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We're coming to the end of what might be called the anti-democracy decade. It began Jan. 21, 2010, with the Supreme Court's shameful decision in Citizen's United v. Federal Election Commission, opening the floodgates to big money in politics with the absurd claim that the First Amendment protects corporate speech.

It ends with Donald Trump in the White House, filling his administration with corporate shills and inviting foreign powers to interfere in American elections.

Trump is the consequence rather than the cause of the anti-democratic surge. By the 2016 election, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans 24,949 very wealthy people accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign contributions. That same year, corporations flooded the presidential, Senate and House elections with $3.4 billion of donations. Labor unions no longer provided any countervailing power, contributing only $213 million $1 for every $16 corporate dollars.

Big corporations and the super-wealthy lavished their donations on the Republican Party because Republicans promised them a giant tax cut if they won. As Sen. Lindsey Graham warned his Republican colleagues "financial contributions will stop" if the GOP didn't come through.

The political investments paid off big. Pfizer, whose 2016 contributions to the GOP totaled $16 million, will reap an estimated $39 billion in tax savings by 2022. GE contributed $20 million and will get back $16 billion. Chevron donated $13 million and will receive $9 billion.

Groups supported by Charles and the late David Koch spent more than $20 million promoting the tax cut, which will save them and their heirs between $1 billion and $1.4 billion a year.

Not even a sizzling economy could match these returns.

With the help of the tax cut, corporate profits are now at an all-time high. But almost nothing has trickled down. Companies have spent most of their extra cash on stock buybacks and dividends. This has given the stock market a sugar high but has left little for workers.

The anti-democracy decade has been hard on American workers. Despite the longest economic expansion in modern history, real wages have barely risen. The share of corporate profits going to workers still isn't back to where it was before the 2008 financial crisis. Never in the history of economic data have corporate profits outgrown employee compensation so clearly and for so long.

The so-called "free market" has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts and corporate welfare.

No wonder confidence in political institutions has plummeted. In 1964, just 29% of voters believed that government was "run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." By 2013, 79% of Americans believed it.

Enter Donald Trump.

"Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place," Trump charged in his nomination-acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 2016, and then he rode the rigging all the way into the Oval Office.

It doesn't have to be this way. Even if Citizens United isn't reversed by the Supreme Court or defanged by constitutional amendment, a principled Congress and decent president could still rescue our democracy. House Democrats have already begun with their "For the People Act," the first legislation introduced when they gained a majority. It expands voting rights, limits partisan gerrymandering, strengthens ethics rules and limits the influence of private donor money by providing $6 of public financing for every $1 of small donations (up to $200) raised by participating candidates.

On the other hand, a second Trump term of office could make the anti-democracy decade a mere prelude to the wholesale destruction of American democracy.

Trump couldn't care less. As he said in 2016, "I gave money to everybody, even the Clintons, because that's how the system works." These might have been the most honest words ever to come out of his mouth.

Robert Reich's columns are distributed by the Tribune Content Agency.

Originally posted here:
Kingdom of the rich displacing our democracy - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com

Years ago when I was a boy my Uncle Eddy had a mule named Frank. Uncle Eddy bought a tractor but couldnt bring himself to get rid of Frank. As things worked out Frank outlived Uncle Eddy and when Frank did die, we had to dig a big hole.

The Democratic Party has a mule for a mascot animal because mules were on most farms back when a family farm was a way of life. That isnt the way things are anymore and that goes for the Democratic Party too.

Democrats have changed a lot. It is no longer the working mans party. Democrats have become so much like Republicans theres only one party. Demuplicans we can call them. A species of parasite that lives off taxpayers and works between Wall Street and Washington trying to sell out for top dollar.

Remember when Hillary went to Goldman Sachs to give a one hour speech for Wall Street bankers to earn a $100,000 fee? Mrs. Globalism was so attracted to that easy money it turned her pretty head! So liberal progressives dont understand how Hillary could lose the election?

