| Number 111 | March 23, 2001 |
|
This Week:
|
|
Greetings, This week I ponder the yawning chasm that looms between, on the one hand, the genuine desire on the part of many Americans for real campaign reform and, on the other, the band-aids offered by our elected leaders, such as the famous McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. Beyond campaigns, I take a look at some of the familiar political labels and begin to think about how they are obstacles to progress. I'll be interested in your comments on this part, in particular, as they will help to shape the second part of that essay which will appear next week. Hoping and working for change, Nygaard |
|
|
The number of U.S. workers who are fired from their jobs or suffer other reprisals because of their union activities has grown from about 6,000 in 1969 to more than 23,000 in 1998. In theory, workers who suffer such reprisals can appeal to the National Labor Relations Board for some sort of help, since such reprisals are illegal. However, "despite the dramatic increase in cases," reports local labor biweekly The Union Advocate, "NLRB staff has been reduced from nearly 3,000 full-time employees in 1980 to fewer than 2,000 in 1998." Lots more information on the rights of workers in the United States can be found in the Human Rights Watch report called "Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States Under International Human Rights Standards," released last August. Find it at: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/uslabor. |
|
"More than a quarter of the nation's bridges are too weak, dilapidated, or overburdened for their current traffic," according to an Associated Press published in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) on February 20th. These numbers come from an analysis of Federal Highway Administration (FHA) records conducted by the AP. The Star Trib did not report some other things from the FHA report, such as the fact that "the estimated average annual investment required to maintain the transit systems in the same condition as today is $10.8 billion. The estimated cost to improve the transit systems by eliminating deficiencies is estimated to be $16 billion." This means that our current transit spending would have to increase by 41 percent simply to maintain things as they are. In order to "eliminate deficiencies," transit spending would have to more than double from current levels. When's the last time you heard one of our national "leaders" recommend doubling our spending on transit? These and other fascinating details can be found in the Highway Information Quarterly Newsletter of September 2000. On the web at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hiqsep00.htm. |
|
I am hoping that not too many Nygaard Notes readers are excited about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. While it is the "big news" on election reform that is currently dominating the corporate media, it's not going to do much even if it does pass. Furthermore, even if it were to pass -- far from certain, weak though it is -- there are some troubling parts of the bill that I doubt you Nygaardians would want to be the law of the land. The Bad Parts One of the worst sections of McCain-Feingold is the one that "bars the use of corporate and union treasury money" for the placing of ads in support of specific candidates. As is typical in elite plans to "reform" campaign finance, there is no acknowledgment of the fundamental difference between "corporate" and "union" spending. That difference, of course, is that union leadership is democratically elected by the members of the union, and is thus accountable to them, while decisions about spending corporate money are made by owners and managers who are only accountable to other owners (stockholders), and not to the workers who generate that money. And even that limited accountability is only true in the case of publicly-held corporations; donation-makers in privately-held corporations are accountable to even fewer people, mainly themselves. For a useful summary of the M-F bill – including the noxious "Sec. 304. Codification of Beck Decision" – go to the Common Cause website at http://www.commoncause.org/issue_agenda/issues.htm. The Missing Parts More fundamentally, the thing that is supposed to excite us about McCain-Feingold is that it places some serious restrictions on the spending of "soft money" in campaigns. "Soft money" is the money that is given to groups, rather than to individual candidates, and it is supposedly not used to influence specific elections (no, I'm not kidding; some people actually believe this.) These "soft" donations are purportedly to be used for "party building," or some other nonsense. It's really just a giant loophole that allows corporations to spend money in connection with federal elections, which readers may be surprised to know has been illegal in the United States since 1907. Does anyone really think that limiting "soft money" will make much of a difference in the way elections are carried out in this country? Money comes in all sorts of forms: hard, soft, gelatinous, colloidal, vaporous, you-name-it. Ban one kind of money, and see another kind magically sprout up to do the job. Money is like any other drug in a market economy: Demand drives supply. In the case of cocaine, we can kill off the coca crop in Peru and, if nothing is done to reduce the number of drug users here in the U.S., the next thing you know there will be an increase in the coca crop in Colombia, Bolivia, Uzbekistan, or somewhere else. In the case of campaign money, as long as it costs several million dollars to get elected to the Senate, people are going to find some way to supply that drug, er, I mean, money. The fundamental problem with our democracy, of which our electoral woes are no more than a symptom, is that wealth and the power that comes with it are too highly concentrated in the hands of the few. And McCain-Feingold isn't going to do anything about that. |
