The voice of the student left at St. Louis U. HighSLUH

Wednesday, January 27, 2010Volume 1, Issue 3

Elections on the auction blockSupreme Court allows free corporate spending in campaigns

Joe KleinEditor

Write for the SLUH ProgressiveThe Progressive is a bi-weekly, issues-based opinion journal that strives to be the voice of the student left.

If you have progressive opinions or liberal leanings, we want you to write for us!

Contact the editors, seniors Jack Newsham (M114) or Ben Minden-Birkenmaier (M114), or sophomore Joe Klein (M209), in person or at progressive@sluh.org.

Questions? Comments? Clarifications? Disputes? We look forward to hearing from you!

The floodgates have been opened. On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case Citizens United v. FEC, ruling in favor of the group Citizens United, who had filed suit over whether they could broadcast their politically-charged documentary within sixty days of an election. While that consequence alone may appear trivial and insignificant, the repercussions of the decision are more grave. Simply put, this ruling will adversely influence the way elections are conducted for time to come, reducing the already sub-standard influence we citizens hold over them, while simultaneously allowing wealthy corporations and special interests to monopolize the election process. To begin, some background: the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act—more commonly known as McCain-Feingold, for its co-sponsors in the Senate—was passed by a relatively wide margin in 2002, and, in addition to mandating the now-common declaration of “I’m [candidate] and I approve this message,” prohibited corporations, unions, and

nonprofit organizations from sponsoring advertisements that directly target a political candidate during a time frame of 60 days before an election takes place. Opponents of this law sought to get it overturned, and, in 2003, they came extremely close, obtaining a Supreme Court hearing on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. That failed, however, and the Court rightly declared corporate money was not subject to the First Amendment rights of human citizens. This case was predicted to be treated as a precedent, which would influence the outcome of similar decisions in the future, and the matter was put to rest. However, the Supreme Court bucked tradition, far from “calling balls and strikes,” as John Roberts summarized his role during confirmation hearings, and overturned the precedent relatively quickly. During the 2008 primaries, Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit, developed a documentary entitled Hillary: The Movie, which they planned to air immediately before the Democratic primaries. Hillary was declared to fall under the umbrella of “electioneering communications,” or communications susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as

an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate” that were prohibited by McCain-Feingold—meaning that Hillary’s purpose was simply to discredit then-Senator Hillary Clinton and urge voters to vote against her. Therefore, it was prohibited from being shown. Although some might argue that this ruling represents nothing new, since corporate contributions are not banned outside of that 60-day period, I point them in the direction of the 1988 election that placed George Bush against Michael Dukakis. A political action committee released an advertisement linking Dukakis with Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who murdered again during a furlough from prison. This advertisement played a direct role in Dukakis’ defeat. That ad premiered in late September 1988, and thus would have been illegal for airing under McCain-Feingold. The content, origin, and wording of this ad are irrelevant. What matter, however, are the aftershocks one advertisement can have in the days leading up to an election. If this ruling is allowed to stand, many more of these Willie Horton-esque advertisements will be seen, with greater intensity, financed by corporations’

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2 1.3January 27, 2010

Russia under Yeltsin:Jack Newsham

Editor

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Most readers of the Progressive weren’t around when the Soviet Union fell. Most of us could only recall something about Mikhail Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall, and Ronald Reagan. But the truth is much more complex and much, much darker than the story of what Reagan termed the “Evil Empire” collapsing under its own weight. The story is wrought in blood and gunfire, a story similar to the “Miracle of Chile” discussed in our last issue, a story that lead to the impoverishment of millions, the deaths of hundreds, and complete economic collapse. The beginning of the end for the USSR was relatively bright. Mikhail Gorbachev, who had won over the West with his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), strove to create what a Slovak politician referred to as “socialism with a human face.” He began a process of political decentralization, from reinstituting a parliament with competitive elections for the first time since 1936 to allotting more power to local councils. Similarly, he began to liberate the economy, allowing private business ownership for the first time since Lenin. However, at the G7 meeting of 1991, the message from the rest of the Western world was clear: if Gorbachev expected any aid, he would have to institute shock therapy, a suggestion Gorbachev recalled as “astonishing.” From a 1990 piece in the Economist that called for “strong-man rule...to smash the resistance” to the Washington Post’s advocating “the Pinochet option,” the consensus of the West was clear: more shock therapy, faster. On August 19, 1991, the process that resulted in Boris Yeltsin’s eclipse of Gorbachev began. A group of radical Communists drove tanks up to the White House, a building in Moscow that houses the parliament, and threatened to open fire on the country’s first democratically elected parliament in decades. With a crowd of citizens behind him, Yeltsin, Russia’s president, climbed onto a tank and condemned the coup, paving his way to political stardom. What followed, a process well-documented but generally written off as simply “reforms,” was a dark start to a new Russia. Riding his newfound glory, Yeltsin and two other leaders of Soviet republics announced that the Soviet Union was no more, forcing

