Vote By Mail Eliminates GOP Election Tricks

Realistic Solution to End Voter Lines and Intimidation

   By Dina Rasor, Truthout 

(Image: takomabibelot / Flickr)

This has not been a good decade for voting rights. The US Supreme Court decision that gutted much of the enforcement power of the Voting Rights Act opened up a Pandora's box of Republican energy to suppress voter registration and hinder people's ability to get to the polls. It seems like each state with a Republican governor and legislature has raced to see how difficult they can make it for people of color and poor people to vote.

States have cut voting hours, days of early voting and polling places. They have limited the number of voting machines in high-population areas, leading to ridiculously long lines. They are allowing partisan "election monitors" to show up in the polling area to look for "mischief" among minority voters.

There is also a push to make it harder and harder to register to vote. This hasn't been a homegrown patchwork of efforts by the Republican governors and legislatures. In fact, the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has a task force that pushes sample legislation to impede certain voters from getting to the polls.

Before the Supreme Court altered the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice (DOJ) would have to approve election law changes in certain states before they were allowed to become law. Once the Supreme Court lifted that restriction, the DOJ has to take on the unconstitutionality of these laws through the federal courts – something that can take years of challenges and appeals while the elections they affect just keep being held.

There are now also partisan election monitors afoot, with a Tea Party-based organization called True the Vote, training volunteers to go into polling places and challenge voters' registration. Wisconsin, who used to pride itself on voter turnout, now has passed a law allowing these election monitors to be within a yardstick of voters and poll workers. Rachel Maddow humorously showed, with one of her producers, just how "creepy" that can be.

Some Democrats and others have been working to challenge these new draconian voter restriction laws before elections, and have been raising money and volunteers to do a massive get-out-the-vote effort for future elections. However, they are missing an important potential strategy: voting by mail.

Three states, Oregon, Washington and Colorado, have already moved to all elections being done by mail.  Oregon led the way, starting the process with Phil Keisling, Oregon's secretary of state in the 1990s. I interviewed Mr. Keisling about Oregon's breakthrough efforts and his work in advocating for more states to consider voting only by mail. Keisling has been frustrated that so much effort is being put into getting people to the polls, rather than allowing people to vote in the privacy of their homes.
In Oregon, the mail ballots are sent out to every registered voter 14-18 days before the election. Voters can mail in their ballots anytime after that or go to a ballot drop-off place until 8 PM on election day. Each county must have at least two drop sites for ballots, such as outdoor ballot boxes, or sites in libraries or city buildings. A county can choose to provide drop-off areas as soon as the ballots are mailed to the voters.  Washington State and Colorado have adopted similar methods.

The all-mail voting has proven to be popular in Oregon, and participation is higher than in many polling place-based states.  Even counties in red state Utah are experimenting with all-mail ballots. Based on all the voting horror stories we have witnessed over the past several decades, mail-in voting could lessen or eliminate many of the politically motived voter-access obstacles. In the 2012 national election, too many states had long lines that required the people in them to wait as much as eight hours or more. The get-out-the-vote organizers were telling the people in line that it was a civil rights stance and were helping the elderly and others with food and seats. President Obama, in his 2013 State of the Union speech lauded Desiline Victor, who, at 102 years old, stayed in a line for more than 6 hours to cast her vote.

It is shameful that people have to take a civil rights stance to get access to a voting place.
This is just one area where voting by mail would stop a lot of voter intimidation and harassment in its tracks. Long lines would be a thing of the past. All voters would have to do is fill out their ballot at their leisure, sign the outside of the envelope and drop it in a mailbox, post office or ballot drop before the end of election day.

Avoiding the Monitors
Based on the large amount of money that is being shoved into intimidation efforts like those of True the Vote, it could take years of work in state legislatures to try to keep partisan monitors out of the election cycle. If vote by mail were to become more universal, these groups would have no polling places in which to do their bullying.

• There has been an ongoing controversy over voting machines, punch cards, hanging chads and lack of a paper trail ever since the notorious 2000 Bush/Gore election. Replacing voting machines and attempting to make them hack-proof is also a worry in an electronic age when even using your credit card at a Target store is not safe. The Oregon ballots are straightforward and designed to be counted by a scanning machine with the original ballot being preserved. Universal voting by mail would eliminate expensive voting machines and the problems that have gone with them. There would also not be a lack of machines, so obvious in urban areas, which also leads to long lines.

• Not only have citizens who have voted for years been unable to register to vote due to the requirement of more and more identification, it has also been a problem for voters to have these same IDs at the polling place to vote. Voting by mail has the voter sign their registration to vote and then sign the vote by mail ballot on the outside of the envelope. The state workers then match the signature to the signature on the card. Ironically, this is a safer way to prevent the very small amount of people who ever try to cast a ballot with fake ID, because it is a lot easier to get a fake ID than it is to forge a signature while standing at a polling table.

• There have also been precincts that run out of ballots and have to take provisional ballots, which slows down the voting process. When voting by mail, everyone who is registered to vote automatically gets a ballot, and, if they don't receive one or mess up the one that was sent to them, there is time to request another one from the state before the election.

• Fewer polling places and more isolated polling places have been a problem in areas where some local voting boards are trying to keep people of color and poor people from voting. People who do not have access to cars and reliable public transportation are put at a distinct disadvantage to get to the polls on time.  The United State Postal Service has outlets in even the most rural and otherwise isolated areas, and voting by mail could eliminate much of this problem.

• One of the most drastic changes that has happened over the past few years has been the cutting of early voting days and hours that polls are open. This has caused problems for voters working standard hours to be able to make it to the polls. Voting by mail would allow workers to read up on the issues and candidates for several weeks before the election and drop their ballot off before or after working hours.

Keisling told me that voting by mail could "bypass so much of the debate" on voter suppression and intimidation, and polling stations are like "iceboxes compared to refrigerators" when talking about the security and ease of voting by mail.

