Pay to Play

By the time you read this, the Democratic candidates for president will have had their first debate of the current electoral season. The Democrats have 3 debates scheduled in 2015. The Republicans have had 2 debates, and have 3 more scheduled for 2015.

This is very different from the debate schedule for the 2007/2008 presidential primary. In 2007 the Republicans had 15 debates, and then 6 more in 2008. In 2007 the Democrats had 17 debates, and 9 more in 2008. Most of us agreed at the time that there were too many debates.

This time the Republicans may have struck a good balance. The Democrats have not.

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schulz (DWS) is the Chair of the Democratic National Committee. She has decreed that there will be only 6 debates sanctioned by the Democratic Party. Any candidates who might want to slither off and do some debating on the side will be cast out from the officially sanctioned debates if they do. Candidate Lawrence Lessig has been polling at sufficient numbers to meet the 1% threshold for appearing on the debate stage, but DWS refused to allow him to participate.

In 2008, DWS was one of Hillary Clinton’s national campaign co-chairs. In 2015, DWS unilaterally made the decision to limit the number of debates to six, and punish any naughty candidates that debated on the side. It’s difficult to imagine that this decision had nothing to do with her long-time support for Clinton. Even more difficult to fathom is that this decision was made by DWS, with no input from the other members of the DNC, or the DNC executive committee. The rest of the DNC meekly followed along, and didn’t challenge the authoritarian decisions made by Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz.

Hillary Clinton has been the anointed candidate of the Democratic Party for a very long time. Clearly DWS expected no viable candidates to rise up and challenge the anointed one, so she saw no need to schedule a lot of debates. When Bernie Sanders came along and began attracting huge crowds and started rising in the polls, DWS refused to add more debates. She appeared (and still appears) desperate to ensure that Clinton would remain the anointed candidate by ensuring that voters wouldn’t hear the voices of her challengers on the national stage until the last possible moment.

This brilliant strategy also ensured that the Republican debates and the Republican candidates have had control of the media and the issues discussed for months, interrupted only by the occasional story about Hillary’s emails. Lucky for DWS, the mainstream corporate media has no interest in covering Sanders. After all, the corporations that own our media don’t want Sanders anywhere near the White House. He’s not for sale.

Sanders may not be for sale, but our democracy is. In Buckley vs. Valeo, and then again in Citizens United, our Supreme Court has affirmed that money is in fact, speech – and that those who which to purchase a lot of speech should not be thwarted from doing so.

Spurred on by ALEC and other conservative special interest groups, many states have succeeded in enacting bills to limit voter participation. Alabama passed a voter ID law that went into effect last year. This year they closed 31 DMV offices. The shuttered offices are in the counties with the largest black populations, including the 5 counties that most significantly supported Obama for president. Quite a coincidence. 

Nowhere is the lack of concern for the democratic process more apparent than the in the debates. Every debate thus far has been on cable television. Cable – which is accessed through paid subscriptions. CNN live streamed the Democrat’s debate so that people who have access to the Internet were able to watch it. Fox did not livestream the GOP debate, so unless one had cable, one was not able to watch the debate.

Voters should not have to PAY to see debates. The debates should be shown on public and network television, and be broadcast over the radio and the Internet. They should be available to every single voter that wishes to see them. No one should have to PAY for the privilege of viewing what is supposed to be our democracy in action.

This week we learned that 158 families (and the companies they own) have provided about half of the money to fund presidential campaigns so far. They are white and they are wealthy. They’ve made vast fortunes in either finance or energy. They have lots and lots of speech at their disposal, and by gum, they’re going to use it to purchase a president. Of those families/companies, 138 are backing Republicans, and 20 are backing Democrats.

How did we get to this place? This isn’t what I learned in Mr. Dakers 8^th grade civics class.

We’re seeing the pernicious influence of big money in all of our elections. In lowly NH state representative races, outside special interests are spending big bucks to ensure that their brand of ideology gets a voice in our legislature. Yvonne Dean-Bailey of Northwood was the recipient of $10,000 in PAC money to win a $100 a year seat in the NH House. Now that buyers know that they can purchase our legislature, the faucet will continue to flow.

It’s called corruption. Whenever special interests purchase a candidate – locally, statewide, or nationally – there is always quid pro quo.

The Roberts court has decreed that the more speech one has in the bank, the louder one’s voice gets to be. You don’t have an account? Sorry – we can’t hear you. What’s in your wallet? Got any speech in there?

Pay to play. What could go wrong?  

This was published as an op-ed in the October 16 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper. 

A Nation of Petty Vigilantes

Those of us who spend time on social media have seen the Facebook memes about rescuing dogs or babies in cars. They’re followed by outraged comments from the huffy judgment posse vowing they’d happily toss a brick through someone’s window to save the day.