Gorbachev’s resignation. The shocks were put into place immediately. In late 1991, Yeltsin went before parliament and called upon the body to give him the power—for one year—to issue laws by decree, circumventing parliament, and he would rebuild the Russian economy. According to the book The Shock Doctrine, Yeltsin immediately assembled a team of self-proclaimed free-market revolutionaries, dubbed “the Chicago Boys” by the Russian press, headed by the young Yegor Gaidar. To aid Yeltsin’s efforts, in 1992, the United States’ USAID awarded the Harvard Institute for International Development a multi-million dollar contract to build a new Russian economy, from writing privatization decrees to designing a Russian stock market. The stage had been set for a free-market disaster. Beginning in October 1991, before the USSR had even been officially dissolved, Yeltsin lifted price controls, a move opposed by 70% of the country, and began privatizing more than 225,000 state-owned companies as fast as possible. The speed was intentional; in a country where The Political Economy of Policy Reform noted that 67% of citizens supported workers’ cooperatives as the best method of privatization, democracy could not get in the way. Despite Yeltsin’s baseless promise that “for approximately six months, things will be worse,” the results were still being inflicted a year later. By that point, over one-third of the population had fallen into poverty. By the year’s end, inflation had passed 2,500%, destroying the life savings of millions. Thousands of middle-class Russians were forced to to sell their personal belongings from card tables, a societal collapse that The Agony of Reform notes was praised as “entrepreneurial” by Chicago School economists. Coming out of their stunned state, the Russian people rebelled against the free-market experiment they were being subjected to. In December 1992, the parliament voted to unseat Gaidar, Yeltsin’s economic adviser, and by March voted to strip Yeltsin of his law-by-decree power, tired of the experiment and desiring a return to democracy. Yeltsin wouldn’t hear it. He declared a state of emergency, which conveniently reinstated his dictatorial powers. Immediately afterward, the Russian Constitutional Court ruled that he had violated, on eight counts, the constitution he was charged to

The free market at gunpoint

thick wallets. These ads will do what the Horton ad did: obscure the truth and prevent voters from making an informed decision on whom to cast their ballot for. Unless proper legislative action is taken to neutralize many of the aftershocks of this ruling, the potential implications from it could be disastrous. A candidate who supports stricter regulations on tobacco would be faced with a tsunami of negative advertising directed at that candidate financed by the tobacco industry. The Center for Public Integrity offered another example. The oil refining company CITGO is in fact not an independent company, but a subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, the nationalized, government-operated petroleum company owned

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by Venezuela. Theoretically, it would then be possible for Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president, to dictate his preferred candidate and open a direct sphere of influence in American elections. While the likelihood of this taking place is doubtful, it is still theoretically possible under this ruling (federal law prohibits foreign nationals from financing “electioneering communications;” however, the issue of domestic subsidiaries of multinational corporations was not addressed by the Court). Do we really want to sit back and let the Supreme Court declare normal citizen the David to the special interests’ Goliath? The Court’s equating corporate and union billions with citizens’ speech and contributions is a mockery of justice and a slap in the face of bipartisanship. Our legislators must act quickly to reinstitute protections—if their Congressional tenures aren’t choked out by corporate money first.