He also points out how a large amount of public funding of elections could be saved, while reducing the absurdly long waits at the polls, in an article he wrote for Governing Magazine:

But better polling stations and shorter lines require more money. New voting machines alone would cost $4 billion; more well-trained poll workers, working more days, would cost millions. Well-heeled jurisdictions, likely with the fewest problems, might not blink at such costs. But why force them, along with thousands of cash-strapped local governments, from red-tinged rural communities to blue-dominated urban areas, to redirect scarce resources to improve the polling place experience, when a long-proven, far less costly alternative - voting by mail - is so close at hand?

 Absentee ballots have coexisted with polling places for centuries; more than 30 million voters cast such ballots in 2012. Having all voters receive their ballots through the mail, while often derided as absentee voting on steroids, should be viewed instead through the lens of "universal ballot delivery."

So the question might be: Why aren't we moving toward voting by mail? There are many Republicans who have already worked hard at restricting the vote to smaller and smaller groups of people so it is not surprising to see them rejecting making the vote easier and more universal. But, according to Keisling, there is a surprising amount of tacit resistance among some of the Democratic establishment.

There are several organized efforts that are looking at vote by mail as an answer to the current mess of US elections. The main organized national effort is called the Voting Rights Project, and they discuss vote by mail as one of their ultimate goals.

However, according to Keisling, there are some Democrats and academics who are concerned about security of the ballot and the loss of a "civic sense" of duty by going to a polling booth. Curtis Gans, from the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, American University, is worried that people will lose their privacy for how they vote and could be paid off or coerced to vote for someone else. He wrote in the May 2006 American Prospect (subscription required):

Mail voting and no-excuse absentee voting are the single greatest invitation to fraud and abuse of any aspect of the voting process. They have that dubious honor because they effectively eliminate the universal secret ballot and replace it with a voluntary secret ballot - a ballot that will be secret only if the citizen who possesses it wills it to be secret.
Any citizen in Oregon or who requests a no-excuse absentee ballot can feel free to share it with anyone of their choosing. This, in turn, has led or can lead to:

• Sharing that ballot with someone who will pay money to see that it is filled out a certain way and then returned in its security envelope to the appropriate place; or buying votes, something that led an election to be declared void in a part of Illinois.

• Sharing that ballot with one's peers and friends in a living room ballot-signing party for a particular cause or point of view - a pressured ballot, pressure that could easily be resisted behind a closed voting place curtain but would be hard to resist among one's friends and associates.

• Giving the ballot to someone other than the voter to deliver or mail - which can lead to that deliverer discarding the ballots if he has reason to believe they were not cast the way which the deliverer wanted it to be. This is a particular danger in group settings such as retirement communities or nursing homes, where infirm citizens may either be pressured to cast their ballots a certain way or who may be grateful for assistance in delivering ballots, not knowing that they may not reach their destination.

Phil Keisling, who has been working with other skeptical vote-by-mail progressives, says that if they truly believe that many peoples' votes can be coerced, then you should not allow absentee ballots, which have the same alleged vulnerability. He said:

Name one example of a husband or wife accused (much less convicted) of "ballot coercion" during the 2012 election, among all of the Oregon and Washington voters who case ballots in this system (and the other 26 million who did so via absentee ballots in the other 48 states). And even if, there were one - or twelve - examples, what would we do? To hear opponents say it, we'd need to then abolish all absentee ballots, period.

I have to agree with him because most of our overseas military vote by absentee ballot. Based on what I know about the military, that bureaucracy would, if they thought they could be successful, pressure their troops to vote for someone who would endlessly raise the military budget. But those troops mark their absentee ballot in their barracks or homes, and the peer or military pressure, I believe, would be greater if we set up polling places on bases with soldiers standing in line and surrounded by officers as they vote.

Based on how complicated it would be to conspire to pay people to mark their ballots by mail or collect and/or coerce without people talking and finding out, I cannot imagine altering thousands or even hundreds of mail in ballots to flip an election. I can imagine hundreds or thousands of people discouraged from casting their ballots with hundreds of people in line with hours of waiting or feeling coerced with unfriendly election monitors a yardstick away questioning your citizenship because you don't look like them.

Some claim that there is the security issue of voting through the US Postal Service and your ballot getting lost. The Postal Service can lose items, but that bureaucracy does not have political skin in the game with ballots versus the local election boards, where the board majority is stocked with political appointees from the majority party in the precinct. I can imagine that my ballot would be safer in the hands of the postal service person, who takes them out of the mailbox with all the other mail, versus the election workers, who are overseen by a political local election board. Also, if someone has a concern about the postal service, they also have the option of taking their ballot directly to a voter ballot drop-off that is under the same precinct control that you would have if you were voting in a precinct.

Keisling was instrumental, as Oregon's secretary of state, in setting up the logistics of voting by mail. He says that all systems, the older traditional system and a vote-by-mail system will have vulnerabilities or problems. However, he believes that it is easier to oversee and safeguard the ballot in a vote-by-mail system where ballots go by mail to central locations where the signature on the outside of the ballot is compared to the voter registration signature. He thinks that precinct voting has its own vulnerabilities:

Across thousands of separate precinct sites, the odds of inconsistently applying elections rules - making mistakes, inadvertently disenfranchising people, etc. - is far greater when ballots are processed. In vote by mail, where all signatures are checked and voter information is verified in central locations, there are fewer mistakes and problems, not more.

