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Every real problem this country and this planet face is replaced by a fantasy problem, which all the powers of government then pretend to address. Meet Donald Trump, master of the street con, trickster extraordinaire.

How many cabinet positions and high-level government posts have been filled by someone whose life work and raison detre make him or her the least qualified person imaginable for the job? Names burst from the news: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions . . .

And now theres Kris Kobach, who brings an ironic twist to the con, in that hes actually a perfect fit for the position he has recently been given by Trump: vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a.k.a., the voter fraud commission, whose mandate is to stanch the flow of illegal people swarming into Americas polling places by the millions and, ahem, voting. Good God, they almost threw the election to Hillary last year.

Kobach, Kansas secretary of state, is the guy who developed Crosscheck, a voter-tracking system that is ingenious in its inanity: It finds people on the list of registered voters in participating states who have the same names, like . . . oh, James Brown . . . and declares that they are one person voting multiple times. And they are then subject to removal from the voter roll, even (eyeball roll is appropriate here) if their middle names differ. This is such an obviously inept process its hard to believe anyone on the planet takes it seriously. But its part of hardcore Republican governance.

Its almost as though, in an eerie way, Trump Republicans really do believe that illegal voters are invading the system if not technically illegal, then morally illegal, in that voting against Trump proposals or Republican ideas in general (the wall, the elimination of Medicaid) is a sign that that youre not a real American. And this is especially true if you belong to a racial minority.

The mission of Kobachs commission is to ensure that Republican America holds strong, even as the party itself sinks ever more deeply into minority status.

The New York Times editorial board defined the real goal of the Commission on Election Integrity thus: to make voting harder for millions of Americans, on the understanding that Republicans win more elections when fewer people vote.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast, who has long been sounding the warning about Crosscheck, put it a bit more bluntly: This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply arent enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guysand they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students the list goes on. Its a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

American quasi-democracy has a long, long history of what one might call protective racism, and it hasnt gone away. What requires protection is the status quo of power. And nothing is more inconvenient to the status quo than real democracy, with regular people having a say in the creation of their social structure. That means the politically powerful are always vulnerable, especially if they focus on serving their own interests, not their constituents. You can see the problem with that.

The Crosscheck program, as well as the presidential claim that the problem with Americas democracy is that too many people are voting, are examples of contemporary deeply coded racial politics. According to Palast, Crosschecks list of suspect voters in the 2016 election was so racially biased that fully one in six registered African-Americans were tagged in the Crosscheck states that include the swing states of Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona and more.

Forget about the Russians. Election tampering is a game played by Republicans. And its hardly limited to Crosscheck. Another highly effective vote suppression measure is the recent spate of strict voter ID laws, which, according to a study by researchers at the University of California San Diego, skew democracy in favor of whites and those on the political right.

This is because the lack of proper identification that is, a government-issued photo ID is not evenly distributed across the population. Studies show that a lack of identification is particularly acute among the minority population, the poor, and the young, according to the study.

Furthermore, existing laws are not applied evenly. Instead, poll workers disproportionately ask minorities for identification. And, the study notes, these laws are passed almost exclusively by Republicans and . . . they tend to emerge in states with larger black populations.

Other tricks and games meant to suppress minority voting include fewer polling locations, shorter hours for voting, repeal of same-day voter registration and the disenfranchisement of felons and (in three states) ex-felons, which is one of many shattering consequences of the countrys expanded prison-industrial complex.

The effects of voter ID laws that we see here are eerily similar to the impact of measures like poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and at-large elections which were used by the white majority decades and centuries ago to help deny blacks many basic rights, the study concludes.

The fraud is committed by those who govern, not those who vote. It comes from the top down.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Source: http://commondreams.org

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Skewing Democracy White - eNews Park Forest

In my last post, I noted that NancyMacLean claimed with regard to George Mason Universitys law school and its most influential dean, Henry Manne, that Mannes law school would stake out a position on the side of corporations against consumerism and environmentalism, two causes that had grown in popularity and influence since the 1970s. His faculty would advocate the superiority of unregulated corporate capitalism and assert, as Manne himself argued in print, that companies needed liberation from the distortions created by government intervention.