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Russia(continued from the previous page)

“So much for economic reform and democratic reform going hand in hand.”

protect. So much for economic reform and democratic reform going hand-in-hand; Yeltsin had pitted himself directly against the elected parliament and the nation’s constitution. That didn’t stop the West from supporting him. Bill Clinton called him “committed to freedom and democracy,” and the Financial Times referred to parliament as “communist hardliners” for opposing a dictatorship comparable to communist Russia. The Washington Post referred to the legislature as “antigovernment,” as though the parliament itself were not the most legitimate part of the government. Emboldened, Yeltsin issued a decree abolishing the constitution and dissolving parliament. Two days later, parliament voted 636-2 to impeach him, and swore in the vice-president (by this point Yeltsin’s critic) as president. The Constitutional Court deemed Yeltsin’s actions unconstitutional (indeed, according to the constitution, he was to be stripped of all power for even trying to change government structure). That didn’t stop the United States from sending him $2.5 billion in aid. With this measure of support, Yeltsin gave up on any premise of democracy. In late September, Yeltsin ordered parliament blockaded. As protests grew, with tens of thousands demanding an end to Yeltsin’s power grab, he completely cut off access to the Russian White House, holding parliament hostage. As a crowd stormed the TV center (recently bought up by cronies of Yeltsin) to demand that the news be announced, they were machine-gunned by Yeltsin’s troops, and nearly 100 were killed. On October 4, after nearly a week of siege in which electricity, water, and phone lines were cut, Yeltsin followed the footsteps of his free-market predecessor, Pinochet: over 5,000 Russian troops shelled, stormed, and burned the Russian White House, seizing a grand total of 11 weapons, making 300 arrests, and saving Yeltsin from the grave danger of democracy. Yeltsin had gone from defending parliament from tanks to setting tanks upon the Russian White House himself a mere two years later. Nearly 500 were killed in the most violent street fighting seen by Moscow since 1917, as documented in The Shock Doctrine. Conjuring images of Pinochet’s Chile, many arrested that day were held in a sports stadium. Many others report being severely beaten at police stations. Yeltsin received full support from the U.S.; the next day, the Washington Post ran the headline, “Victory Seen for Democracy.” And what did the economic co-conspirators to Yeltsin’s strong-arm dictatorship do? As Jeffery Sachs, an adviser to Yeltsin, had said, “there was no shock therapy” before the coup, but “(n)ow there is a chance to do something.” Budgets were slashed, price controls were lifted on even the most basic necessities, and Russia was completely plundered of her state industries, with a clique of newly-rich Russians, deemed “the oligarchs,” living it up

and moving profits offshore at a rate of $2 billion per month, as reported by journalist Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. But Yeltsin and the oligarchs still had reason to be afraid. With elections dawning in 1996, a full half of the country in poverty (a thirty-eight-fold increase since 1989) according to the World Bank, and Yeltsin’s approval ratings in the single digits—8%, according to San Francisco Public Radio—their grip on power was in a precarious state. Even a quick success in the 1994 war against Chechnya didn’t help, and at least one of Yeltsin’s advisers was quoted in the Washington Post as supporting canceling the election. Thanks, however, to what The Shock Doctrine reports as $100 million in financing (thirty-three times the legal limit) from his oligarch cronies and 800 times more television coverage than his rivals, Yeltsin eked out a victory. Russia was now open for business. The plunder of its state industries reached new heights in Yeltsin’s second term. Norilsk Nickel, which controls one-fifth of the world’s supply, sold for $170 million, though it made $1.5 billion in annual profits. The oil giant Yukos was sold for $309 million, roughly one-tenth of its annual

revenue, and a stake in the oil company Sidanko sold for $130 million, only to be valued at $2.8 billion—over twenty-one times the original price—two years later. Further, the Moscow Times revealed that much of this scheming was done with public money, wherein oligarch-controlled banks would use public money deposited in them to bid in auctions for the country’s resources—the same auctions they were managing. As Klein observed, “the Russian people fronted the money for the looting of their own country.” And, like Chile, the story wouldn’t be complete without corruption on part of the very architects of the deregulation disaster.

Remember Harvard’s role? The head of the project and his deputy were accused and found guilty of profiting from the markets they were supposed to be privatizing, funneling money through family members, and directly violating their contract with the U.S. government. They were fined millions, and Harvard settled with the government for $26.5 million (unfortunately, Russia would not see a dime). And, just like with Pinochet, Yeltsin’s own family got rich, his children and their spouses appointed to executive positions at large privatized firms. By the time Yeltsin left office on New Year’s Eve of 1999, his approval rating was at 2%, according to CNN. Vladimir Putin’s first act as president was to sign a law protecting Yeltsin from any prosecution that could have resulted from his criminal reign. The legacy left by decades of Chicago School economics has been one giant log of corruption, collusion, and human rights abuses, from Chile’s Chicago Boys, to Russia’s oligarchs, to Sri Lanka’s post-tsunami land grabs, to Iraqi war profiteers. It is a legacy that was best encapsulated by Klein: the point of economic shock “is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly—not despite the lawlessness but precisely because of it.”