According to Keisling, this romanticizing of the tradition and civic cohesion of the public polling place is more widespread than many politicians are willing to admit. The arguments remind me of the gauzy reminiscence of Norman Rockwell's early paintings of a homogeneous white America coming together to vote. In fact Rockwell did a painting called Election 1944 that looks like what many Republicans and some Democrats still see as the America they would like to remember and emulate.
The late columnist Carl Rowan didn't see vote by mail that way. He saw it as liberating people who don't look like the people in this Rockwell painting. After the first large-scale, vote-by-mail Oregon vote, he mocked the people who decried the loss of the sacred polling place in a February 11, 1996 column (subscription required):

We're told that it allowed all people to vote without expending the small amount of energy and sacrifice of going to a neighborhood polling place, undermining the notion that "the vote is a precious thing."
This is swallowed by some as the sentimentality of patriotism, but it is, in fact, undemocratic gibberish that ought not override the fact that the Oregon election lifted the percentage of voters to about 65 percent of those eligible, a figure that made democratic participation almost as high as in European countries. It saved Oregon about $1 million. And it produced results that any Republican could applaud.
So we are to deplore this election as a violation of what "the framers" intended? I remember that the framers counted black citizens as three-fifths of a vote. And women as zero percent of a vote. Naturally, neither I nor my wife is much impressed by a reminder of what the framers believed about the semi-slave status of African-American males, or women.
The framers created a situation under which many states could decree that only the propertied could vote. When that idea and "poll tax" requirements were beaten down, polling places were located where millions of poor, ill minority citizens could not get to because they lacked transportation or couldn't leave their jobs.

Voting by mail is a way for our democracy to advance, widen the voting population, and make sure everyone who is registered receives a ballot and an easier way to cast that ballot without lines, humiliation and the prospect of losing work. All systems are going to be vulnerable, and there are going to be problems arising in any system of voting. There will be people who will try to game vote by mail, just like they are now gaming the precinct elections. As with any governmental process, it will be important to fix problems or mistakes as they pop up.

But we know about the problems in the precincts - statistics show that actual voting fraud in very small but the manipulation of the ability to vote has been greatly twisted to benefit a shrinking status quo. We know about the lines, the lack of voter machines, the partisan election monitors who can challenge people that they don't think look like Americans in the precinct system. If voting by mail is truly evil for democracy, then we need to start pulling back the efforts to expand the absentee ballot if you are going to be consistent in the argument that any vote by mail is dangerous.

Implementing the Vote By Mail Solution
Just saying that we all should embrace vote by mail and assuming both political parties will accept it in every state is wishful thinking. However, there is a way to advance the ability to vote by mail down the road, through the longstanding tradition of the absentee ballot. Many states make people have an excuse to be able to use an absentee ballot, but more and more states are moving to no-excuse absentee ballots.

Although my state, California, doesn't look like it will move soon to all vote by mail (all the candidates for secretary of state have declared they are against it), California not only has a no-excuse absentee ballot, but you can request that you permanently receive an absentee ballot for all elections. As more and more people get use to the convenience and privacy of casting their ballot that way, it can lead to the realization that voting by mail is what the public wants.

The bipartisan National Council of State Legislatures has a very useful interactive chart that shows what states have no-excuse absentee ballots and those who require an excuse to get an absentee ballot.

Looking at the chart, there are three states that do all voting by mail, 28 states that allow no-excuse absentee voting (some of these states allow vote by mail under certain circumstances) and 19 states that require an excuse to obtain an absentee ballot. Compared to the work it would take to negate so many of the restrictions that some of these states have put on voting at the polling booth, it would be much easier to work on getting the states with excuse-required absentee ballots to remove that provision and get the states that have a no-excuse absentee ballot to move to the permanent status option for an absentee ballot.

Some of the states that require an excuse for absentee ballots are purple or blue states like Massachusetts, New York, Delaware, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. These states should be open to allowing no-excuse absentee ballots. Meanwhile, get-out-the-vote efforts in all the states could be geared to encourage people to ask and vote by absentee ballot - just one step away from vote by mail.

As the emphasis in the next election is to get people to vote, it is apparent that it would be much easier to get people to ask for an absentee ballot and remind them to mail it in then to go out with cars to give rides to people to the polls when you can only offer them long lines and pushy poll watchers. As more and more people see the convenience of voting by absentee ballot, there may well be a push to make it a permanent status, and that, in turn, could lead to vote by mail as more people press for that option. Eventually, as more people get away from the old ideal of voting at a polling place, there will be a much more open mind about adopting voting by mail. This will mean that eventually many, if not most, of the states will be encouraging their voters to vote by sending out a ballot to each one of them, instead of discouraging the "wrong" voters to give up by using unfair laws that keep them home.

Based on what I have seen in the courts, especially on election finance laws and the gutting of the Voter Rights Act, I fear that if some of these states' absurd and drastic election precinct laws are challenged in the courts, we might end up with the equivalent of a "Citizens United" ruling by this US Supreme Court on these junk laws put in to intimidate or deter voters out of their basic rights.

The gradual adoption of vote by mail, using the existing absentee ballot structure, may be the fastest and cheapest way to overcome this shameful chapter in our history, where state governments have actively tried to inhibit some of their citizens from voting, for political reasons. To get a universal right to vote, we need universal ballots sent out to the voters with a modern and realistic way to getting their ballots back to the government. The bugs in a vote-by-mail system can be worked out as the system is adopted across the country. Eventually, vote by mail could restore the balance.

Copyright, Truthout. 

Dina Rasor

Dina Rasor is an investigator, journalist and author. Rasor has been fighting waste while working for transparency and accountability in government for three decades. In 1981, Rasor founded the Project on Military Procurement (now called the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO) to serve as a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog over military and related government spending. Rasor's most recent book, "Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War," chronicles first-hand accounts of the devastating consequences of privatized war support for troops and the overall war effort in Iraq. She also founded the Bauman & Rasor Group that helps whistleblowers file lawsuits under the federal qui tam False Claims act and has been involved in cases which have returned over $100 million back to the US Treasury.

New Poem Called "UNION"

Union…

It’s time to take back the word

So the benefits of unions are heard

Don’t let the bosses define unions as bad

Not when unions are the best thing workers ever had

Unions create shared prosperity

But people saying so is such a rarity

If you support workers’ right to organize,

It’s something you should proudly verbalize

Tell your neighbors and your friends

So that everyone comprehends

Unions benefit us all

And without them, living standards fall.