I pointed out thatMacLeans footnoted sources for asserting that Manne wanted the George Mason Law School to stake out particular political positions are as follows: John Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (1984), and M. Bruce Johnsen, ed., The Attack on Corporate America: The Corporate Issues Sourcebook (1978). The latter source, I recounted, published eight years before Manne became dean at GMU, stated Mannes personal position on unregulated corporate capitalism, but never suggested that he sought to impose this on a law school.

I have since received the relevant page cited in The Conservative Labryrinth. Here it is:TN 379209.doc

The page in question describes the fact that Manne ran economics programs for judges through the Law and Economics Center at Emory University and the University of Miami. It doesnt remotely support what MacLean wrote about Manne and the law school. For what its worth, and as befits a program aimed at federal judges, Mannes programs were truly focused on teaching judges economics, not ideology. For example, he paired the famous liberal economist, Paul Samuelson, with Milton Friedman when putting together his faculty. So not only does the reference to LEC programs fail to support MacLeans point, if anything it undermines it.

Meanwhile, toward the very end of the book, we find this sentence: Faculty at the George Mason School of Law, now aptly named after Justice Antonin Scalia, are urging [the Supreme Court] to fire [a loaded gun] by going back to its pre-1937 jurisprudence, when the justices routinely [sic] struck down government action to advance popular economic security or social justice goals. In support of that assertion, she cites my book Rehabilitating Lochner. Nowhere in the book do I suggest that the court go back to its pre-1937 jurisprudence, nor do I take any other normative position on constitutional jurisprudence. A minor point, perhaps, but at some point, given all the other documentedflaws with the book, one wonders whether one can trust the footnotes to support the text.

Its also indicative of a lack of understanding of the broader subject matter that MacLean thinks both that George Mason faculty support a return to the limited government jurisprudence of the pre-New Deal period and that the law school is aptly named after Scalia, who of course was strongly opposed to the courts pre-1937 due process jurisprudence on economic and personal liberty. Nor was Scalia inclined to return national power to anything remotely approaching its pre-1937 constitutional limits, as his vote to uphold prosecution of non-commercial growing of marijuana reveals. But MacLean seems to believe that Scalia, like Edwin Meese, was a secret member of the libertarian cadre.

Finally, MacLean seems to suggest the economist James Buchanan, the villain of the book, developed his public choice ideas in response to Brown v. Board of Education, though she provides no documentation of this relationship. How direct she believes the connection to be isnt 100 percent clear from the book, but the dust jacket, which one assumes she approved in my experience authors always get to approve the text of the dust jackets boldly states that Buchanan first forged his ideas in Virginia, in a last-gap attempt to preserve the power of the white elite in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. As Michael Munger points out in a comprehensive review of the book, desegregation seems an odd choice for MacLean to emphasize. It was after all desegregation that was imposed, at the point of a bayonet, at the command of an anti-majoritarian institution, the Supreme Court. Put another way, MacLeans primary criticism of Buchanan is that his work on constitutional economics was fundamentally anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic. Its illogical to surmise that he came to his anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic views as a hostile response to an anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic* supreme court decision.

*Its true that the segregation was imposed in many Southern jurisdictions that were at best imperfect democracies, as African Americans were largely disenfranchised. But the defendants in Brown included jurisdictions that arent subject to that criticism, such as Topeka, Kan., where the majority clearly supported segregation.

More:
Yet more dubious claims in Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains' - Washington Post

A demonstration in Taksim Square, Istanbul, against the failed coup attempt on July 17, 2016. Turkey has remained under a state of emergency since, and a constitutional referendum was held and won with a narrow majority to convert the countrys parliamentary system into an executive presidency.

Last week I received a bizarre invitation. A bureaucrat in Istanbul asked me to help the Turkish government celebrate its commitment to democracy. I was invited to be one of about 30 journalists who will contribute articles to a special magazine that is to be distributed in Istanbul and six foreign cities on July 15.

Each article is supposed to be about the benefits of strong democracies.