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Ben Minden-BirkenmaierEditor

Supermajority shattered:How the Democrats can still wield Congressional power

All human beings have a right to health care. The largest obstacle that prevents Americans from exercising this right is financial inability, not government interference. As reported by Reuters news service, more than 46 million people in the United States are without adequate healthcare, and out of those 46 million, 40 million lack coverage because they cannot afford it. Both bills recently passed by the House and Senate would address this financial inability through federal aid and insurance regulation while maintaining the competitive, free market health care arena that our conservative counterparts prize. But in the Senate, the bill was watered down significantly to gain support from conservative Blue Dog Democrats in order to form a 60 vote supermajority. Such a supermajority is widely seen as the only fool-proof way to pass legislation without the threat of a Republican filibuster. But there is another tool which could be used to pass this important legislation over Republican road blocks, a tool used by Republicans during the Bush era to steamroll Democratic opposition. This tool is a procedural move called budget reconciliation, and it involves packaging the proposed legislation as part of spending or tax targets in the federal budget. Presented this way, legislation can be passed with a simple 51 vote majority, negating the need for a 60 vote supermajority. Republicans are complaining that any use of the budget reconciliation process would be akin to “running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River” as Judd Gregg, the Republican Senator from New Hampshire said. His melodramatic statement fails to take into account the fact that Budget Reconciliation is a fairly routine move that has been used to pass, according to the Library of Congress’ website, at least 23

pieces of major legislation since 1980. Furthermore, as noted by the writers at ThinkProgress.org, Senator Gregg has conveniently forgotten that Republicans used this same tactic against Democrats several times during the Bush years in order to pass controversial tax cut legislation which later ballooned the federal deficit. Gregg is even on record as supporting the use of budget reconciliation to pass legislation allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 2005. This response continues the troubling trend in Republican Senate activity of turning to procedural moves to obstruct legislation, rather than working toward bipartisan compromise. “We have crossed the mark of over 100 filibusters and acts of procedural obstruction in less than one year,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said on the floor on December 20, 2009. “Never since the founding of the Republic, not even in the bitter sentiments preceding Civil War, was such a thing ever seen in this body.” As such, Republican opposition to the fairness of the budget reconciliation tactic seems hypocritical at best. Democrats, though, have so far proven reluctant to use the budget reconciliation tactic to pass health care reform legislation, prefering instead to cobble together 60 votes from grudging conservative support. This led to the passage of a Senate bill that was severely weakened in order to obtain this support, though, a bill which had no provision for the public option that most progressives agree is needed. With Democratic senatorial candidate Martha Coakley’s loss to Republican Scott Brown, Democrats are left with only 59 votes in the Senate, one short of a supermajority. With no alternative, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may soon find himself forced to resort to using budget reconciliation, or risk losing any hope of passing a combined House-Senate bill. The need for health care reform is urgent, and faced by a powerful Republican opposition driven mostly by fear and ignorance, Democrats must use every procedural tool at their disposal.

Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO):E-mail: Go to http://mccaskill.senate.gov/, then click “Contact Claire.”Phone: (202)-224-6154Mail: 717 Hart Senate Office Building,District of Columbia 20510-2505

Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-MO):E-mail: Go to http://bond.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.ContactFormPhone: (202)-224-5721Mail: 274 Russell Senate Office Building,District of Columbia 20510-2503

Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO-3):E-mail: Go to https://forms.house.gov/carnahan/web-forms/issue_subscribe.htm

Phone: (202) 225-2671Mail:1710 Longworth House Office BuildingWashington DC, 20515

Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO-1):E-mail: Go to http://lacyclay.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=90&sectiontree=3,90Phone (D.C.): (202) 225-2406Mail (D.C.): 2418 Rayburn House Office BuildingWashington D.C. , 20515

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO-2):E-mail: Go to http://akin.house.gov/email.shtmlPhone: (202) 225-2561Mail: 117 Cannon House Office Bldg.Washington, D.C. 20515

Contact your representatives: