RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Corporate insiders should not be able to use investor money as a piggybank to advance political agendas.”

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said the disclosure of corporate political spending would have “obvious value” for America’s democracy.

“It adds transparency – cleans up campaign finance and it keeps the election process fair and free of super-funded outside influences here in the United States or from elsewhere. But even setting aside the benefits to democracy, the case for disclosure is clear and convincing, purely as a matter of corporate governance and investor protection,” Menendez said on a conference call briefing last week that focused on attempts to require the “largest mutual fund companies” to disclose political spending records.

“This information is material to how shareholders decide where to invest their money and how to vote in corporate elections. As it currently stands, corporations can funnel shareholders’ money to organizations that do not have to disclose their political contributions, and investors have no way of knowing whether executives are spending their money on political causes that may be directly adverse to the shareholders’ interests,” he said. “Corporate insiders should not be able to use investor money as a piggybank to advance their personal political agendas without any oversight from shareholders.”

For the last six years, Menendez said he’s been “pushing” the Securities and Exchange Commission to begin working on a rule to require public companies to disclose all of their political spending to shareholders.

“Some corporations have stridently fought this initiative. They’ve sounded the alarm bell and called upon their allies in Congress to fight common sense disclosure,” he said.

Menendez said new SEC Chairman Jay Clayton has not provided any “assurances” that he would take public support for a disclosure rule seriously. Menendez voted against Clayton’s confirmation.

“He wouldn’t commit to holding an innocuous public roundtable on the issue. He wouldn’t comment on whether he believes this disclosure is material to shareholders and I find that to be entirely inadequate when so many investors, both retail and institutional, are demanding this information,” he said. “Investors can’t rely on the shareholders’ proposal process alone to affect corporate change on this issue.”

Menendez, a member of the Senate Finance and Banking Committees, said the nation needs an SEC that will truly “stand up for investors and corporate governance principles and finally require this disclosure.”

“At the end of the day, those that choose not to support such a disclosure are working to silence the voices of hardworking Americans in favor of amplifying the speech and magnifying the influence of corporations in our politics, and that just simply can’t be the case,” he said.

Menendez said the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision “opened the floodgates” for unlimited, unchecked and “often undisclosed” corporate spending on campaign advertisements, federal and state advocacy efforts and other political communication methods. CONTINUE AT SITE

Scene: The lab-coated man comes in from the room. “It was a troubling case,” he admits. “This question of why you voted for Trump.” He snaps on his surgical glove and probes his patient’s mouth in the usual way “A real brain crusher! The boys and I really went a few rounds on the diagnosis. Were you the sympathetic sort? You know, just down on your luck, jobless maybe. Suffering from inequality. Or were you the ‘take my country back’ type. You know? Worked up about Central Americans or whatever. In other words, were you more a case of inequality?”

“You mean you wanted to know whether I had problems or whether I was the problem?” the patient offers.

The doctor: “More or less. So, we came up with a new battery of tests. A whole new data set!” The man in the lab coat was clearly excited about the new spreadsheets — he loved them. But then he turned to the man in the chair and started to wince. “We’ve run the numbers, and it turns out . . . ”

“No, doc, give me a chance!” the patient protests.

“You’ve come back deplorable,” the doctor sighs. “It’s really unfortunate.

“If the test had shown that you were financially put-out enough, we might have tried a trade policy, some shovel-ready infrastructure projects, or maybe a handout. But, owing to your manifest condition, I can recommend only a limited number of options.”

The patient: “Diversity training?”

The doctor laughs, “Oh no! Liable to make things worse, really. You’d resist. It’s complicated. No, perhaps we could try the implementation of a fairness doctrine, to turn off your Fox News. After observing your gut health, that’s an option we should explore. But the other way is just to let nature take its course, you know. Deplorables are generally older and so, closer to the end.”

“I’m a goner, then? No future.”

“It’s painful to contemplate. But pain, we can treat. Would you like a prescription opioid?” the doctors says with a faint leer.

And . . . scene!