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My friend Sahin Alpay, a veteran Turkish journalist who is also a political science professor, is better qualified than I am to write on that theme. As a young leftist, he was persecuted after both the 1973 and 1980 military coups in Turkey. He spent years in exile, mostly in Sweden. His political views moderated, and by the time he returned home, by his own account, he had gone from disillusioned Marxist to convinced liberal social democrat. He became a newspaper columnist and radio commentator. When Michael Dukakis visited Turkey in 1999, he translated Dukakiss comments for other Turkish reporters. In 2002 he surprised some of his secularist colleagues by announcing that he would vote for the rising political star Recep Tayyip Erdogan, arguing that Erdogans democratic promise outweighed his Islamist impulses.

Unfortunately, my friend is no longer in a position to write articles for anyone. He is one of more than 200 Turkish journalists and other media workers now languishing in jail. His crime was writing columns that are now seen as having expressed subversive opinions. Prosecutors have asked that he be penalized with three consecutive terms of life imprisonment, plus up to 15 years for membership in an armed terror group. He is 73 years-old and the sweetest guy I have ever known.

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After his arrest, the German newspaper Die Zeit called him one of the most important liberal voices in Turkey, and concluded that few arrests seem as absurd as that of Sahin Alpay. My friend may or may not be a hero of the Turkish press. After he was dismissed from several newspapers for writing articles that disturbed people in power, he landed at one that was loyal to the exiled Turkish cleric Fetullah Gulen. Several times he called Gulen a supporter of moderate Islam. He did not jump to protest when anti-Gulen journalists were imprisoned. Perhaps he made some misjudgments a sin that many columnists, maybe including me, have occasionally committed. Now, for what he has written, he faces the possibility of spending years in jail. I am not allowed to visit him, but a news report several months after his arrest said that he was confined to a cell with two other prisoners and forbidden even to walk in the jailhouse courtyard. His wife brings him books and anti-depressant medication.

Turkey was progressive and free. Until it wasnt. Will the US take heed?

President Erdogan was once an ally of Gulen. They feuded, parted company, and became enemies. After a failed military coup in Turkey last year, their enmity turned deadly. Erdogan asserted that Gulen was behind the coup attempt. Anyone who ever worked for his newspaper or wrote a good word about him suddenly became the equivalent of a Jew in Nazi Germany: a vile traitor who deserved the nations hatred. I have no way of knowing whether my friend regrets anything he wrote. As a fallible newspaper columnist myself, however, I can only howl in protest at the specter of columnists being given sentences beyond those given to serial killers, simply because of what they published in a newspaper.

Turkey spent more than 80 years marching slowly, with many reversals, toward democracy. Now it is sliding in the opposite direction. President Erdogan, who rode to power partly due to the support of secular democrats like my friend, no longer tolerates the clash of ideas that is democracys essence. More journalists are now in jail in Turkey than in any other country.

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Sahin Alpays sad fate reflects more than the collapse of journalism in Turkey. It is part of a larger story: the terrible decline of Turkish democracy. Fifteen years ago the entire Middle East was abuzz with excitement over the Turkish model, a new mix of freedom and Muslim piety. Turkey seemed like the coolest place on earth. Now it is a world leader in repression.

Even bigger than that huge story is the global meaning of President Erdogans turn toward autocratic rule. From Egypt to Hungary to the Philippines, demagogues like him are using the tools of democracy to destroy democracy.

They show how fragile free institutions can be. It is a sobering message for all especially, at this moment, for Americans. Once in a while, after reading too much about the madness enveloping Washington, I catch myself wondering whether my friends in Germany or Costa Rica or Canada will one day be writing columns lamenting my imprisonment because of something I once wrote.

Rather than ignore the invitation I received to write an article celebrating Turkish democracy, I replied. My proposal was to contribute an article asserting that any leader who imprisons journalists for what they have written is a deadly enemy of democracy.

There has been no reply.

The rest is here:
My friend faces three life sentences in Turkey - The Boston Globe

Lots of things are said about students, on a regular basis. Rarely are they good; that were lazy and apathetic, entitled snowflakes, overeducated and under-prepared for the rigmaroles of life.

