second floor

http://www.kqed.org/programs/radio/forum (click here for realmedia stream)

Fri, Feb 29, 2008 — 9:00 AM
Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez

	Download (MP3) (Windows: right-click and choose “Save Target As.” Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose “Save As.”)

Yesterday, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader named San Francisco’s own Matt Gonzalez — a former Board of Supervisors president and mayoral candidate — as his running mate. Guest host Rachael Myrow talks with both Nader and Gonzalez about their campaign.
Host: Rachael Myrow

ian ayres @ freakonomics on the concept of a blind trust for campaign donations:

Transparency in government has a glorious tradition. Justice Louis Brandeis long ago said, “publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” But there exists in our government a central mechanism of democracy that stands against this cult of disclosure — the voting booth. Ballot secrecy was adopted toward the end of the nineteenth century to deter political corruption. Before the secret ballot, people could buy your vote and hold you to your bargain by watching you place that vote. Voting booth privacy disrupted the economics of vote buying, making it much more difficult for candidates to buy votes because, at the end of the day, they could never be sure who had voted for them.

A similar anti-transparency argument can be applied to campaign finance. We might replicate the benefits of the voting booth by creating a “donation booth,” or a screen that forces donors to funnel campaign contributions through blind trusts. Like the voting booth, the donation booth would keep candidates from learning the identity of their supporters. Just as the secret ballot makes it more difficult for candidates to buy votes, mandating anonymous donations through a system of blind trusts might make it harder for candidates to sell access or influence because they would never know which donors had paid the price. Knowledge about whether the other side actually performs his or her promise is an important prerequisite for trade. People — including political candidates — are less likely to deal if they are uncertain whether the other side performs. The secret ballot disrupts vote buying because candidates are uncertain how a citizen actually voted; anonymous donations disrupt influence-peddling because candidates are uncertain whether contributors actually contributed.

So instead of mandating transparency, we might do better to mandate a kind of non-transparency.

bloomberg:

Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who ran for president in 2000 and 2004, said he is considering another bid for the White House because he believes the current contenders aren’t standing up enough to corporate interests.

“Look at the major areas of injustice, deprivation and solutions that are not being addressed by the major candidates,” Nader, 73, said in a telephone interview today. Among other issues, he cited the need for a “practical timed withdrawal” from Iraq, programs to crack down on corporate fraud and a rearrangement of the U.S. tax system.

…

The campaign has set up an exploratory committee and is in the process of filing papers with the U.S. Federal Election Commission. The committee’s Web site says Nader is “committed to challenging the corporate powers that have a hammerlock on our political and economic systems.”

Nader said he wants to spend the next month assessing the fundraising abilities of the campaign, gathering paid staff and volunteers and trying to win over an army of lawyers willing to work for free to fight for his access on ballots across the U.S. He said he would want to raise $10 million over the course of the campaign and initially get enough to cover operations.

By comparison, the top Democrats — New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Illinois Senator Barack Obama — each raised more than $100 million in political contributions last year.

nader’s exploratory committee website:

Maybe the Democrats and Republicans will nominate Presidential candidates this year who will stand up against the war profiteers, the nuclear industry, the credit card industry, the corporate criminals, big oil, and the drug and health insurance industries.

We doubt it.

But hope springs eternal.

In the meantime, take a few minutes and explore with us an idea.

abc:

He was set to announce that he had formed an exploratory committee Wednesday, even before former Sen. John Edwards made it known that he’d be ending his candidacy. But with Edwards — who has made economic populism and ending poverty cornerstones of his campaign — leaving the Democratic field, Nader said, he feels his candidacy is more urgent than ever.

“When Kucinich threw in the towel, now you have Edwards gone — who’s going to carry the torch of democratic populism against the relentless domination of powerful corporations of our government?” Nader said. “You can’t just brush these issues to the side because the candidates are ignoring them.”

He has harsh words for the leading Democratic candidates, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, chastising them for failing to advance aggressive plans to tax corporations more fairly, and to fight for a vastly higher minimum wage.

Obama, he said, is a particular disappointment, since his background suggests that he knows the importance of progressive issues yet hasn’t fought for them in the Senate.

“His record in the Senate is pretty mediocre,” Nader said. “His most distinctive characteristic is the extent to which he censors himself. He hasn’t performed as a really progressive first-term senator would.”

His “self-censorship,” Nader said, “is a reflection of character.”

cnn political ticker:

Nader said he finds Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both unacceptable candidates, and he said whichever wins the party’s presidential nomination will not have an impact on his decision to run.