All around us now income disparity

What we need is worker solidarity

Strength in numbers, a collective voice

That’s what workers get when they have free choice

So say it loudly

And say it proudly

The answer to working harder for less

Is and always will be: UNION YES!

                                                                                           

Poem Written by MaryBe McMillan                                                     

                                   

                May Day,            

                                   

                North Carolina State AFL-CIO           

                               

Koch Bros Woo Judges to Cut Union Pensions

Koch Brothers, Major Corporations Sponsor Pension Reform Seminar for Judges

By Chris Young, Center for Public Integrity | Report

George Mason University, Arlington, VA, 2013 (Image: Ron Cogswell / Flickr)

Truthout relies on reader support - click here to make a tax-deductible donation and help publish journalism with real integrity and independence.

As state courts across the nation prepare to referee numerous public pension reform disputes, a gaggle of interested parties — from major corporations to the Koch brothers — will next week sponsor an expenses-paid conference on public pension reform for judges who may decide the cases' fates.
Conference funders, which include ExxonMobil, Google and Wal-Mart, could benefit from efforts to slash benefits for public employees. Alternative approaches to shore up state budgets would likely require higher corporate taxes, fewer corporate subsidies and reduced government services, all of which would be bad for business.
The three-day gathering in a Charleston, S.C., hotel is hosted by George Mason University's Law & Economics Center.
The "Judicial Symposium on the Economics and Law of Public Pension Reform," according to a George Mason event description, is intended to "comprehensively outline the underlying structure of pension systems, address the differences between public and private pensions and detail the unfunded liabilities and potential bankruptcy issues arising from this crisis."

In all, about three dozen corporations — Ford Motor Co., General Electric Co., ConocoPhillips, drug maker Pfizer and the Dow Chemical Company also among them — are sponsoring the conference. Other funders include trade associations such as the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and conservative foundations such as the John William Pope Foundation and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.
Dozens of individuals are also helping bankroll the gathering; some state and federal judges themselves are listed sponsors, including Utah Judge Samuel D. McVey and Harris L. Hartz of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

It's unclear which judges — and how many of them — will be attending the conference, although George Mason's judicial seminars are traditionally open to both state and federal judges. George Mason does not publicly list conference attendees, and federal judges who attend privately funded educational seminars aren't required to publicly disclose which conference they attended until 30 days after it ends.
Henry Butler, executive director of the Law & Economics Center, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
As the Center for Public Integrity reported last year, George Mason University's Law & Economics Center regularly organizes business-friendly judicial seminars.
The Washington Post recently reported that conference funders provide more than just financial support — they also help coordinate who attends the influential seminars.
Conference agenda
What is clear from the conference's agenda is that attending judges will spend most of their time inside Charleston, S.C.'s Francis Marion Hotel listening to lectures and panel discussions led mainly by advocates of public pension reform. Bill Lurye, general counsel of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, stands out as one of the only panelists offering a union perspective on the pension debate.
Two of the conference's featured lecturers — Todd Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor, and Eileen Norcross, a senior research fellow at George Mason University's conservative Mercatus Center — co-wrote a 2010 op-ed headlined "How public worker pensions are too rich for New York's — and America's — blood." 

 The column decried unions' efforts to thwart pension reform efforts.
"No one begrudges a secure retirement for police officers, firefighters and other public servants," the authors wrote. "But unless states act now by closing insolvent plans to new hires and reducing the rate of benefit accrual for current employees, they won't be able to shore up enough to guarantee at least some of what's been promised."

Norcross will lead an hour-long afternoon session on Monday titled "Pension Reform Options." In 2011, Norcross testified before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, where she recommended that states "[f]reeze or reduce the Cost of Living Adjustment, increase the retirement age, increase contributions from workers, and, importantly close the defined benefit plan to new hires."
Zywicki did not respond to requests for comment. Mercatus Center spokesman Kyle Precourt told the Center for Public Integrity in an email that Norcross is "entrenched in research now and not available for media."
For a session on "Legal Questions Raised by Pension Reform," judges will listen to Amy Monahan, a University of Minnesota law professor. Monahan, who did not respond to requests for comment, has published research disputing court rulings that state statutes establishing a pension contract between states and employees cannot legally be broken.

She wrote in a 2012 paper that "changes to future pension accruals should be legally permissible absent clear and unambiguous evidence that the legislature intended to create a contract."
Peter Kiernan, a New York attorney who co-wrote a recent report on public pensions, says arguments like these are exactly what judges will have to grapple with as pension reforms face legal challenges. In some states and cities, reforms have already reached the courts.

Illinois, for example, passed legislation in late 2013 that cut retirement benefits for public employees. Unions have since filed several lawsuits, claiming that the pension changes violate the Illinois Constitution, which explicitly states that contractual pension benefits "shall not be diminished or impaired."

Now the fate of Illinois' pension reform efforts rests in the hands of the courts. How they rule could have nationwide implications.

"If the Illinois Supreme Court says that what the Illinois legislature did is constitutional and legal, then the logjam has been broken," Kiernan said, stressing that judges will be "enormously important" in resolving the pension reform dispute. "And you're going to see all of those states attempt reforms with respect to current employees."
Corporate push for public pension reform
To be sure: Public pensions across the nation are in rotten shape. Depending on who is making the calculations — and how those calculations are being made — state and local pensions nationwide are underfunded by anywhere from nearly $1 trillion to as much as $4 trillion.
Some states and cities are worse off than others. Illinois and New Jersey, two of the worst, are drowning in pension debt. Detroit and other cities, meanwhile, have even filed for bankruptcy in part because their pension shortfalls are so severe.
"Reform is necessary because it is creating an unsustainable burden on taxpayers," said Todd Maisch, executive vice president of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce.
In Illinois, "I don't think you fix the mess without pension reform," he said.