And so it goes. The political and chattering classes, mostly exiled from official positions of power are still trying to figure out why they lost. And so they’ve returned to a debate that never needed to take place: Were Trump’s base of voters motivated primarily by “economic anxiety” or by racism and a host of other backward cultural attitudes?

Emma Green, a staff writer at The Atlantic, summed up the new surveys conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and her magazine.

Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump. Besides partisan affiliation, it was cultural anxiety — feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment — that best predicted support for Trump.

Green adds:

Polling is a notoriously clumsy instrument for understanding people’s lives, and provides only a sketch of who they are. But it’s useful for debunking myths and narratives — particularly the ubiquitous idea that economic anxiety drove white working-class voters to support Trump.

She goes on to argue that working-class white voters are “attuned to cultural change and anxiety about America’s multicultural future.” It’s a very strong conclusion and the Twitterati immediately jumped all over it, essentially saying, “They’re just racists after all.”

The Republican-party establishment is caught in an existential paradox.

Without Donald Trump’s populist and nationalist 2016 campaign, the GOP probably would not have won the presidency. Nor would Republicans now enjoy such lopsided control of state legislatures and governorships, as well as majorities in the House and Senate, and likely control of the Supreme Court for a generation.

So are conservatives angry at the apostate Trump or indebted to him for helping them politically when they were not able to help themselves?

For a similar sense of the paradox, imagine if a novice outsider such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban had captured the Democratic nomination and then won the presidency — but did not run on either Bernie Sanders’s progressive redistributionism, Barack Obama’s identity politics, or Hillary Clinton’s high taxes and increased regulation. Would liberals be happy, conflicted, or seething?

For now, most Republicans are overlooking Trump’s bothersome character excesses — without conceding that his impulsiveness and bluntness may well have contributed to his success after Republican sobriety and traditionalism failed.

Republicans concentrate on what they like in the Trump agenda — military spending increases, energy expansion, deterrence abroad, tax and regulatory reform, and the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act — and they ignore the inherent contradictions between Trumpism and their own political creed.

But there are many fault lines that will loom large in the next few years.

Doctrinaire conservatives believe that unfettered free trade is essential, even if it is sometimes not fair or reciprocal.

Hillary Clinton recently took “full responsibility” for her 2016 loss. Only she didn’t. Instead of explaining what the historian Thucydides once called the “truest causes” (aitiai), she went on to list at least three pretexts (prophases) for her defeat: sexism, FBI director James Comey, and the purported Russian hacking of her unsecured e-mail server and the John Podesta e-mail trove.

Clinton’s accusations also raise the larger question of why a presidential candidate wins or loses an election.

In general, there seem to be five hinges of fate: personality, positions on the issues, the general political atmosphere of the era, the quality of the campaign, and sudden and unforeseen outside events such as depression, scandal, or war. Even a biased media or lots of money pales in comparison.

The Pretexts

We can fairly dismiss Clinton’s pretexts.

Take sexism. Hillary Clinton found her sex an advantage in being elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. For a generation, among the most powerful and successful figures in U.S. politics were three progressive, multimillionaire, Bay Area women who, in a most non-diverse fashion, lived within 50 miles of one another: Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.

From 1997 to 2013 women of both parties were in charge of U.S. foreign policy as secretary of state, for twelve out of 16 years. One could make the argument that “the first female president” was an advantageous campaigning point, not a drawback; it was certainly designed to bookend Barack Obama’s successful trumpeting of being the first African-American president.

Blaming a deer-in-the-headlights FBI director James Comey is equally problematic. His passive-aggressive pronouncements irrationally first exonerated her, then did not, then did again. Faulting the FBI for her own likely felonious behavior of sending and receiving classified communications on an unsecured server (or of Bill Clinton’s trying to leverage Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac) is sort of like blaming the defeat at Pearl Harbor on the Japanese — true, but hardly the whole story given America’s responsibility for its own unpreparedness.