|
If you only listen to National Public Radio or read your local daily paper, you could be forgiven for thinking that McCain-Feingold is the only game in town when it comes to campaign reform. That's not the case. In fact, some quite exciting legislation has been introduced around the country which aims at some real (i.e. structural) reform of our election procedures. Bills and charter amendments to study and/or implement such real democratic reforms as Proportional Representation (PR), Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), and Cumulative Voting (CV), are in play at all levels -- national, state, and municipal. At the Federal level, three interesting bills have been introduced in the House:
At the state level, no fewer than eleven states -- Alaska, Hawaii, California, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Vermont, Washington, and my own state of Minnesota – have legislation pending that would study or implement PR, IRV, or CV. In Minnesota, Senator Linda Scheid and four co-sponsors have introduced a bill that would do all kinds of things to improve elections, the most significant being to implement an Instant Runoff Voting process at the state level. Similar legislation has been introduced in the Minnesota House, although nary a word about any of this has appeared in the local corporate press. A few cities have taken matters into their own hands. In the elections of last November, which are justly famous for the reports of massive fraud and voting-rights violations, it was also the case that a couple of significant victories for election reform were won at the local level. Voters in two California cities, Oakland and San Leandro, approved city charter amendments that permit the use of instant runoff voting in city elections. These cities join Santa Clara County (CA) and Vancouver (WA) who have passed charter amendments allowing IRV in the past 2 years. Proportional or cumulative voting systems have long been in place at the local level in several states, from Illinois to Massachusetts to Alabama. This report is a summary only of official, legislative efforts to promote structural reform in our electoral process. Of course there are many people working at other levels to make serious changes in how we do this democracy thing. Discussion of those efforts, however, will have to wait for later issue of Nygaard Notes. If you want to know what I think, generally, about election reform, go look at my essay "Seven Steps to Better Elections" that appeared back in October, in Nygaard Notes #89. For more details on how Proportional Representation, Instant Runoff Voting, and Cumulative Voting actually work, plus information on the numerous campaigns to get them put in place, check out the website of the Center for Voting and Democracy at http://open.igc.org/cvd/index.html. Their site is chock-full of information about real electoral reform that you'll never see in the newspaper. |
|
Unlike the mainstream media, I resist using the standard labels of "left" and "right," "liberal"and "conservative" to refer to individuals and institutions. The main reason is that I think these labels are essentially meaningless, in the literal sense, and dangerously misleading, in the political sense. Let me use myself as an example. I favor retaining some traditional government programs from the New Deal and the Great Society eras of 65 and 35 years ago, respectively. This makes me "conservative." Of course, that only works if we use the word in the dictionary sense, as in "wanting to conserve things as they are." Many would say this makes me a "liberal." So we are already confused. I am also critical of these same programs for falling far short of what they should be, and favor improving them and making them much stronger. This makes me even more "liberal," although many people who are called "conservative" also call for significant reforms to these programs. Beyond that, I am working to create a society in which we don't need such government programs at all – indeed, where we don't need government at all! – which makes me (pick one) a radical, a revolutionary, an anarchist, or a certified nut-case. Many on the extreme "right" would say the same thing. So, what am I? A conservative? A liberal? A radical? Left? Right? I have even heard recently in the media the ridiculous term "the extreme center." Is that what I am? I have had numerous readers ask me, "What are you getting at with this newsletter? I can't tell where you're coming from." I can see where the confusion comes from. The Problem With Labels I have a general distaste for the labeling of people, who seem to me to be a little too complex to put in such neat and orderly boxes. Furthermore, I think these political labels can be significant obstacles to understanding the nature of our world and thus how to go about changing it for the better. This is so, first of all, because they make people who are fundamentally in agreement seem to be in opposition to each other. The perfect example is our two major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, which are routinely presented as "left" and "right," or "liberal" and "conservative." As I see it, they are both parties of the Business Class, basically in agreement about the capitalist, competitive, property-oriented nature of the society we should have. They differ only in how to maintain it. The other problem with using the standard political labels is that they lead people away from the serious discussions about philosophical differences which are necessary to make intelligent and effective choices about where to focus our energies in working for change. It's hard to fight for or against something for which one has no name. I don't pretend to have answers to all of this, but I have some thoughts which I will share in next week's Nygaard Notes. |