose to do nothing.

The 170 workers at Sensata will lose their jobs at year’s end when Bain Capital finishes shipping the car sensor factory lock, stock and machinery to China. The workers have repeatedly petitioned Romney to intervene with Bain, a firm he created and still profits from, to stop the offshoring.

Romney stiffed them. The candidate who claims he would create 12 million jobs if elected president failed to make an attempt to save the jobs of these 170 workers at a successful, money-making American factory. He didn’t send the workers his condolences for personally profiting from their calamity. He has never even acknowledged the Sensata workers’ existence.

At virtually any moment as he ran for president over the past two years, Romney could have very publically deplored Republican attempts to suppress Democratic votes. That’s because virtually continuously over that time, Republican-controlled legislatures, Republican governors and other GOP officials have concocted a variety of measures to wrest from Democrats their right to vote. These include passing onerous photo ID requirements, limiting early balloting and aggressively purging voter rolls.

These measures disproportionately affect minority, poor, disabled, elderly and women voters, all of whom tend to vote Democrat. Among the most egregious examples occurred in Ohio where the secretary of state tried to limit poll hours in Democratic-dominated counties and extend them in Republican-controlled counties.

At any time during the massive publicity over any one of these incidents across the country – from Maine to Montana and Florida to Arizona – Romney could have stood up and spoken for fairness. He never did – not even after the Republican National Committee was forced to fire a shady voter registration firm that was caught in September submitting hundreds of fraudulent registration forms in Florida or after a Republican operative in Virginia was criminally charged in October with throwing completed voter registration forms in a Dumpster.

A simple statement from Romney would have sufficed: winning by means of voter suppression and registration fraud is craven and beneath the dignity of anyone seeking public office. But he said nothing.

Similar to voter suppression is the attempt at voter coercion that has been made by numerous employers this year. Just this past week, Mike White, owner of Rite-Hite, a Milwaukee industrial equipment manufacturer, threatened his workers with “personal consequences” if President Obama is re-elected. Earlier this month, timeshare mogul David Siegel, who is building himself a 90,000-square-foot, $100 million home, threatened to lay off his workers if President Obama is re-elected. Arthur Allen of ASG Software Solutions and the Koch brothers of Georgia Pacific, told their tens of thousands of workers they’d suffer fallout if Romney loses.

Romney could have acted as a shield for workers by condemning this intimidation. Instead, in a June conference call with business owners, Romney encouraged bullying. He told the business owners:

"I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”

What Americans want is a president like George Washington. The general’s appeal is not the quirky wooden teeth or odd half-finished portrait. It’s the never-tell-a-lie, step-down-from-power nobility of the guy. Romney, by contrast, has shown he’s willing to win without honor. He doesn’t seem to know Americans won’t elect a candidate they believe lacks nobility.

A Plutocrat Epiphany: All Votes Need Not Count

Sam Pizzigati — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 13:48:00 -0400

America's billionaires have realized they really don't have to bother convincing a majority of people to vote their way. They can put their cash instead into campaigns to keep the hard-to-convince from voting.

Our two major presidential candidates descended on Ohio last week, and legions of reporters followed closely behind. Those reporters filed tens of thousands of words on what they saw and heard on their quick in-and-out Ohio excursion.

But not one of those reporters filed a word about what may have been the most nationally significant news out of Ohio last week: the release of a new analysis on income inequality from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

This new Cleveland Fed analysis examines both “labor” and “capital” income in America since 1980. Labor income includes everything we make from our jobs: wages and salaries, pensions and health insurance benefits.

Capital income comes from the ownership of assets. Interest, dividends, and the capital gains from buying and selling stocks, bonds, and other forms of property all count as capital income.

Labor income, the Cleveland Fed analysis shows, “has been declining as a share of total income earned in the United States for the past three decades.” The capital share, by stark contrast, has been increasing

In other words, Americans have been making less from work and more from wealth. But only a relative few Americans, the Cleveland Fed observes, have significant quantities of that wealth. The unsurprising result: We have witnessed a significant “spike in inequality” over the past generation.

