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More Scrutiny For An Organization Called Americans Elect

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On July 25, I explained that the Republi-Cratic Corporatist Party was being threatened by a new, Internet-based effort to nominate a presidential ticket, which would be placed on the 2012 ballot in all fifty states.  Last summer, that organization – Americans Elect – described itself in the following terms:

Americans Elect is the first-ever open nominating process.  We’re using the Internet to give every single voter – Democrat, Republican or independent – the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012.  The people will choose the issues. The people will choose the candidates.  And in a secure, online convention next June, the people will make history by putting their choice on the ballot in every state.

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We have no ties to any political group – left, right, or center.  We don’t promote any issues, ideology or candidates.  None of our funding comes from special interests or lobbyists.  Our only goal is to put a directly-nominated ticket on the ballot in 2012.

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The goal of Americans Elect is to nominate a presidential ticket that answers to the people – not the political system.  Like millions of American voters, we simply want leadership that will work together to tackle the challenges facing our country.  And we believe a direct nominating process will prove that America is ready for a competitive, nonpartisan ticket.

Since that time, there has been a good deal of scrutiny focused on Americans Elect.  Justin Elliott recently wrote a comprehensive piece for Salon, highlighting the numerous sources of criticism targeting Americans Elect.  Mr. Elliott provided this summary of the controversies surrounding the organization:

The group is hoping to raise $30 million for its effort. It has already raised an impressive $22 million as of last month.  So where is all that money coming from?  Americans Elect won’t say. In fact, the group changed how it is organized under the tax code last year in order to shield the identity of donors.  It is now a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” group whose contributors are not reported publicly.

What we do know about the donors, largely through news reports citing anonymous sources, suggests they are a handful of super-rich Americans who made fortunes in the finance industry. (More on this below.)  But it’s impossible to fully assess the donors’ motives and examine their backgrounds and entanglements – important parts of the democratic process – while their identities and the size of their donations remain secret.

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Americans Elect officials often tout their “revolutionary” online nominating convention, which will be open to any registered voter. But there’s a big catch.  Any ticket picked by participants will have to be approved by a Candidate Certification Committee, according to the group’s bylaws.

Among other things this committee will need to certify a “balanced ticket obligation”  – that the ticket consists of persons who are “responsive to the vast majority of citizens while remaining independent of special interests and the partisan interests of either major political party,” according to the current draft of Americans Elect rules.  Making these sorts of assessments is, of course, purely subjective.

Jim Cook of Irregular Times has been keeping a steady watch over Americans Elect, with almost-daily postings concerning the strange twists and turns that organization has taken since its inception (and incorporation).  Mr. Cook’s December 11 update provided this revelation:

The 501c4 corporation Americans Elect is arranging for the nation’s first-ever privately-run online nomination of candidates for President and Vice President of the United States in 2012.  As with any other corporation in the United States, it has a set of bylaws.  On November 18, 2011 the Americans Elect corporation held an unannounced meeting at which it amended its previous bylaws.

A month later, Americans Elect has not posted changes to the bylaws, or posted any notice of the changes, on its website for public review.  Furthermore, Americans Elect has generally made it a practice to post its documents as images that cannot be indexed by search engines or searched by keyword.  For these reasons, Irregular Times has retyped the bylaws into an easily searchable text format, based on a pdf file submitted to the Florida Secretary of State on November 22, 2011.  You can read the full text of the amended bylaws here.

Just a day earlier (on December 10) Jim Cook had been highlighting one of the many transparency controversies experienced by the group:

On the Americans Elect’s “Candidates” web page it rolled out last month, various numbers were tossed up without explanation.  A reference to a wildly error-prone slate of candidates’ supposed policies drawn up by Americans Elect contractor “On the Issues” appeared next to various politicians’ names, but the actual calculation by which Americans Elect came up with its “National Match” for each politician has never actually been published.  I’ll repeat that in bold:  Americans Elect’s system for calculating its numerical rankings of politicians was never shared with the public.

Another problem for Americans Elect concerns compliance with its bylaws by individual directors, and the lack of enforcement of those bylaws, as Cook’s December 9 posting demonstrates:

She’s done it five times before; this is the sixth.

The Americans Elect bylaws are very specific, as an Americans Elect Director, Christine Todd Whitman is not supposed to “communicate or act in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for President or Vice President at any time before the adjournment of the online nominating convention of Americans Elect.”

But here she is this week nevertheless, appearing on national television via FOX News to communicate in favor of presidential candidate Jon Huntsman   .   .   .

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The bylaws say that when the neutrality provision is violated, there must be some sort of sanction.  But Christine Todd Whitman is getting away with it again and again and again where the whole country can see it.  Is the Americans Elect corporation inclined to follow its own rules?  If not, how much trust should we place in it as it gets ready to run its own private presidential nomination in less than five months’ time?

Richard Hansen, a professor at the University of California at Irvine Law School, wrote an essay for Politico, which was harshly critical of Americans Elect.  He concluded the piece with these observations:

But the biggest problem with Americans Elect is neither its secrecy nor the security of its election.  It is the problems with internal fairness and democracy.  To begin with, according to its draft rules, only those who can provide sufficient voter identification that will satisfy the organization – and, of course, who have Internet access – will be allowed to choose the candidate.  These will hardly be a cross section of American voters.

In addition, an unelected committee appointed by the board, the Candidates Certification Committee, will be able to veto a presidential/vice presidential ticket deemed not “balanced” – subject only to a two-thirds override by delegates.