During the 2016 presidential election Democratic Party chairman Debbie Shultz got so worried about Bernie Sanders doing well with his Santa Claus campaign she had secret emails sent to state party headquarters telling them to get him off the front burner chill his campaign out. When Bernie found out his own party sabotaged his campaign all he said was Im not surprised. Really, why not? Sounds like serious election tampering to me.

The thing is, the Democratic Party has become so corrupt I believe the mule is going to die. However, there is a bright side to this, Democrats have already dug a big hole for the mule and it wont be much trouble to bury him.

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Letter: Democracy on the skids | Letters - Roanoke Times

Unfortunately, the House Judiciary Committee hearing on impeachment this week has been perceived by many as a showdown between partisan law professors rather than an objective analysis. On the Democratic side were Noah Feldman of Harvard, Pamela Karlan of Stanford, and Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina. On the Republican side was Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, who is a legal analyst with me at CBS News. Feldman, Karlan, and Gerhardt argued that the conduct of President TrumpDonald John TrumpLawmakers release defense bill with parental leave-for-Space-Force deal House Democrats expected to unveil articles of impeachment Tuesday Houston police chief excoriates McConnell, Cornyn and Cruz on gun violence MORE is unequivocally impeachable, while Turley urged caution and a fuller factual record to avoid a rush to judgment.

This is the wrong way to frame the hearing. The Constitution is not a partisan document. It does not even mention political parties, let alone endorse them. Every member of Congress, as well as the president, the federal judiciary, and numerous officials and civil servants in the executive branch, take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. That oath is not a pledge of fidelity to the incumbent president. It instead promises fidelity to the founding document designed to protect regular people against a bullying and overly powerful government comprised of officials who only care about shoring up their own power. This basic foundational concept goes back to the Code of Hammurabi, which declared that the first duty of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful.

If the office of the president of the United States rises above the law, with no more accountability to Congress or to the courts, then regular people will lose their individual rights and liberties. This was the message of the constitutional scholars who testified that the behavior of Trump cannot go unchecked. Just imagine a American president with unlimited power to punish political rivals and employ the massive might of the military and the criminal justice system to secure incumbent power. Over the past couple of weeks, protests in Iran over high gasoline prices prompted that totalitarian government to shut down the internet, leaving 80 million people untethered to the rest of the world. Online videos show security forces subsequently opening machine gunfire on crowds, reportedly killing at least 200 people, including peaceful protesters and civilians.

But this could never happen in America. Right? We cannot be so sanguine. In their sobering book, How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put together a compelling historical narrative of how numerous functioning democracies around the world have since morphed into authoritarian regimes, not by violent coups but by elected governments themselves. Several countries such as Venezuela, Georgia, Hungary, and Turkey witnessed their democratic institutions backslide at the ballot box while maintaining the veneer of democracy. The authors identify four patterns. An elected demagogue packs the courts and exerts stringent control over the legislature and the administrative bureaucracy, attacks his opponents, ignores or destroys rules and norms governing his conduct in office, and encourages violence from his devout loyalists.

When it comes to President Trump, it is not hard to do the math. Check, check, check, and check for each of these patterns. The founders of our government vehemently rejected a monarchy, whereby the king could do no wrong and could not be impeached or removed from his throne by the will of the people. In America, the people are the kings. In a government by we the people, the president works for us. But what if he uses that power to manipulate the electoral process so that he can stay in power? The founders recognized that this was a problem. It is why they included impeachment in the Constitution. If another election were the only way to hold a president accountable for distorting an election to gain and retain power, then there is no way to ensure a true government by the people.

Here are the facts today. The July call memorandum shows that Trump had a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelensky in which he asked for the favor of initiating investigations of the Bidens and the unsubstantiated theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 American election. We know that he withheld nearly $400 million in aid approved by the Senate and a White House meeting at the same time, all while Zelensky was trying to establish legitimacy as the new Ukrainian leader in the midst of a difficult war with Russian President Vladimir PutinVladimir Vladimirovich PutinUkraine, Russia agree to restart peace process Trump, Russian foreign minister to meet Tuesday Impeachment, Ukraine, Syria and warheads color Washington visit by top Russian diplomat MORE.