In a vital democracy, the candidates who seek our votes would be agonizing over this new Cleveland Fed study. How could we possibly have evolved a society, they would orate, where wealth counts more than work? But we don't live in a vital democracy. We live in a plutocracy, a society where the rich rule.

Some Americans dismiss this “plutocracy” label. The rich can't possibly rule, the argument goes, because the rich often don't get their way. Look at the Mitt Romney candidacy. Romney clearly has most of America's wealthy on his side. Yet, according to the polls, he now appears headed to a thumping defeat.

All true enough. The polls certainly are predicting a hard slog for Romney. And the nation’s rich have, by and large, lined up Romney’s way. These Romney rich have mobilized on a grand scale. They're taking full advantage of the recent court rulings that have essentially thrown out all limits on how much money rich people — and the corporations they run — can spread around at election time.

But these super rich can also read public opinion polls. They’ve known for some time now that the majority of Americans support public policies — most notably, higher taxes on the rich — that the rich themselves deeply oppose.

All the ad campaigns our rich have bankrolled over the years haven’t made much of a dent on this public support for higher taxes on America's wealthy. In a real democracy, that would be the end of the story. The public policy positions the majority favors, in a truly democratic society, eventually wind their way into law,

But not in a plutocracy. In a society where wealth has concentrated at the top, the awesomely affluent don’t have to gamble on convincing skeptical voters. They can simply keep these skeptical voters, as America's contemporary super rich have now realized, from voting and having their votes counted.

In 2012 America, we have a phrase for this phenomenon, voter suppression, and no journalist over the past dozen years has done more to shine a light on this suppression than Greg Palast, the BBC reporter who first gained global attention with his coverage of the disputed 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Now Palast has a new book out that chronicles how many of America’s super rich — the Koch brothers, hedge fund titan Paul Singer, Texan corporate raider Harold Simmons, among many others — have been patiently and prodigiously subsidizing campaigns not to “get out the vote,” but to keep it down.

“To win an election, you need votes,” Palast explains in Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 7 Easy Steps. “Or, just as good, you need to take away the votes of your opponent.”

This getting votes to disappear takes money. Notes Palast: “Purging and blocking voters on a grand scale — thousands and millions of registrations and ballots — isn’t checkers. It’s complex and very, very expensive.”

And this purging and blocking is working. In 2008, details Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, no fewer than 488,136 absentee ballots went uncounted, as did 767,023 provisionally cast ballots, and 1,451,116 ballots thrown out as “spoiled.”

Another 2,383,587 would-be voters, Palast points out, “had their registrations rejected,” and 491,952 more already registered voters had their registrations purged from the rolls. Finally, an estimated 320,000 other voters were turned away at the polls by poll workers who found their IDs insufficient.

Palast calls all these Americans the “Missing Six Million.” They come especially from minority voting groups that tend to vote against super-rich priorities.

“Elections aren’t stolen in the vote count,” as former U.S. Commission on Civil Rights chair Mary Francis Berry puts it, “they’re stolen in the no count.”

Santiago Juarez, a voting rights attorney with the League of United Latin American Citizens, places this plutocratic disenfranchisement in the context of the broader trends that the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank has tracked so well.

“You take away people’s health insurance and you take away their right to union pay scale, and you take away their pensions,” notes Juarez. “Taking away their vote is just one more thing.”

Palast has organized a Web site that links to citizen efforts that aim to counter billionaires and their voter suppression. But the long-range answer to voter suppression, he stresses, demands an assault on inequality, a relentless struggle to keep wealth from concentrating at America's economic summit.

“You can’t stop billionaires from spending their billions,” his new book reminds us. “The only way to put an end to billionaires buying our elections is to put an end to billionaires.”

Until that end, income from work will continue to stagnate — and income from wealth will continue to soar.

Veteran labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book, The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, will appear this fall.

Ohio Secretary of State Brunner Does Right by Voters

Michael Kwiatkowski — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:45:21 -0400

Project Vote has estimated that, in 2008, voter caging could result in as many as 600,000 eligible voters-mostly low-income Americans, people of color, and youths-being stricken from the Ohio voter rolls without notice or due process.