In similar fashion, had Donald Trump lost, he might have faulted the Washington Post for airing the decade-old Access Hollywood tape that nearly destroyed his campaign, as if the clear ill will and partisanship of Jeff Bezos’s Post were not empowered by Trump’s own private, hot-mic — but nonetheless crude — statements. The Germans claimed that harsh snows and the last-minute campaign in the Balkans had delayed and thus doomed their 1941 Russian offensive, as if the Red Army did not have a say or as if Germans were a tropical people.

He has a very good message! rsk

NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal announced plans to run for sheriff on Friday, although it is unclear where in the country he will do so. The bombshell came after he denied plans to run for mayor of Atlanta, Ga.

“Mayor no, I would never run for mayor,” O’Neal told 11Alive News. But then the basketball start dropped a bombshell. “In 2020, I plan on running for sheriff.”

The NBA star explained his goal — to support the public image of police. “This is not about politics. This is about bringing people closer together,” Shaq said. “You know, when I was coming up, people love [sic] and respected the police, the deputies. And, I want to be the one to bring that back, especially in the community I serve.”

Shaq added that he would do well, because he can relate to everyone. “I can put on a suit and have a conversation with Bill Gates. I can go in the hood and talk to the homies, and talk to the children.”

As a prominent black celebrity, O’Neal can speak to the racial tensions inspiring the Black Lives Matter movement and defend police against the accusations that law enforcement across America is racist.

In an interview with Esquire in November, Shaq put forth his answer on the police-race tension in America. “As an African-American male, I understand. I’ve been through it. As a police officer, I understand. I’ve been through it. I understand people. I listen. We’re not put on this Earth to change people’s minds—we just have to listen to them,” he said.

The NBA star explained his respect for the police, and why he is not afraid of traffic stops.

When I get stopped by the cops, I’m not worried. And it has nothing to do with being Shaq. You know why? I show respect. “Yes, sir. No, sir.” That’s how I was taught. I was raised by a drill sergeant, and that’s who I am. Doesn’t matter if it’s a black guy, white guy, whatever. I’m not going to make it uncomfortable for you, because I don’t want it uncomfortable for me. There’s not going to be any talking back—none of that.

Chelsea Victoria Clinton was named after the Joni Mitchell song “Chelsea Morning,” and as of the spring of 2017, it’s Chelsea Morning in America. Boom, she’s in Variety . . . CBS This Morning . . . The New York Times Book Review. She even picked up a Lifetime award! Okay it was from Lifetime, as in the cable channel, not for a lifetime of achievement, but still, Chelsea Clinton is everywhere. America, whether it asked for it or not, has become the setting for an invasion-from-inside thriller: The Chelsening.

She’s not just a little girl anymore, you know, not just someone’s daughter or campaign prop. Chelsea Clinton is a person, no, a citizen, no, a global citizen, and she is done being quiet. Hear, world, as Chelsea speaks out. She is speaking out about social media: “I’ve recognized, as a lot of people have, that Twitter is a vehicle for me to share my thoughts.” She’s speaking out on movies: “Of course I’m going to see Furious 8. I’ve already seen Logan. I love that Logan is being succeeded by a little girl.” She’s speaking out on the Clinton Foundation: “At its most distilled level, we try to make a positive, impactful, empowering difference in whatever ways we can.” She’s speaking out on speaking out: “This is not the time to be silent or stay on the sidelines.”

With the exception of a few resentful Twitter pokes at the man responsible for rendering her mom an isolated forest monster — Chappaquatch — instead of the most powerful woman in the history of the planet, everything Chelsea says is pretty much like this. The positions she articulates on progress (pro), climate change (anti), and gauzy, inspirational, make-the-world-a-better-place-for-girls-and-women goodness (super-duper pro) are verbal fentanyl. Everything she says is a platitude wrapped in a cliché washed down with a bromide. She’s the dusty end of the greeting-card section, the lite FM of famous-person chatter, a human press release. In short, Chelsea Clinton is becoming the champion dullard of our time. This didn’t happen by chance: We’re talking about the ever-calculating Clintonworld here. The dullness is a strategy, a demented post-last-ditch effort by the Clinton gals to finally power Hillary into the Oval Office. But I’ll come back to that.