Government officials find themselves left with difficult choices: Raise taxes and cut services to help increase their annual contributions to beleaguered pension funds, change the terms of public employee pensions to help lower the burden on state and local budgets, or do a little of both.

Reform advocates contend that public employees are enjoying lavish retirement benefits that are handcuffing states and bankrupting cities. They argue that states and municipalities should cut pensions for current and future employees. In some cases, that means shifting workers from employee-friendly defined-benefit plans to plans that more closely resemble private-sector 401(k) plans.
Public workers and their unions, too, have cried foul, arguing that their retirement benefits are far from extravagant and that attempts to change the terms of their pensions violate agreements they previously reached with state and local governments.

David Sirota, a liberal writer and commentator, wrote a 2013 report called "The Plot against Pensions," which argued that "conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks."

While public pensions face a $46 billion annual shortfall, the report found, it is "dwarfed by the $80 billion a year states and cities spend on corporate subsidies."

"We are having a debate over pension shortfalls, calling them an emergency, when in fact they are in aggregate far smaller than what is spent each year on subsidies to business," Sirota told the Center for Public Integrity. "And business likes that imbalance."

Critics of pension reform worry that corporations and conservative lawmakers are winning a public relations battle intended to demonize public pensions while ignoring the broader scope of budget shortfalls.
Hank Kim, executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, said he's tired of pension reform advocates claiming that state and local municipalities can only overcome their fiscal problems on the backs of public workers.

"If it's really about 'shared sacrifice,' which is the terminology folks have been using since the Great Recession, it occurs to us that the groups that aren't sharing the sacrifice are the wealthy and the corporations because they're still getting the tax breaks," he said. "You can't be crying poverty when you are still giving away the shop to corporations."

But a combination of higher taxes and poorer services could prompt businesses to move, said Patrick McGuinn, a political science professor at Drew University and author of a February report about the politics of pension reform.
"When you're cutting things like education or health care or investment in transportation or technology, those are things that, to varying degrees, are going to affect corporations," he said.
With so much at stake for businesses, some worry what kind of influence a corporate-funded conference might have on judges whose rulings could resolve the pension debate.
Sirota, for one, said the conference hosted by George Mason's Law & Economics Center is "an effort to lobby judges."

"It's crossing a line that's not supposed to be crossed," he said. "What's next? Is a company going to be able to hire a lobbyist to go lobby a judge in chambers?"
Probably not.

But what's next for judges certainly includes another conference on public pension reform hosted by George Mason's Law & Economics Center. It's scheduled for September in San Francisco.

