Signs of Collapse: Non-Enforcement of Federal Election Law, Repeal of Prevailing Wage and the Return of Radical Chic

Something is happening here. When I got off the train after work on Friday the telltale massing of security officers was located at the mouth of the transit station. The underground bus/light-rail train tunnel must be a vulnerable and vital node in the city. Once up on street level I noticed helicopters hovering to the east above Capitol Hill, my neighborhood. The helicopters looked to be stationed over Seattle Central Community College. It was May Day. So I assumed some sort of protest had morphed into a street occupation and/or confrontation with the police.

As I walked up the hill on Pine Street, big black unmarked SUVs with police inside sped by. When I arrived in my neighborhood, the bars were full as usual on Friday evening. People seemed to be going about their business in spite of the noisy gyrations of helicopters overhead. At the grocery store, where I had stopped for weekend provisions, the young checker told me he had been on edge during the day because of rumors that anarchists armed with hammers would attack the supermarket, a local company that had been bought out some time ago by Kroger, a corporate behemoth.

I was going to deliver a mild defense of anarchism, something to the effect that when the state fails and is so completely captured by capital the people need to step in, but I stopped myself. The young checker was about to finish his shift and just wanted to get home. I understood completely because after a long week so did I. Outside the grocery store a cluster of police officials stood on Broadway next to a police van. The noise from the helicopters above blanketed everything.

The problem for the police now, for law enforcement throughout the country, is "radical chic" appears to be back several years after the last Occupy Wall Street encampment was torn down. Popular enthusiasm for protest and confrontation appears to be renewed. Case in point is during that Friday evening walk home after I left the transit center, I passed a young handsome couple very well dressed out on the town for a night out. The guy had on a tie and jacket; the woman, a dress. They both looked hip, not square, and elegant. But the problem for them is that they were out of place in an environment where helicopters were making industrial-strength noise overhead and black Chevy Suburbans packed with cops gunned up and down the street. The young handsome couple seemed indulgent and fragile, more like figurines on a wedding cake. They would have been better off in jeans and kaffiyeh.

That order is collapsing should be beyond dispute at this point. The United States is now committed to perpetual warfare. How long before a political formation arises that addresses that problem is unclear.

The problem for the U.S. homeland is that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, Two stories in yesterday's paper illustrate this.

First, Eric Lichtblau reports in "F.E.C. Can’t Curb 2016 Election Abuse, Commission Chief Says"
of a mini-Bulworth moment for the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission Ann Ravel when she says that the commission can no longer enforce federal election law:

WASHINGTON — The leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised and spent, says she has largely given up hope of reining in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending. 

“The likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim,” Ann M. Ravel, the chairwoman, said in an interview. “I never want to give up, but I’m not under any illusions. People think the F.E.C. is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional.” 

Her unusually frank assessment reflects a worsening stalemate among the agency’s six commissioners. They are perpetually locked in 3-to-3 ties along party lines on key votes because of a fundamental disagreement over the mandate of the commission, which was created 40 years ago in response to the political corruption of Watergate. 

Some commissioners are barely on speaking terms, cross-aisle negotiations are infrequent, and with no consensus on which rules to enforce, the caseload against violators has plummeted. 

The F.E.C.’s paralysis comes at a particularly critical time because of the sea change brought about by the Supreme Court’s decision in 2010 in the Citizens United case, which freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited funds in support of political candidates. Billionaire donors and “super PACs” are already gaining an outsize role in the 2016 campaign, and the lines have become increasingly stretched and blurred over what presidential candidates and political groups are allowed to do. 

Watchdog groups have gone to the F.E.C. with complaints that probable presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Martin O’Malley are skirting finance laws by raising millions without officially declaring that they are considering running.

A variety of functions usually handled by a campaign committee, such as expensive bulk mailings, are being offloaded to super PACs, which can raise unlimited amounts of money. The problem is that there is not supposed to be any coordination between candidates' campaign committees and Super PACs. This turns out to be a fictitious problem since there is no enforcement mechanism.

The basic point is the obvious one. You cannot have a democracy with concentrated wealth controlling the political process.

How the plutocratic control of the political process is making itself felt is the feeding frenzy on the corpse of organized labor that is currently underway. This is collapse story number two from yesterday, Monica Davey's "G.O.P. Expands Labor Battle to Laws Setting State Construction Wages." To go along with the raft of new right-to-work legislation is the effort to repeal prevailing- wage at the state level (and then when Scott Walker wins the presidency in 2016, you repeal the Big Kahuna, Davis-Bacon). Once prevailing wage, which provides a union-scale peg for government construction projects, is abolished income inequality will really take off.

Efforts to end prevailing-wage laws are emerging in statehouses around the nation. Opponents say these efforts would lower wages and see them as a new front in a battle by increasingly Republican legislatures to weaken labor unions. Advocates, like Mr. Bosma [House speaker of the Indiana state legislature], say the bills are aimed at sparing the budgets of struggling cities and states through free-market principles, and ending an inconsistent, inflated and sometimes politicized system for calculating what wage should be the standard.

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In West Virginia, where Republicans took control of the Legislature this year for the first time since the 1930s, lawmakers ended the prevailing wage for projects worth $500,000 or less.

In Nevada, where Republicans also newly dominate, lawmakers in March exempted school construction projects from that state’s requirement.

Proposals to repeal such laws entirely have been offered in more than a dozen states, including Michigan and Missouri, as well as Wisconsin, where one conservative lawmaker has called for a vote this week but Republicans appear divided on the matter.

In Illinois, Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican newly at the helm of a legislature controlled by Democrats, has called for changes, arguing that from 2002 to 2011 the financially devastated state “overspent by $1.6 billion” on education projects alone because of the state’s prevailing-wage rule.

During the Great Depression, numerous states passed prevailing-wage laws in an effort to prevent companies from offering low bids to the detriment of ordinary workers. The laws, which exist in 32 states as well as on federal contracts, require private contractors to pay workers on public projects wages in line with those earned by people doing comparable work in the same region.

Efforts to repeal the laws have been around for decades, and groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council have included repeal as a model policy for years. But as Republicans have gained power in the states — they control 68 of 98 partisan state legislative chambers, the most in the party’s history — they found new traction on the prevailing wage. 

Though the issue is not explicitly about labor power, unions tend to favor the wage regulations, and opponents of the prevailing wage, which states determine differently, contend that it often amounts to higher, union scale wages. 

So some view ending wage rules as a next goal for those who once were more focused on pressing for laws barring organized labor from requiring all workers to pay union fees or dues. With a flurry of those so-called right-to-work laws enacted recently in parts of the industrial Midwest — states like Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin — the prevailing wage has taken center stage.

Where is the AFL-CIO in all of this? Nowhere. Well, that is not true. The AFL is with the Democrats. That is the extent of the AFL's game plan -- elect Democrats. But Democrats are proving incapable of defending laws that have been around for generations.