It gets worse.  Under the group’s bylaws, that committee, along with the three other standing committees, serves at the pleasure of the board – and committee members can be removed without cause by the board.  The board members were not elected by delegates; they chose themselves in the organization’s articles of incorporation.

The bottom line:  If Americans Elect is successful, millions of people will have united to provide ballot access not for a candidate they necessarily believe in – like a Ross Perot or Ralph Nader – but for a candidate whose choice could be shaped largely by a handful of self-appointed leaders.

Despite the veneer of democracy created by having “delegates” choose a presidential candidate through a series of Internet votes, the unelected, unaccountable board of Americans Elect, funded by secret money, will control the process for choosing a presidential and vice presidential candidate – who could well appear on the ballot in all 50 states.

Forget about Tom Friedman’s breathlessly-enthusiastic New York Times commentary from last summer, gushing praise on Americans Elect.  It’s beginning to appear as though this movement is about to go off the rails, following the Cain Train into oblivion.


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Food For Thought

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March 9, 2009

Every so often, conservative columnist (and baseball fan) George Will hits one out of the park.  He did so again in Sunday’s Washington Post.  While other conservative columnists busied themselves by blaming Barack Obama for our current recession (after all, he’s been in office for 48 whole days!) Mr. Will found something more important to discuss.  In an article called “Where the Obesity Grows“, Mr. Will addressed America’s diet problem.  The undercurrent of Will’s article focused on the fact that our new Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, is the former Governor of Iowa (a state which obtains a large amount of revenue from corn production).  Nevertheless, it is doubtful that Vilsack will embark on some sort of “corn agenda”, especially since Iowa produces a number of other crops, including the increasingly-popular soybean.  Besides, Nebraska is widely accepted as America’s greatest corn-producing state.

Consider these points discussed in George Will’s article and be sure to remind yourself that these aren’t the rantings of some “lefty”:

A quarter of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket contain processed corn.  Fossil fuels are involved in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting and processing the corn. America’s food industry uses about as much petroleum as America’s automobiles do.

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Corn, which covers 125,000 square miles of America — about the size of New Mexico — fattens 100 million beef cattle and at least that many bipeds.  Much of the river of cheap corn becomes an ocean of high-fructose corn syrup, which by 1984 was sweetening Coke and Pepsi.  Disposing of the corn also requires passing it through animals’ stomachs. Corn, together with pharmaceuticals and other chemicals  …   has made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots rather than grass, cutting by up to 75 percent the time from birth to slaughter.  Eating corn nourished by petroleum-based fertilizers, a beef cow consumes almost a barrel of oil in its lifetime.

Although Tom Vilsack received some attention in Will’s article, the star character was a man named Michael Pollan.  Pollan is a professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.  Last year, David Laskin of The Seattle Times reviewed Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto:

Pollan’s bugbear this time is the so-called science of nutrition. Back in the good old days, people ate plants and animals raised (or foraged) close to (or at) home and prepared accordingly to age-old traditions.  But once nutritionists started isolating the chemical components of what we ate and putting them back to together in “new, improved” and highly processed ways, Americans began growing steadily more obese, more prone to diabetes, cancer and heart disease, and more stressed about our dietary options.  These days our food is cheap, convenient and increasingly plastered with health claims–but it’s making us and everyone else who eats it fat and sick.

More importantly, Mr. Laskin’s review of Michael Pollan’s new book made a point that was (surprisingly) not included in George Will’s article:

As the Senate’s recent rubber-stamping of yet another pork-filled farm bill demonstrates, America still lacks the political will to reform the agricultural practices at the root of our dietary woes.  But to Pollan, that’s no reason why enlightened eaters can’t rise up and start changing the Western diet one meal, one garden, one family farm at time.

On December 17, the more left-leaning Irregular Times website pointed out that the Organic Consumers Association had specifically asked that Vilsack not be appointed as Agriculture Secretary and that within one week, 10,000 people signed a petition opposing that appointment.  The Irregular Times piece gave us this appraisal of the Vilsack appointment:

Significant food reform is not what we can expect from a Secretary Vilsack.  As the Governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack defended the interests of industrial agriculture, and did plenty of favors for giant agricultural corporations like Monsanto.  Iowa agriculture is no longer typified by small family farms, but by gigantic fields of genetically engineered corn and soybeans, interspersed with concentrated feeding lots in which cattle and pigs pumped full of antibiotics stand in their own filth all day long.

Agricultural pollution from Iowa is so bad that it significantly contributes to dead zones all the way down in the Gulf of Mexico.  It contributes to global warming too, with methane oozing out of manure lagoons near livestock factory farms adding significantly to the concentration of greenhouse gases in our planet’s atmosphere.

None of these problems got better when Tom Vilsack was Governor of Iowa.  Vilsack has seemed more interested in promoting big agribusiness as it is than in reforming it.

On that same day, Gabriel Winant of Salon.com asked Michael Pollan for his reaction to the selection of Vilsack.  Pollan replied that Vilsack’s record in Iowa “does not give one much reason to believe he’s going to bring a reformist agenda to the Department of Agriculture.”  Pollan went on to explain:

He was biotech governor of the year.  And he has very close relations to Monsanto.  As with every other pick, the focus is on the Nixon-in-China scenario, the hopeful fantasy, which is that these people will be able to drive reform in their bureaucracies — that’s the story of this Cabinet.  Whether that comes true or not, we’re just going to have to wait and see.

By making Michael Pollan the subject of his article, perhaps George Will’s hidden message was:  Don’t expect too much Change from this administration or you will be sadly disappointed.