We know that the withholding of aid was viewed as a threat to national security within the administration, and there is still no clear explanation offered by Trump for that decision, which he does not deny. We also know that he was interested in the announcement of the investigation, but not necessarily its completion or results, which suggests that it was about damaging his political rival, rather than actually uncovering government corruption in Ukraine. There is also no explanation for why Trump asked Ukraine to perform a function that our superior American intelligence services could have done instead. It simply does not add up, and there remains no counter narrative in defense of Trump that makes any sense.

Although it is true that the Democrats are moving quickly and without full information, largely by virtue of the White House refusing to cooperate, the majority of the scholarly panel this week was correct to suggest that this is a code red moment in American democracy. If we let presidents use their office to get reelected, then we will lose our ability to control our own government. When we lose that, our individual rights will no longer be rights but more like goodies that can be doled out to select people by a president acting more like a monarch, depending on his own personal predilections and politics. That is not the America I want for my children.

Kimberly Wehle is a former assistant United States attorney, a former associate independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, and a professor at the University of Baltimore Law School. She is a CBS News legal analyst, a BBC News contributor, and author of How to Read the Constitution and Why. You can follow her updates online @Kim_Wehle.

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We have now reached a code red moment in American democracy | TheHill - The Hill

The Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Marija Pejinovi Buri, has underlined the importance of protecting human rights, democracy and the rule of law including when fighting terrorism in Turkey as in all other Council of Europe member states.

Speaking at a conference on Turkeys Action Plan on Human Rights, the Secretary General said that the failed coup attempt of three years ago was an illegitimate attack on the democratic institutions of this country. She underlined that the Turkish government will continue to have the Council of Europes practical and technical support in the framework of human rights-related reforms.

The Secretary General emphasised that the long-lasting cooperation between the Council of Europe and Turkey - the organisation's second-largest member state and a member since 1950 - has brought positive results, such as the right of individual application to the Constitutional Court in Turkey and the courts important jurisprudence.

The finalisation of the new Action Plan on Human Rights is another of those results, said the Secretary General. However, progress is still needed on some outstanding issues, in particular shortcomings identified by the European Court of Human Rights in the areas of criminal justice, deprivation of liberty and freedom of expression.

The Secretary General said that the ambiguity of some legislation, the limited or narrow interpretation of human rights standards and excessive limitations on rights and freedoms are still at the origin of many applications to the European Court of Human Rights.

To overcome these problems, changes in judicial interpretation and further legislative amendments are needed, she said. The Action Plan must therefore reinforce domestic tools to ensure human rights protection, in line with the European Convention on Human Rights, which will further imbed individuals rights in Turkish law and practice.

Achieving maximum effect will require political drive, intensive judicial interaction between Strasbourg and Ankara, inclusive dialogue with all relevant stakeholders including civil society and media organisations and the determination of the Turkish authorities, at the highest level, to ensure that change is put into practice, concluded the Secretary General.

Following a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdoan, the Secretary General said: I had a frank and very constructive meeting with the President in which we covered many issues of common concern, in particular the growing threat of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and racism in Europe.

The Secretary General also commended Turkey for its major efforts in accommodating and providing aid to Syrian refugees.

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Turkey: Protect human rights, democracy and the rule of law even when fighting terrorism - Council of Europe

The survival of our democracy is a miracle in itself. The concept is timeless, but the reality is elusive. Success for democracy requires willingness on the part of leaders to set aside their differences and work for the good of all regardless of party and politics, and willingness on the part of the people to support the leaders whether they voted for them or not.

The problem with our two-party system is that the names of the two parties, Democrats and Republicans, are not descriptive. Both parties are elements in a democratic republic, just like the Greeks. Variations on this formulation for governance dot the recorded history of the world. Multiparty systems are less functional because of the inability to find common ground among enough of them to form a lasting government. Just look at the trouble we have with only two parties!

In case this looks like an argument for a one-party system, let's put that one to rest. Dictatorships by whatever title fail because of the ideological and social limitations most of them depend on. Too few people are willing to speak truth to power. Those who try don't last long enough to accomplish anything.

Larry White

East Lyme

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Survival of democracy is a miracle - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com