THERE SHOULD BE A PROTEST AT THE CONFERENCE

New Law Suit for War Crimes vs Bush & Blair

President George W. Bush, right, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrive for a joint news conference in the East Room at the White House on Tuesday, June 7, 2005. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)
This is part II of a series on Dahr Jamail's trip to the Iraq Commission conference in Brussels. Also see Part I: International Lawyers Seek Justice for Iraqis
Narmeen Saleh and her husband Shawki were detained by US military forces during a violent 2004 raid of their home in Baghdad.
Saleh spent 16 days in prison, where "the interrogations didn't stop for one minute." She was beaten, electrocuted and threatened with rape if she didn't "confess."
"They [US soldiers] tortured and beat me a lot, and when they found out that I was pregnant they told me they would kill the baby in my womb," she was quoted, as her testimony was read at the Iraq Commission conference in Brussels recently. "They then concentrated their beating and electricity on my abdomen area."
Her daughter, who is now 8 years old, has cerebral palsy, and her husband remains in custody of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for the bogus charge of "illegally entering Iraq."
This shocking testimony was provided to international lawyers, journalists , and activists converged at a conference titled, "The Iraq Commission," held in Brussels, Belgium, April 16 and 17, with the primary aim of bringing to justice government officials who are guilty of war crimes in Iraq.
The conference represented the most powerful and most current organized movement in the world to hold accountable those responsible for the catastrophic invasion and occupation in Iraq, including UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President George W. Bush, along with others in their administrations.
War Crimes in Iraq
Nawal al-Obaidi, an Iraqi academic and founding trustee of the International Action for Iraqi Refugees NGO, provided somber testimony about how her brother was killed by US forces.
Hazim al-Obaidi left his wife and four children at their home in Mosul to go to work at his grocery store one morning in January 2005.
That same evening, his wife became worried when Hazim had not returned home and began a search.
"The whole family could not sleep that night, wondering what had happened to Hazim and why he did not return back home," his sister Nawal told the audience. "As the curfew was in place, no one could leave the house until the next morning."
The next morning, family members searched the morgues of the main hospital, but to no avail. Two days later, they learned of his burned car.
Eyewitnesses informed the family of the car being attacked by US forces, who "started shooting at him and at his car, until the car exploded." What was left of the severely burned body was removed by family members, then, "to the bewilderment of his family, US troops stopped them after they had collected the body, uncovered it and took photos."
"Hazim was not a "terrorist" or a "Saddamist," al-Obeidi explained. "He was a cheerful family man who was wounded in the Iran-Iraq war and survived the harshness of the sanctions years by selling groceries. Who is going to investigate his killing, compensate his family, and help his children to make sense of their tragedy? Will it be the Iraqi government, or the US-led occupation? Judging by the human rights records of both, the answer is that neither of them will investigate Hazim's killing, or any other. [Hundreds of] thousands of civilians have been killed for no reason. One of them was my brother."
This writer, too, provided testimony: I spoke of several war crimes I witnessed during my reportage from Iraq during the US-led occupation.
In May 2004, I interviewed a man who had just been released from Abu Ghraib prison. Like so many I interviewed from various US military detention facilities who'd been tortured horrifically, he still managed to maintain his sense of humor.
He began laughing when telling of how US soldiers made him beat other prisoners. He laughed because he told me he had been beaten himself prior to this and was so tired that all he could do to beat other detained Iraqis was to lift his arm and let it drop on the other men.
Later in the same interview, when telling of another story, he laughed again and said, "The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."
Another story I reported to the international lawyers was that of 55-year-old Sadiq Zoman, who was tortured horrifically by US military personnel. I shared documentation of US military doctors, nurses and medics being complicit with that torture.
Sadiq Zoman was detained from his home shortly after the US occupation of Iraq began, but not charged with any crime. (Photo: Dahr Jamail)
Zoman was detained from his home in Kirkuk in a raid by US soldiers that produced no weapons. He was taken to a police office in Kirkuk, the Kirkuk Airport Detention Center, the Tikrit Airport Detention Center and then the 28th Combat Support Hospital, where he was treated by Dr. Michael Hodges, a lieutenant colonel.
Hodges' medical report listed the primary diagnoses of Zoman's condition as hypoxic brain injury (brain damage caused by lack of oxygen) "with persistent vegetative state," myocardial infraction (heart attack) and heat stroke.
After one month in custody, Zoman was dropped off in a coma at the General Hospital in Tikrit by US soldiers.
A comatose Zoman was dropped off by US military personnel at the main hospital in Tikrit. (Photo: Dahr Jamail)
Zoman's last name was listed as his first name on the report, despite the fact that all of his identification papers were taken during the raid on his home. Because of this, it took his family weeks to locate him in the hospital.
The medical report given by the US military medic did not mention the trauma on the back of Zoman's head. (Photo: Dahr Jamail)
Hodges' medical report did not mention the fact that the back of Zoman's head was bashed in, nor that he had electrical burn marks on the bottoms of his feet and genitals, or why he had lash marks across his back and chest.
Zoman's feet had point-burn marks from electrical shocks on the bottoms of his feet and genitals. (Photo: Dahr Jamail)
Zoman remains in a coma, and there has been no compensation provided to his now-impoverished family for what was done to him.
Zoman's family has yet to receive any compensation for what US forces did to him. (Photo: Dahr Jamail)
Bringing Justice
Inder Comar, who testified at the commission, is the legal director at Comar Law in San Francisco, California.
"On March 13, 2013, my client, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan, filed a class action lawsuit against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz in a federal court in California," Comar has written about his case.
"She alleges that these six defendants planned and waged the Iraq War in violation of international law by waging a 'war of aggression,' as defined by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, more than sixty years ago," Comar added. (The current complaint can be found here).
Comar's client, Sundus Shaker Saleh, is alleging "crime of aggression" in the San Francisco Federal Court against the aforementioned. "Crime of aggression" emanates from the Nuremberg Trials following World War II and is what Comar is arguing was committed in the Iraq War.
The lawsuit includes all Iraqis who have suffered harm as a result of the war, and Comar's firm is representing Saleh pro bono.
"This could be precedent setting," Comar told the commission. "And this is the first time a US court is looking at a crime of aggression since Nuremberg, since 1945. We're very curious to see how this judge will decide this issue."
Inder Comar is representing an Iraqi woman, who is charging Bush administration officials with "crime of aggression." (Photo: Dahr Jamail)
US courts have immunized many of the members of the Bush Administration, but Comar thinks his case is different and will not be subject to the same kind of immunity.
"The crime of aggression is part of international law, so we are arguing with good precedent that international law is part of federal law," he said.
Comar's case against Bush is based on the conduct of members of his administration prior to their coming into office, as well as conduct taking place during and after the events of September 11, 2001.
Evidence of premeditation abounds.
Years before their appointment to the Bush administration, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were vocal advocates of a militant neoconservative ideology that called for the United States to use its armed forces in the Middle East and elsewhere.
They openly chronicled their desire for aggressive wars through a nonprofit called The Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz personally signed a letter to then-President Clinton urging him to implement a "strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power," which included a "willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing."
On September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz openly pressed for the United States to invade Iraq, even though intelligence at the time confirmed that Saddam Hussein was in no way responsible. Richard Clarke, former national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, famously told President Bush that attacking Iraq for 9/11 "would be like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor."
Comar's case states: "Defendants planned the war against Iraq as early as 1998; manipulated the United States' public to support the war by scaring them with images of 'mushroom clouds' and conflating the Hussein regime with al-Qaeda; and broke international law by commencing the invasion without proper legal authorization."
By comparison, more than 60 years ago, American prosecutors in Nuremberg, Germany, convicted Nazi leaders of the crimes of conspiring and waging wars of aggression. They found the Nazis guilty of planning and waging wars that had no basis in law and which killed millions of innocents.
The plaintiff in the case, Saleh, is thus seeking justice under the Nuremberg principles, as well as US law, for damages she and others like her suffered because of the defendants' premeditated plan to invade Iraq.
Comar detailed to the commission how the premeditation was obvious, showing slides from an article titled "Saddam Must Go," penned by Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as others titled, "Overthrow Him," "How to Attack Iraq" and "Bombing Iraq is not enough."
"When we talk about these war criminals, we need to employ the language of pirates in order to engage the basis of universal jurisdiction," Comar added. "Because when pirates go anywhere they have no safe haven from being held accountable for their actions."
Comar told Truthout that he decided to take this case because he was inspired by the Nuremberg judgment.
"That and my client's bravery to want to do this and be committed to her case," he explained. "In law school, I was fascinated by Nuremberg and the trail of facts."
Comar believes strongly in the morality behind the case.
"We have to use every avenue the law provides us to try to do something, and it's amazing that it took a single mother refugee from Iraq to press for justice for a war our leaders continue to want to ignore," he said. "What I'm doing can have a ripple, it might inspire other lawyers, it might cause people to start asking questions about the Bush administration."
According to Comar, his case represents the first time a US judge will hear about a crime of aggression since 1946, "So this case will be looked at internationally. We have to set the stage for other countries to start working to conform to principles of peace."
Comar added that his case in California serves as a template that could be used in every other US state.
Planning for Prosecutions
Sabah al-Mukhtar, the president of the Arab Lawyers Association, chaired the final session of the Iraq commission. The session investigated what the next steps should be toward bringing those responsible for the Iraq invasion and occupation to justice.
(Right to Left) Dirk Adriaensens, cofounder of the Iraq Commission and Brussels Tribunal, Sabah al-Mukhtar, chair of the Iraq Commission, and Michel Chossudovsky, Canadian economist at University of Ottawa. (Photo: Dahr Jamail)
"The delegitimization of major war criminals is complete in terms of the understanding around the world that these successive wars that have been waged are in complete opposition to international law," Dr. Niloufer Bhagwat, professor of comparative constitutional law at the University of Mumbai and vice president of the Indian Lawyers Association in Mumbai testified.
She addressed the fact that there have been no reparations, the sanctions crimes need to be addressed, including the fact that the US government knowingly killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children via malnourishment and disease, and added, "The work we've done here has to be carried from country to country so the political formations adopt our viewpoint, that these wars of aggression can only come to an end when we have an overturning of the political and economic systems."
Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar, a senior practicing lawyer and lead prosecutor of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunals on Iraq, believes that the people's tribunals that have been held on Iraq "are becoming an increasingly important tool for recapturing the lost space and jurisprudence over war crimes. We've had three war crimes tribunals and we intend to have more and to introduce this thinking into law schools like the one in which I teach."
He believes the next step toward justice is for countries to exercise universal jurisdiction as a means of charging war criminals.
"Three quarters of UN states have authorized their courts to exercise universal jurisdiction over war crimes, so the stage is actually set," he said. "The challenge then is how to get these countries to institute charges against these war criminals on the basis of credible trials that have been conducted and ended up in convictions, either by peoples' tribunals or otherwise. The next step is to go country to country and begin to file charges in each of these jurisdictions."
Dr. Curtis F. J. Doebbler, an international lawyer who practices law before the International Court of Justice, shared an instance where there has already been some success.
"We suggested, for Syria, and I was in the room with the negotiators, that [US Secretary of State John] Kerry be advised that the use of force could lead to violations of international law, and there could be war crimes," he said. "So I think we're making some inroads."
Lindsey German, the convener of the British antiwar organization Stop the War Coalition, stated in her concluding remarks that Bush and Blair are "by far the most responsible persons for the Iraq war."
She added, "Blair is still the envoy for peace in the Middle East, of all things, for which they obviously didn't check his CV. We have to stress the connections between the wars and the political and economic systems under which we live. We can't have economic justice without bringing justice to the war criminals."
Comar addressed the "banality of militarism" in the United States, said he hopes that the work he is doing "is creating a vaccine for that" and stressed the need for confidence in international law.
"We in the US can work to take power back from the federal system on a state system and begin to incorporate international law into our own laws," he said. "Or maybe we can do this on a city level to criminalize this wrongdoing in a lawful manner so that we have more control. I look forward to sharing my court complaint with any other lawyer. We need to work together to help get people reparations from this war and to prevent the next war."
Dirk Adriaensens, a long-time Iraq activist and cofounder of the Iraq Commission, concluded the commission by calling for concrete proposals that will lead to global court cases regarding Iraq.
"If Inder Comar says that his court case can be replicated in all other 49 US states," he said, "then we can replicate this in every country around the world."