It’s not like Chelsea Clinton lacks for interesting things she could talk about. What’s it like being in college when your dad humiliates your mom with an intern your own age? What’s it like watching said mom humiliate herself by losing the presidency, after a lifetime of preparation for the task, to a cheesy reality-television star running on a whim? What’s it like living in a $10 million New York condo with 250-foot-long hallways? Oh, and do you have any comment on longtime Clinton Foundation officer Doug Band’s claim, in a private e-mail uncovered by WikiLeaks, that the foundation paid for your “wedding and life for a decade”?

Yet Vogue writer Jonathan Van Meter, after spending much of the spring and summer of 2012 with Chelsea, was so lost for a juicy anecdote about her that he led off his lengthy profile with this tidbit: “I am pretty intrigued by Joplin Avenue Coffee Company,” Chelsea told him in Joplin, Mo., adding, “When in doubt, coffee.” Van Meter italicized the final noun in a heroic attempt to make the remark sound a little more electrifying than it was.

Variety’s writer Ramin Setoodeh whipped up this pulse-pounder to open his profile: “Chelsea Clinton is about to tell you some things you may not know about her. In an interview with Variety, she lists the last great movie she saw (Hidden Figures), her most surprising job (an internship at a cattle ranch in 1999), and her favorite food growing up (cheddar cheese).”

Supposedly the media have an intriguing new angle. After 20 years of declaring that Chelsea has at last found a niche for herself, they’re now saying that Chelsea has at last really found a niche for herself. Said niche is her new social-media role as the tart-tongued Trump tormentor of Twitter. “Now on Twitter: Chelsea Clinton, Unbound,” proclaimed the New York Times in a story of more than 1,100 words — longer than the same newspaper’s April 18 story about the Fresno Islamist who slaughtered three people while yelling “Allahu akbar.”

Against the odds, House Republicans have regained momentum on health-care reform, and they’re nearing a majority coalition. While there may be more swerves before a vote, they ought to appreciate the importance of demonstrating that a center-right Congress—working with President Trump —can govern.

There are still holdouts and others are undecided in the GOP’s moderate and conservative wings, but their differences are narrowing. More members are also recognizing their political mistake in trashing the original ObamaCare repeal and replace bill. The House now has a rare second chance, and a generational opportunity to start to solve some U.S. problems.

On Wednesday Fred Upton of Michigan and Billy Long of Missouri worked out the latest compromise, meant to assuage concerns about insurance for pre-existing medical conditions. The amendment would add $8 billion over five years to a 10-year, $130 billion fund to create risk pools to protect people in the individual insurance market who need high-cost treatments.

Pre-existing conditions are an understandable concern, but the critics traffick in demagoguery, not substance. Their opposition has less to do with vulnerable patients than preserving ObamaCare. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that risk pools are “like administering cough medicine to someone with stage 4 cancer,” which exploits cancer victims and shows he knows nothing about risk pools.

By targeting funds at the sickest patients, states can make insurance markets more affordable and stable. These subsidies siphon off some of the costs that contribute to rising premiums in the overall market, and the idea is that the resulting cheaper plans for everyone else will encourage more people to enroll.

In Alaska, ObamaCare premiums rose 40% annually over multiple years, one of the two participating insurers exited the business, and the other was on the brink. So the state received a federal waiver last year to create a risk pool. Premiums rose 7.3% on average for 2017.

Opponents say risk pools are underfunded, but the Alaska rescue mission cost merely $55 million (albeit in a low-population state). The results came despite ObamaCare’s restraints, and the GOP’s American Health Care Act promises more regulatory flexibility to experiment. Opponents also argue that risk pools are ghettos for the sick, but the Alaska payments are “invisible,” meaning that all consumers use regular insurance.

We’ll learn soon if risk pools are enough to win over GOP moderates, but they should know that Democrats will demagogue the pre-existing conditions issue in the 2018 election whether the bill passes or not. Better to pass the bill, and explain to their voters why their reform is better for patients, than defend a failure. HillaryCare’s crash didn’t save vulnerable Democrats in 1994—though unlike Democrats, this time Republicans have a good product to sell.