This has reached a fever pitch post-election, during which itis widely acknowledged that the youth and student vote played a large role in the surprise outcome. Its estimated there was a 13 percentage point increase in under-25s voting in this General Election compared to the last. Instudent heavy areas Canterbury, Devon and Sheffield Hallam, for instance, we played a decisive role.

This has led to a number of retributions in the aftermath of the surprise hung parliament. Society had begged, pleaded young people to engage with its democratic processes, only for us to find that when we did, we were doing it wrong.

So now the din of battle has died down in the distance, and we all start gearing up for what could well be another general election around the corner, Id like to unpick some of the things that have been said in the last few weeks

1. Its unfair for students to vote in their university constituencies

The most mendacious claims pushed by the likes of Andrea Leadsom and Philip Davies were that some students "double voted"in their family and student constituencies. This Trump-esque claim is the democratic equivalent of losing a game of football and blaming the referee. Try as I might, I simply couldnt find any evidence to substantiate this claim.

Linked to this, there have been ideas put forward for students to only be allowed to vote in their family constituencies, rather than being given the choice of where they study. This ignores the 73bn that Universities UK estimates universities add to UK economy, the millions of lives changed and communities improved by colleges, and the untold positive social impacts that students have on their communities each and every day. It ignores that their student constituency is where they, yknow, live.

But more than this, it is simply saying; students arent people like other constituents. Because you voted the wrong way, you dont deserve the opportunity at all. Its no wonder that only 12 per centof students we surveyed before the election think that politicians value the views of young people; it would seem to be because many simply dont.

2. Students were bribed

Theres a couple of things to this; you say bribe, I say "putting forward a manifesto that speaks to young people". The concept of giveaways in political party manifestos is hardly new, except it is, because it used to be solely for the elderly. This doesnt work on a more fundamental level anyway, as weve shown time and time again that students dont vote based on self-interest, but on the sort of society they want to see.

When we at the National Union of Students surveyed students before the election, weve found that they arent obsessed with niche concerns or self-interested they give importance to the same issues that the rest of wider society does. Just before the election over half (57 per cent) of students identified the NHS as the biggest issue in deciding their vote, with cost of living and education chosen by approximately a third each, and Brexit and student funding chosen by approximately a quarter each.

3. This was Revenge of the Youth

Firstly, this is not Kill Bill. Revenge doesnt look like under-25s queuing up to get into their polling station. But dont get me wrong; young people have every right to be angry, and to demand change at the ballot box.

This is the first generation who will earn less in real terms than generation before it (according to the Intergenerational Commission), while the average age of first-time home buyers is now 33 (according to the English Housing Survey 14/15)

Over half of studentsfear for their career opportunities, even while nearly four in 10 say their educational opportunities are increasing. And more widely they are pessimistic about fairness and wealth inequality, jobsand economy.

Once again, students are urged to change society by partaking in its democracy. Yet when we do so, we are criticised for it.

4. Students just dont understand

Weve been hoodwinked, tricked I tell you. We cant be trusted to make informed choices about our lives and rest of society.

Aside from the fact that this has been an argument employed to stop (in no particular order) working class people, women and the BME community from voting in the first place, this seems like a particularly foolish argument. The notion that "if only people were smart enough, to understand (my view), everything would be fine"doesnt feel particularly democratic.

Despite all this, 69 per centof students we surveyed told us that voting in a general election will make a difference to them and their peers. Despite all this, youth voter turnout is the highest its been ina generation. And despite all this, my generation are more determined, not less to vote for the sort of society that is worthy of our futures.

So, the results are in,students are people too. We vote, we care about the same things as others and we make our voices heard.

The challenge for our political leaders, whenever the next general election happens, is to show young people and students that there is something worth voting for.

Because we wont settle for less.

Richard Brooks is the outgoing vice president for union development at the National Union of Students.

