Campaign

From State Dinners to State Fairs, food is a critical aspect of American politics. We are what we eat and what we eat reflects who we are. On the campaign trail, candidates triumphantly embrace local favorites to connect with voters - - or not - - as when John Kerry ordered Swiss cheese on a Philly cheese steak (instead of the traditional Cheez Whiz), leading a local food critic to describe the choice as, “an alternative lifestyle,” that would “doom” Kerry’s candidacy in Philadelphia. Like most things we hold important to us, food is personal. That is one reason that the public discussion about food policy carries political risks, real or perceived.

The 2012 election cycle kicked into high-gear last week in Iowa, and food was appropriately the star of the show. True to Iowa’s proud agrarian traditions, the Iowa State Fair is essentially a trade show about food. The famous butter statues and giant vegetables present a lighter side of the hard and often lonely work of farming. And certainly the annual parade of ever more delicious, and sometimes even outrageous sweet fried treats on sticks provide a welcome communal break for the people who grow food for the rest of us.

Last week NBC News broke the story of a company called W Spann LLC, which was created in March, made the $1 million contribution to a Mitt Romney-supporting Super PAC Restore Our Future in April and was dissolved in July.  The only human that could be linked to W Spann was the Boston attorney who signed the paperwork filed in Delaware to create the company—and she refused to disclose the identity of her client.  Managers of the Manhattan office building listed as the address of W Spann had no record of a tenant by that name, but the building happened to house an office of Bain Capital, a private equity firm co-founded by Romney.
 
A flurry of news stories followed and on Friday my organization, the Campaign Legal Center, together with Democracy 21, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and also sent it to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the agencies charged with enforcing our nation’s election laws, urging an investigation of W Spann and its mysterious $1 million contribution.

Anonymity seemingly became a liability and that night, the mystery donor revealed himself as longtime Romney friend an associate Edward Conard.  Romney himself was quick to declare the controversy over.  For the sake of our democracy, let’s hope the FEC and the DOJ don’t agree, or “straw companies” will become a preferred vehicle of political donors not wanting to leave finger prints.

Apparently the campaign finance “reform” lobby can’t take a hint. After repeated U.S. Supreme Court rulings affirming the vital importance of free speech in elections and striking down their efforts to regulate the funding of political speech, they continue to promote legislation designed to silence disfavored speakers. Their latest effort, introduced on July 13, is the so-called “Shareholder Protection Act” (H.R. 2517, S. 1360). But despite its anodyne name, the Shareholder Protection Act has little to do with protecting shareholders and everything to do with silencing corporate speech.

The brainchild of Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the Shareholder Protection Act would require corporations to get approval from a majority of their shareholders every year in which they wish to speak out in a federal election. The Act even requires corporations to get shareholder approval before making contributions to industry trade associations that might eventually make political expenditures. Corporations that fail to get separate permission each year they spend money on their own electoral speech or donate to trade associations that might someday engage in electoral speech could be sued by shareholders for damages of three times the amount of their expenditures.

The extreme extent to which politicians are willing to go in the political game of chicken they are playing with the public good—from the hardened, absolutist positions in the negotiations over the U.S. debt ceiling to the nasty budget battles gripping some state governments (most recently in Minnesota)—suggests that the gridlock gripping our political system is a more virulent form than the gridlock of the past. How has our democracy come to this? 

While some may wish to blame our current crop of politicians or argue that it is the media’s fault for polarizing politics so, a more complete explanation is found in the current condition of elections in the U.S.  Elections are critical to provide the one factor that can resolve political conflict—legitimacy for the policy positions politicians take—and they fail miserably at doing so.

When passengers boarded a World Wide Tours bus from New York City to a nearby casino, they had no idea they were gambling with their life. The bus driver, way over his hours of service and fatigued, fell asleep causing the bus to strike a guard rail, tip to its side before slamming into a pole sheering it from end to end. In the end, several passengers were injured and 14 were killed.

This horrible tragedy and numerous others including the March 2011 tour bus crash in New Hampshire and the most recent one that occurred earlier this month in Virginia, operated by Sky Express, could have been prevented if law enforcement were permitted to inspect these buses and their drivers enroute during their trip.

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is a bloated federal agency that has long outlived its purpose and recklessly mismanages its resources, yet continues to cost taxpayers millions of dollars each year. Put simply, the EAC is the perfect example of what’s wrong with Washington.
 
The EAC was created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in conjunction with a federal decision to send billions of dollars to states to replace old punch card and lever voting systems and to implement statewide registration databases and other improvements. HAVA also identified a number of research studies to be completed and provided for a federal voting machine testing and certification program.
 
Today, all of those functions except the ongoing testing and certification are now complete. Specifically, the agency has completed four of the five federally mandated election studies. The one outstanding study is six years overdue and stalled in interagency controversy. To boot, the last three White House budgets did not request any additional funds for the EAC to distribute to states, and given budget realities, it is unlikely that more funds will be made available.

Nearly a decade after its creation and years since it accomplished its primary objectives, the commission continues to operate providing little to no benefit to our electoral system.

The 2012 elections may still be 18 months away, but the political attack ads are already hitting the airwaves. And because the Supreme Court has now green-lighted corporations and unions to use their treasury funds to pay for ads supporting or opposing political candidates, expect to see a steady and increasing diet of attacks ads -- many run by unaccountable, anonymously funded groups. 

I'm an accountant. My college degrees and CPA license are the intellectual properties that enable me to earn a living. Now suppose that I formed a corporation to deliver my services, then took my diplomas and license off my wall and placed them in a safe deposit box in a Luxembourg bank. When clients came to my Oregon office, I would explain that the value of my services was represented by the diplomas and license now held in the offshore bank, and they should send their payment to my corporation housed at a PO Box in Luxembourg. Using this little accounting trick, I would be able to avoid paying U.S. taxes, until I brought those "foreign" funds back to the United States.

Now with the presidential election season underway with last night's GOP debate in New Hampshire, the jobs numbers could hardly be worse. At the present rate of job growth (if you can call it that), it’ll take until the 2016 presidential election at the earliest before we even regain the jobs lost in the 2008 recession, let alone create new jobs for our growing population.

Yet when it comes to the nation’s number one policy challenge - job creation - both political parties consistently display a penchant for deaf, dumb and blind policy making that would be laughable were it not so sad. Time and again, they ignore the voices of the only group in society that actually knows something about American job creation: American entrepreneurs.

Committee on Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) gave these remarks during his weekly radio address, The Ag Minute.

President Obama recently signed a new executive order establishing the White House Rural Council to quote 'strengthen rural communities' and focus on job creation and economic development.
 
But, haven’t we heard this before? Back when then Senator Obama was running for President, he pledged to have a rural summit in Iowa and to take action on a rural agenda in the first 100 days of office.

To date, there has been no rural summit.  No rural agenda.

Then in the summer of 2009, President Obama directed members of his cabinet to conduct a listening tour of rural America. Only a few months ago, the EPA Administrator and USDA Secretary held their own listening tour across American farms.