We’ve all become very comfortable with minding other people’s business. It’s one thing to save a dog trapped for a long time in a hot car. It’s another to be a jerk to someone who just ran into the store for a few minutes. Then there are those who call the police when they see unsupervised children walking to the park or (as happened to a friend of mine) standing out in front of their house. A practice called “Free Range Parenting” has become a thing, because of the busybodies that call the police about unsupervised children. Free Range parents allow their kids walk to the corner store or the park unaccompanied. The absence of parental hovering is alarming to many people who appear to have little else to do. 

When I was 8 years old, I rode my bike around town, unsupervised. No one called the police. Kids were expected to play outside and entertain themselves. Over the years adults have become conditioned to fear for their children’s lives if they’re outside alone, even though the likelihood of their being kidnapped by a stranger is almost nonexistent.  (At the same time we bemoan the fact that kids sit inside all day.) Actual crime rates are going down, but the perception of crime is going up.

 The US media is better at mongering fear than providing useful information. If you watch morning shows like “Good Morning America” every day there’s almost always some new, dire warning for parents. The average TV newscast involves ginning up at least one kind of fear. That fear endless stream of fear creates a sort of evil combo plate. Combine the ginned up fear with the kind of isolation caused by the constant ginning up of fear, add a side order of overwhelming feelings of powerlessness, another side of anonymous comment sections, and garnish with a constant stream of celebrity gossip masquerading as news and voila - we become a nation of pissy, petty vigilantes.

Homeless children growing up in shelters? Yawn. We save our collective outrage to comment about on a photo of some celebrity dad who puts his kid in a backpack or a car seat the wrong way. Cecil the lion’s death created more outrage than the fact that none of the Wall St. bankers who destroyed the economy went to prison.

WMUR’s website is filled with stories from all over the country that have one specific purpose – feeding the outrage machine. As a result, anonymous commenters leave hundreds of comments about stories they have almost no information on. They all think they’re Sherlock Holmes, but they’re more like Nancy Grace. Those of us who followed the story of a local teen who was missing for a long time read all kinds of terrible comments (before and after she was found) from anonymous comment section vigilantes, eager to pass judgment. It’s awful that she and her family were subjected to that.

At a different place on the outrage spectrum, not everyone who is charged with a crime is prosecuted. The gossipmongers-passing-for-media write huge front-page stories sensationalizing an arrest, and the comment section quarterbacks write hateful comments. They don’t stop there. They harass people on social media, and that harassment can move into the real lives of the falsely accused. Those same media outlets never write big front-page retractions about dropped charges or exonerations. They are unconcerned about being complicit in ruining lives. Sensationalism sells.

This is playing out in our presidential primary. Donald Trump is one of the pissiest, pettiest celebrities on the planet. He believes he’s uniquely qualified to judge women’s looks, and has had plenty to say about them. He churlishly offers up his judgments even though no one has asked for them. In a culture where the most untalented and meaningless of celebrities are lionized by media, he’s the logical end result. He spent years saying that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US. Is it any surprise that he’s announced that all Mexicans are criminals and rapists? He’s the darling of the GOP base. They love him for “speaking his mind.” (So does drunk Uncle Joe at Christmas, but no one wants him to run for president.) How far do we really think Trumpelistiltskin would have gone in life if he hadn’t been born into a wealthy family?

Bernie Sanders is in trouble for not caving in to the gossip media. He was asked about Hillary’s hair over the weekend, and was a bit curt with the reporter about being asked this inane question. Now some folks are miffed that he didn’t answer this Big Important Feminist Question about Hillary’s hair. He talks a lot about income inequality. As a woman who has been paid less than male counterparts in a few workplaces, that’s more important to me than Hillary’s hair, or what Bernie Sanders thinks about Hillary’s hair. Bernie has a stellar voting record on women’s issues. Instead of being asked about his record, he gets asked about hair. It’s enough to make you weep.

 The thing about answering those kinds of questions is that it only encourages the mainstream media to ask more of them. Where are the questions about the $8.5 trillion the Pentagon can’t account for? The Pentagon has never been audited. It gets a huge chunk of our taxpayer dollars, but we are completely unconcerned by what they’re doing with all that money. We’d rather give some poor single mother the stinkeye for buying her kids some sweets with a SNAP card. After all, she’s a moocher wasting our tax dollars! That the Pentagon is the world’s biggest moocher doesn’t occur to them. They don’t know about it, because it’s never mentioned on the nightly news. Reporters aren’t asking about it, because they have important questions about hair. It pales in comparison to crucial issues like “deflategate.”

We deserve President Trump.

  

published as an op-ed in the August 21, 2015 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper