|
The Powers that Be: Big-Money Politics
from the School Board to the U.S. Senate
November 13, 2009
Who’d ever guess a mid-sized city’s school board election would reflect as much about U.S. politics as a gubernatorial race in New Jersey? When Denver voters elected school board members who raised less than their competitors but want to see neighborhood schools succeed, they showed followers of former DPS superintendent, U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, where their loyalties and hopes for the future lie: with the teachers and students of their district. When New Jersey voters opted to remove former Goldman Sachs CEO and incumbent New Jersey governor John Corzine from office, they showed where their loyalties and hopes for the future lie: with a governor who is not beholden to big-money power players.
It has become clear across the country that big-money power players will continue to call the shots in both the Republican and Democratic parties unless the electorate stop allowing the raising of money to determine election outcomes. Here in Colorado, voters tired of Big-Money politics are yelling foul as they watch the damage being done to our capital city’s public school district, our state’s Democratic party, and our state’s representation in Washington. Consider these 2009 developments:
In January of this year, Governor Bill Ritter appointed Denver Public Schools Superintendant Michael Bennet to fill the U.S. Senate seat opened by newly appointed Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. Voters who’d prefer to elect such a replacement voiced concerns over Bennet’s appointment because:
1) Bennet was not required to provide any sort of financial disclosures regarding his personal millions or his supporters
2) Bennet had never been elected to a public office
3) Bennet’s appointment was unreasonable and unfounded, leading to speculation Ritter was pressured by big-money power brokers to make the appointment due to Bennet’s association with Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz
4) No public input was truly sought, applied, or acknowledged during the appointment process
Additional concerns have arisen during Bennet’s tenure due to his voting record, especially his “No” vote in April that helped derail complete bankruptcy reform by killing the Durbin/“mortgage cramdown” amendment in the Senate. Designed to give bankruptcy judges more leeway to modify mortgages of bankrupt homeowners by lengthening terms, cutting interest rates, and reducing mortgage balances regardless of lender objections, the amendment also would have further encouraged lenders to be much more aggressive and effective in their attempts to voluntarily rework bad loans.
Since the Senate defeat of the amendment, U.S. foreclosure rates have remained at record high levels. According to the foreclosure marketing firm RealtyTrac, an average of 300,000 foreclosures were filed on properties in the U.S. every month this year, with that number reaching nearly 360,000 in August, the worst month to date. In September, one in every 65,000 homes in the U.S. faced foreclosure, and currently nearly 2 million homes in the U.S. are listed as foreclosed. While October foreclosure numbers have reportedly improved over last year at this time, housing industry watchers predict the U.S. foreclosure rate will get much worse before it shows true signs of improvement.
Unfortunately, as noted in newspapers such as The New York Times and on sites such as The Washington Independent, the Obama administration seemed to accept the votes against the Durbin amendment by a total of 12 Democratic U.S. Senators, including Bennet, with no regrets regarding the failure of the amendment—despite the fact that candidate Barack Obama campaigned on the premise that every individual homeowner whose home is their primary residence suffers from the financial meltdown caused by years of irresponsible, unregulated lending practices by the U.S. financial industry...and deserves to be helped. We at Imagine A Great Election agreed with this premise and assumed President Obama would fight to assist homeowners rather than cater to the banks that betrayed them. If indeed the Obama administration wants to support full bankruptcy reform, why did the president fail to pressure senators like Michael Bennet to help average Americans rather than support big banks once again?
Despite this disturbing vote and Bennet’s lack of experience, the junior senator has received significant support from the White House in the form of:
1) an immediate statement of the administration’s determination to keep Bennet in office following a primary challenge from former Colorado Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff earlier this year
2) plum appointments that include the seat vacated by deceased Senator Ted Kennedy on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
3) a June fundraiser hosted by Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual at the Chicago Ritz-Carlton
Not only did the fundraising event place cash in the coffers of Bennet and the other Democratic senators it honored, it raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for 2010 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee promotional efforts in the key candidates’ states.
How much of Bennet’s campaign contributions come from out of state? According to OpenSecrets.org (a site of the Center for Responsive Politics), the bulk of Bennet’s $2.5 million campaign fund has been contributed via ActBlue.com, an on-line clearinghouse that allows donors from any location to support individual Democratic candidates via the web. Other Bennet supporters range from Comcast Corporation of Philadelphia and Infoture Inc. of Boulder to lobbying firms such as Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck of Denver and Las Vegas and Hogan & Hartson of Washington, D.C.
Compared to Bennet, Republican front-runner and former Colorado Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton has raised just over half a million dollars in her campaign, while Democratic challenger Andrew Romanoff has raised about $300,000. Meanwhile, Imagine A Great Election learned directly from Romanoff that if he’d been appointed to the U.S. Senate seat now held by Michael Bennet, he would have voted for, rather than against, the Durbin amendment designed to help homeowners, regardless of how he perceived the administration may have wanted him to vote. It is our opinion that this is the type of honest leadership Coloradoans—and residents of every state—deserve to have in Washington.
It is also our opinion that voting for Bennet in 2010 will mean voting for more Big-Money influence in our government. And Big Money does indeed make a difference. American taxpayers supported Wall Street because they were convinced by Wall Street insiders within the Bush and Obama administrations that some of our banks are indeed too big to fail. Despite promising cutbacks including reduced compensation for those in their ranks making millions, Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs (the former employer not only of former New Jersey governor John Corzine but of current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as well as current Economic Council director Larry Summers, both significant Obama economic advisors) have simply given their corporate chiefs more stock options, many of which were purchased at discount rates and are already increasing dramatically in their worth. Wall Street and Washington will never be reformed if such tit-for-tat relationships continue to tie the biggest money makers in the financial industry with the most influential policy makers in the country. As Ohio Congresswomen Marcy Kaptur states in this Bill Moyers Journal video, criminal prosecution of those responsible for deceiving and robbing the American public are long overdue…not only to punish those who deliberately conducted these acts, but to ensure such crimes are not repeated on such a grand scale ever again.
Back in Denver, Senator Michael Bennet’s influence was evidenced through the quick appointment of his successor as superintendant of Denver Public Schools, Tom Boasberg, former COO of DPS and a long-time friend of Bennet. A fellow native of Washington, D.C., Boasberg is also a lawyer who attended Bennet’s alma mater, the prestigious St. Alban’s School. Bennet and Boasberg’s mutual success in revamping the DPS budget led to their shared emphasis on the need for more educational reforms in the district in the form of charter schools. Candidates for open seats on the DPS board campaigned earlier this year as advocates for or against such proposed reforms, with teachers’ union-backed candidates emphasizing the need for stronger neighborhood schools. The November 3 election resulted in a 4-3 majority on the now ideologically “split” board, with those supporting neighborhood schools in the majority.
As far as Big Money goes, there was plenty of it to go around in this single school board election. Mary Seawell, a pro-charter school candidate who was endorsed by Denver mayor John Hickenlooper and by the Denver Post, raised the most of all the candidates with approximately $180,000 in donations from significant contributors, including Denver businessman Thomas Gamel, Denver Center for the Performing Arts CEO Daniel Ritchie, reclusive Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, and Susan Daggett—wife of Senator Michael Bennet. Gamel, an outspoken supporter of charter schools, also supported two other candidates considered pro-charter and therefore reform-minded, but of his three preferred candidates, only Seawell won her election bid.
Did Main Street win over Big Money here in Denver as it did in New Jersey? Did the outcome of election night in New York’s 23rd district also reflect the frustration voters of varied affiliations are voicing against the wealthy power-hungry powers-that-be, even (or especially) if the true identities, intentions, or affiliations of these powers-that-be remain relatively unknown?
Such frustration could be a critical factor in next fall’s midterm elections, a possibility we agree the Obama administration would do well to consider. Here in Colorado, Governor Bill Ritter has supposedly fallen from grace among the party leaders as well as among state voters, many say due to significant missteps such as the Bennet appointment. If that appointment had been in fact dictated by the Democratic Party powers-that-be in Washington, one wonders why such support continues when the appointed Senator votes against core Obama campaign promises? The administration’s aggressive support of Bennet in a primary against Andrew Romanoff—who clearly sides with the view that mortgage holders, not Big Banks, need protection—is particularly baffling. Until or unless the White House takes action to the contrary, we can only assume that President Obama had no intention of fulfilling the promise for change that candidate Obama so eloquently articulated.
—Sherry Seiber
|