Forty-nine years ago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate for president.

The year 1968 was a tumultuous one that saw the assassinations of rival candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson’s unpopular lame-duck Democratic administration imploded because of massive protests against the Vietnam War.

Yet Humphrey almost defeated Republican nominee Richard Nixon, losing the election by just over 500,000 votes (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent).

Infighting Democrats could have defeated the unpopular Nixon if not for a few unforeseen developments.

Their convention in Chicago turned into a creepy carnival of televised rioting and radical protests. Hippies and leftists were seen battling police in the streets on prime-time news.

The former Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, ran as a states’ rights third-party candidate and drew 13.5 percent of the vote. Wallace destroyed the Democrats’ traditional hold on the old “solid South” by winning five Southern states outright. He also siphoned off enough traditional Democratic supporters to give Nixon astonishing Republican victories in half a dozen other states in the region.

Nixon won over a few Northern blue-collar states that had often voted Democratic, such as Wisconsin and Ohio — again with help from Wallace, who appealed to fed-up, working-class Democrats.

What was the lesson from 1968?

The Democrats could have recalibrated their message to appeal more to working-class voters.

They should have rebuilt the old Franklin D. Roosevelt–era coalition that had elected Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, mostly by appealing to paycheck issues and avoiding radical agendas.

Yet despite picking up twelve House seats in the 1970 midterm elections, and instead of attributing the 1968 loss to Wallace’s third-party populism and voter pushback against radicalism, the Democrats went off the rails and veered hard left in 1972.

The lowering of the voting age to age 18 in 1971 also tricked Democrats into wrongly thinking that most new young voters were leftists and would vote in record numbers for leftist candidates.

So the Democrats in 1972 foolishly nominated die-hard left-wing South Dakota senator George McGovern.

Ex-President Barack Obama is the mystery man of American politics. Given the absence of a viable paper trail, nobody can say for sure who he is. He manifests for us as a figure of multiple identities: a Christian, a Muslim, a secularist, a socialist, a humanist, an intellectual, a man of the people. His lack of definable substance, his inner absence, has been an important political advantage. As Obama himself confessed (or boasted) in The Audacity of Hope, this layering of anonymities enabled him to “serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Obama’s enigmatic personae and antecedents are an issue most people are reluctant to pursue, whether out of mere indifference, partisan allegiance or fear of ridicule. Even though he represents one of the most pivotal moments in American history, which saw a polarizing cipher with a neo-Marxist blueprint reduce the country to a social, political and economic shambles, Obama doesn’t get much traction in the news these days. Few wish to investigate his shadowy heritage, to confront the ongoing implications of the debacle he was instrumental in causing or to pursue its resolution. The unwillingness to grapple with what Obama signifies — in fact, personifies — is a sign of the failure of political will, a tendency to allow a crucial feature of national existence to subside beneath the welter of current events. “Nothing to see here,” seems to be the consensus, “time to move on.”

But there is more to see than meets the eye. The question that may exercise future historians is how a man so obviously unfit for the presidency and so patently inimical to the well-being of the nation could have been elected—twice. Was the race card in itself sufficiently instrumental to persuade a nation to embrace eight years of mayhem? Could a voting majority have been swept up in an access of reparation euphoria? Did John Dewey’s “progressivist” education gradually work to dumb down a significant portion of the electorate, rendering it ultimately susceptible to socialist manipulation? Was the influence of the Frankfurt School and its leftist agenda powerful enough to subvert the academy, the press, the entertainment industry and the culture at large, and thus to transform a free democratic society into a nascent authoritarian state? All these elements were certainly in play, but likely could not have borne their tainted fruit had Obama not appeared on the scene, like a diabolus ex machina. He acted as both catalyst and embodiment of a looming catastrophe.

The fact that there was little in the way of reliable biographical and formative data — vital records were (and are) either disputed or inaccessible — was not the liability one might have imagined. Rather, it may have been the critical factor in determining Obama’s electoral triumphs and the malign consequences that inevitably followed.