California Jury Sues Wall Street

Wall Street Greed: Not Too Big for a California Jury

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Ellen Brown

Sixteen of the world’s largest banks have been caught colluding to rig global interest rates.  Why are we doing business with a corrupt global banking cartel?
United States Attorney General Eric Holder has declared that the too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks are too big to prosecute.  But an outraged California jury might have different ideas. As noted in the California legal newspaper The Daily Journal:

California juries are not bashful – they have been known to render massive punitive damages awards that dwarf the award of compensatory (actual) damages.For example, in one securities fraud case jurors awarded $5.7 million in compensatory damages and $165 million in punitive damages. . . . And in a tobacco case with $5.5 million in compensatory damages, the jury awarded $3 billion in punitive damages . . . .

The question, then, is how to get Wall Street banks before a California jury. How about charging them with common law fraud and breach of contract?  That’s what the FDIC just did in its massive 24-count civil suit for damages for LIBOR manipulation, filed in March 2014 against sixteen of the world’s largest banks, including the three largest US banks – JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.   
LIBOR (the London Interbank Offering Rate) is the benchmark rate at which banks themselves can borrow. It is a crucial rate involved in over $400 trillion in derivatives called interest-rate swaps, and it is set by the sixteen private megabanks behind closed doors.
The biggest victims of interest-rate swaps have been local governments, universities, pension funds, and other public entities. The banks have made renegotiating these deals prohibitively expensive, and renegotiation itself is an inadequate remedy. It is the equivalent of the grocer giving you an extra potato when you catch him cheating on the scales. A legal action for fraud is a more fitting and effective remedy. Fraud is grounds both for rescission (calling off the deal) as well as restitution (damages), and in appropriate cases punitive damages.
Trapped in a Fraud
Nationally, municipalities and other large non-profits are thought to have as much as $300 billion in outstanding swap contracts based on LIBOR, deals in which they are trapped due to prohibitive termination fees. According to a 2010 report by the SEIU (Service Employees International Union):

The overall effect is staggering. Banks are estimated to have collected as much as $28 billion in termination fees alone from state and local governments over the past two years. This does not even begin to account for the outsized net payments that state and local governments are now making to the banks. . . .
While the press have reported numerous stories of cities like Detroit, caught with high termination payments, the reality is there are hundreds (maybe even thousands) more cities, counties, utility districts, school districts and state governments with swap agreements [that] are causing cash strapped local and city governments to pay millions of dollars in unneeded fees directly to Wall Street.