Read the original post:
Students heeded calls to engage with democracy, now we're being told we got it wrong - New Statesman

Everybodys finding errors in Duke historian Nancy MacLeans work of speculative historical fiction on Nobel laureate James Buchanan and the libertarian movement, Democracy in Chains. Id feel left out if I werent misquoted, so Im relieved to find my name on page 211. Heres what MacLean says about me and some of my purported allies:

Now: Did I actually say that the poor and working class are intent on exploiting the rich? Or that they contribute nothing? Well, heres what I wrote on pp. 252-53 of The Libertarian Mind, which is the source MacLean footnotes:

Economists call this process rent-seeking, or transfer-seeking. Its another illustration of Oppenheimers distinction between the economic and the political means. Some individuals and businesses produce wealth. They grow food or build things people want to buy or perform useful services. Others find it easier to go to Washington, a state capital, or a city hall and get a subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors. Thats the political means to wealth, and, sadly, its been growing faster than the economic means.

Of course, in the modern world of trillion-dollar governments handing out favors like Santa Claus, it becomes harder to distinguish between the producers and the transfer-seekers, the predators and the prey. The state tries to confuse us, like the three-card monte dealer, by taking our money as quietly as possible and then handing some of it back to us with great ceremony. We all end up railing against taxes but then demanding our Medicare, our subsidized mass transit, our farm programs, our free national parks, and on and on and on. Frederic Bastiat explained it in the nineteenth century: The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. In the aggregate, we all lose, but its hard to know who is a net loser and who is a net winner in the immediate circumstance.

On the preceding pages I introduced James Buchanan and the concept of public choice:

One of the key concepts of Public Choice is concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. That means that the benefits of any government program are concentrated on a few people, while the costs are diffused among many people. Take ADMs ethanol subsidy, for instance. If ADM makes $200 million a year from it, it costs each American about a dollar. Did you know about it? Probably not. Now that you do, are you going to write your congressman and complain? Probably not. Are you going to fly to Washington, take your senator out to dinner, give him a thousand-dollar contribution, and ask him not to vote for the ethanol subsidy? Of course not. But you can bet that ADMs corporate officers are doing all that and more. Think about it: How much would you spend to get a $200 million subsidy from the federal government? About $199 million if you had to, Ill bet. So who will members of Congress listen to? The average Americans who dont know that theyre paying a dollar each for ADMs profits? Or ADM, which is making a list and checking it twice to see whos voting for their subsidy?

I also wrote on page 253 about the parasite economy, in which

every group in society comes up with a way for the government to help it or penalize its competitors: businesses seek tariffs, unions call for minimum-wage laws (which make high-priced skilled workers more economical than cheaper, low-skilled workers), postal workers get Congress to outlaw private competition, businesses seek subtle twists in regulations that hurt their competitors more than themselves.

Lets be clear: when public choice economists and I talk about rent seeking and concentrated benefits, and we point to subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors, were not trying to protect the rich. Were talking about ways that businesses, unions, and other organized interest groups seek to use government to gain advantages that they couldnt gain in the marketplace. And when we suggest limiting the power of government to hand out such favors, we are arguing in the interests of workers and consumers.

I do not believe that MacLeans two very short quotations from The Libertarian Mind and the paragraphs in which she situates them fairly depict my argument in the book. One might even say that she reversed the meaning of the predators and the prey. Unfortunately, selective quotation and misrepresentation seem to be MacLeans M.O., as Steve Horwitz, Phil Magness, Russ Roberts, David Henderson, David Bernstein, Bernstein again, Nick Gillespie, Michael Munger, and others have pointed out.

By the way, Professor MacLean derides me as a writer subsidized by wealthy donors. Well, yes, its true that the Cato Institute is supported by voluntary contributions, not by tax funding. And donors to organizations Duke University, NPR, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute tend to be well-off. But I assure Professor MacLean that I was absorbing the ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek, the American Founders, and John Stuart Mill long before I discovered that there might be jobs available to write about such ideas.

Although James Buchanan was not involved in the founding of the Cato Institute, as MacLean writes, we are proud that he chose to write frequently for the Cato Journal,speak at various Cato events, and allow us to count him as a Distinguished Senior Fellow. And we regret that he has been so ill treated by a fellow academic.

Read more:
Another Misleading Quotation in Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains - Cato Institute (blog)