“They are both enthralled to the corporate powers,” Nader said of the two leading Democrats. “They’ve completely ignored the presidential pattern of illegality and accountability, they’ve ignored the out of control waste-fruad military expenditures, they hardly ever mention the diversion of hundreds of billions of dollars to corporate subsidies, handouts, and giveaways, and they don’t talk about a living wage.”

He expressed particular disappointment with Obama, whose senate record he called “mediocre, and quite cautious.”

“It’s not that he doesn’t know what the score is, of course he does — look at his background, he knows plenty,” Nader said. “But he’s censoring himself.”

“This issue looks forward, not back, and it’s packed with interviews with the artists, leaders and thinkers who can best divine what our future holds. It arrives, appropriately, during the run-up to next year’s presidential election, which looms as a moment of truth for our nation. “People are nauseous about being perceived as the enemy,” Bono says of America’s standing in the world. “Whoever fixes that problem gets elected.” But it’s not just politics – as a society, we face choices that will likely determine the fate of our civilization, matters of war and peace, resource depletion and explosive population growth. And, of course, global warming: “It’s a mistake to think of the climate crisis as one in a list of issues that will define our future,” Al Gore tells us. “It is the issue.”

We don’t claim to have the answers to these challenges, but we do know where to look for leadership and inspiration. The values of tolerance, inclusiveness, common sense and personal liberty (not to mention fun) that took shape in the 1960s have animated this magazine ever since.”

chock full of wit and wisdom from some of the world’s most interesting minds…

you can find the entire issue digitally right here, but the interface rolling stone set up is really horrible, so i’ve made the text from some of the interviews into pdfs:

BILL CLINTON

BILL GATES

AL GORE

SAM HARRIS

PAUL KRUGMAN

BILL MAHER

JON STEWART

CORNEL WEST

KANYE WEST

here’s some quotes that i’ve culled:

(more…)

from wsj (subscription required):

DALY CITY, Calif. — One of the biggest sources of political donations to Hillary Rodham Clinton is a tiny, lime-green bungalow that lies under the flight path from San Francisco International Airport.

Six members of the Paw family, each listing the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to the Democratic senator from New York since 2005, for her presidential campaign, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, election records show.

That total ranks the house with residences in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan’s Upper East Side among the top addresses to donate to the Democratic presidential front-runner over the past two years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of donations listed with the Federal Election Commission.

It isn’t obvious how the Paw family is able to afford such political largess. Records show they own a gift shop and live in a 1,280-square-foot house that they recently refinanced for $270,000. William Paw, the 64-year-old head of the household, is a mail carrier with the U.S. Postal Service who earns about $49,000 a year, according to a union representative. Alice Paw, also 64, is a homemaker. The couple’s grown children have jobs ranging from account manager at a software company to “attendance liaison” at a local public high school. One is listed on campaign records as an executive at a mutual fund.

The Paws’ political donations closely track donations made by Norman Hsu, a wealthy New York businessman in the apparel industry who once listed the Paw home as his address, according to public records. Mr. Hsu is one of the top fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. He has hosted or co-hosted some of her most prominent money-raising events.

 

(more…)

gravel speaks on campaign finance…don’t take this as an endorsement hah - not sure about that specific correlation between edwards, fortress, humana and his universal healthcare proposal but he makes his point about contribution money: “in the old days we used to call this conflict of interest, right now we call this politics as usual.”

interesting and telling report on “energy and environmental giving in the states” (pdf) by the national institute on money in state politics. some interesting stats:

“Non-individual contributors from the oil and gas, electric utilities and coal mining industries
contributed $58.3 million to state-level candidates and party committees from 2003 through 2006.1
On the other side, pro-environmental policy organizations gave $2.1 million and alternative
energy interests contributed almost $564,000. “

“Republican candidates and party committees collected 75 percent more
than Democrats from energy interests while pro-environmental groups
contributed almost five times more to Democrats than Republicans.”

top energy contributor between 2003 and 2006 was chevron with $3.28 million, while top pro-environmental contributor between same time period was the california league of conservation voters with $244,950.

screenshot of the top recipients of those energy industry dollars (click on screenshot for full view):

if you go to their website at http://www.followthemoney.org you can see where your elected officials are getting their money from. lots of interesting data broken down by economic sector, business vs. labor, individual vs. institutional, and geographic location.

http://www.opensecrets.org has this page dedicated to the 2008 race with contribution info for each candidate.

also, another good resource is http://www.maplight.org where you can also track the money each candidate received in relation to a specific congressional bill, in addition to basic campaign contributions.

russ feingold’s top ten campaign contributors:

chuck hagel’s top ten campaign contributors:

my formula for the day:

too much $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ + politics = bad.