All of these entities could have damage claims for fraud, breach of contract and rescission; and that is true whether or not they negotiated directly with one of the LIBOR-rigging banks.
To understand why, it is necessary to understand how swaps work. As explained in my last article here, interest-rate swaps are sold to parties who have taken out loans at variable interest rates, as insurance against rising rates. The most common swap is one where counterparty A (a university, municipal government, etc.) pays a fixed rate to counterparty B (the bank), while receiving from B a floating rate indexed to a reference rate such as LIBOR. If interest rates go up, the municipality gets paid more on the swap contract, offsetting its rising borrowing costs. If interest rates go down, the municipality owes money to the bank on the swap, but that extra charge is offset by the falling interest rate on its variable rate loan. The result is to fix borrowing costs at the lower variable rate.
At least, that is how they are supposed to work. The catch is that the swap is a separate financial agreement – essentially an ongoing bet on interest rates. The borrower owes both the interest onits variable rate loan and what it must pay on its separate swap deal. And the benchmarks for the two rates don’t necessarily track each other. The rate owed on the debt is based on something called the SIFMA municipal bond index.  The rate owed by the bank is based on the privately-fixed LIBOR rate.
As noted by Stephen Gandel on CNNMoney, when the rate-setting banks started manipulating LIBOR, the two rates decoupled, sometimes radically. Public entities wound up paying substantially more than the fixed rate they had bargained for – a failure of consideration constituting breach of contract. Breach of contract is grounds for rescission and damages.
Pain and Suffering in California
The SEIU report noted that no one has yet completely categorized all the outstanding swap deals entered into by local and state governments.  But in a sampling of swaps within California, involving ten cities and counties (San Francisco, Corcoran, Los Angeles, Menlo Park, Oakland, Oxnard, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Riverside, and Sacramento), one community college district, one utility district, one transportation authority, and the state itself, the collective tab was $365 million in swap payments annually, with total termination fees exceeding $1 billion.
Omitted from the sample was the University of California system, which alone is reported to have lost tens of millions of dollars on interest-rate swaps. According to an article in the Orange County Register on February 24, 2014, the swaps now cost the university system an estimated $6 million a year. University accountants estimate that the 10-campus system will lose as much as $136 million over the next 34 years if it remains locked into the deals, losses that would be reduced only if interest rates started to rise. According to the article:

Already officials have been forced to unwind a contract at UC Davis, requiring the university to pay $9 million in termination fees and other costs to several banks. That sum would have covered the tuition and fees of 682 undergraduates for a year.
The university is facing the losses at a time when it is under tremendous financial stress. Administrators have tripled the cost of tuition and fees in the past 10 years, but still can’t cover escalating expenses. Class sizes have increased. Families have been angered by the rising price of attending the university, which has left students in deeper debt.

Peter Taylor, the university’s Chief Financial Officer, defended the swaps, saying he was confident that interest rates would rise in coming years, reversing what the deals have lost. But for that to be true, rates would have to rise by multiples that would drive interest on the soaring federal debt to prohibitive levels, something the Federal Reserve is not likely to allow.
The Revolving Door
The UC’s dilemma is explored in a report titled “Swapping Our Future: How Students and Taxpayers Are Funding Risky UC Borrowing and Wall Street Profits.” The authors, a group called Public Sociologists of Berkeley, say that two factors were responsible for the precipitous decline in interest rates that drove up UC’s relative borrowing costs. One was the move by the Federal Reserve to push interest rates to record lows in order to stabilize the largest banks. The other was the illegal effort by major banks to manipulate LIBOR, which indexes interest rates on most bonds issued by UC.
Why, asked the authors, has UC’s management not tried to renegotiate the deals? They pointed to the revolving door between management and Wall Street. Unlike in earlier years, current and former business and finance executives now play a prominent role on the UC Board of Regents.
They include Chief Financial Officer Taylor, who walked through the revolving door from Lehman Brothers, where he was a top banker in Lehman’s municipal finance business in 2007. That was when the bank sold the university a swap related to debt at UCLA that has now become the source of its biggest swap losses. The university hired Taylor for his $400,000-a-year position in 2009, and he has continued to sign contracts for swaps on its behalf since.
Investigative reporter Peter Byrne notes that the UC regent’s investment committee controls $53 billion in Wall Street investments, and that historically it has been plagued by self-dealing. Byrne writes:

Several very wealthy, politically powerful men are fixtures on the regent’s investment committee, including Richard C. Blum (Wall Streeter, war contractor, and husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein), and Paul Wachter (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s long-time business partner and financial advisor). The probability of conflicts of interest inside this committee—as it moves billions of dollars between public and private companies and investment banks—is enormous.

Blum’s firm Blum Capital is also an adviser to CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which also got caught in the LIBOR-rigging scandal. “Once again,” said CalPERS Chief Investment Officer Joseph Dear of the LIBOR-rigging, “the financial services industry demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to make decisions in the long-term interests of investors.” If the financial services industry cannot be trusted, it needs to be replaced with something that can be.
Remedies
The Public Sociologists of Berkeley recommend renegotiation of the onerous interest rate swaps, which could save up to $200 million for the UC system; and evaluation of the university’s legal options concerning the manipulation of LIBOR. As demonstrated in the new FDIC suit, those options include not just renegotiating on better terms but rescission and damages for fraud and breach of contract. These are remedies that could be sought by local governments and public entities across the state and the nation.
The larger question is why our state and local governments continue to do business with a corrupt global banking cartel. There is an alternative. They could set up their own publicly-owned banks, on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. Fraud could be avoided, profits could be recaptured, and interest could become a much-needed source of public revenue. Credit could become a public utility, dispensed as needed to benefit local residents and local economies.
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Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and a candidate for California State Treasurer running on a state bank platform. She is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt and her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, which explores successful public banking models historically and globally.