Political Irony

© Ed Stein

The economy is stuck in a weird Catch-22 right now. Corporate profits are soaring and businesses are sitting on mountains of cash. Historically, when business profits go up, workers share in the bounty; they get raises and more workers are hired. Not this time. Businesses want to see the economy to turn around before they’re willing to add employees, and consumers are afraid to spend more money until they see businesses putting people to work.

Or maybe they don’t want the economy to improve until after the election? Is it just me, or am I getting paranoid?

UPDATE: I guess I’m not the only person who is becoming paranoid:

© Bruce Beattie

© Jen Sorensen

Are the voters really this fickle, or are we just more susceptible to propaganda than we would like to admit (like, are Fox News/Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh now in charge)? Whatever it is, I’m depressed about the future of our country.

© Ben Sargent

This is a pretty good representation of how I feel about the political parties today.

Some people are calling for new political parties, but I can’t help but think how much better things would be if we didn’t have political parties at all. Even George Washington warned against them.

The District of Columbia created an electronic system to make it easier for overseas and military voters to cast ballots over the Internet. I want to point out that this is not some complicated electronic voting system, it is very simple:

The voter goes to a website and they get a PDF file of the ballot. They can do one of two things: print out the ballot, mark it by hand, and send it back by regular mail, OR they can vote directly on the PDF file and then send it back electronically. The only part that needs to be secure is the part where they transfer their ballot file back to the server. Transferring files securely is something that is done all the time, so this should be easy, right?

So confident were the DC officials that their system was secure, they decided to have a test period and invite people to try to hack into it. That was their big mistake.

An assistant professor at the University of Michigan, along with a couple of grad students, decided to take the challenge. The result? In less than 36 hours, they broke into the system, replaced all the ballots, installed a “back door” that would allow them to see and modify any ballots cast on the system. And for fun, they installed an easter egg that played the University of Michigan fight song after the voter submitted their ballot.

Now here’s the ironic part. Despite the fact that the hackers were not trying to hide their attack, and that the DC system administrators had systems in place to detect any attack, the successful takeover of the voting system was not detected. In fact, they only found out about it (after two days) because test voters reported hearing the UM fight song.

In other words, it was trivial to take over this supposedly secure voting system and — without detection — change enough votes to change the results of an election. Just imagine what an organization who actually wanted to throw an election could do.

As a result, the DC Board of Elections and Ethics has announced that they will not proceed with a live deployment of their system in a real election. Whew, I guess we dodged that bullet, right?

Well, not quite. That was just DC. According to the NY Times, 33 states will allow overseas and military voters to cast ballots over the internet in the upcoming November election. A real election. With no test period. That’s millions of votes that can easily be hacked. D’oh!

I have nothing but respect for the “chamber of commerce” — the thousands of local organizations that help small businesses and consumers, but most people don’t realize that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC) is completely different. The USCC has become a blatantly partisan organization, running the largest campaign against Democrats in the upcoming election: spending more than $75 million and as of September 15, airing more than 8,000 ads on behalf of GOP Senate candidates alone. Spending from the USCC on political ads dwarfs that from every other issue group, and is larger than what the political parties spend on most candidates. News Corp (the parent company of Fox News and now the Wall St. Journal) donated $1 million to the USCC this summer.

As a non-profit trade association, the USCC can raise unlimited funds without ever disclosing any of its donors, and they have taken strong advantage of the Supreme Court ruling that allows unlimited corporate spending on politics. While Republicans filibustered attempts to outlaw foreign corporations from running political ads, the USCC used their offices in other countries to actively solicit funds from foreign corporations, including ones directly controlled by foreign governments.

For example, USCC operates an office in Bahrain, which collects over $100,000 a year in “dues” from foreign-owned businesses. The membership form stipulates that money should be sent directly to the US Chamber of Commerce, and also explicitly states that foreign-owned firms are welcomed. They also operate an office in India, which includes some of India’s largest corporations (like the state-run State Bank of India). This office generates over $200,000 a year in dues. On their website, they promise to help change American policy to help businesses in India. The USCC also has affiliates in Egypt, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, among others.

In addition to annual dues, which is as high as a third of a million dollars for large companies, companies can also donate additional money to the USCC. For example, during the health care debate, it was discovered that health insurance companies like Aetna pumped $20 million into the USCC to pay for attack ads aimed at killing reform, while publicly claiming that they supported health care reform. We have no way of knowing how much money foreign-owned companies, including ones owned by foreign governments, are spending on ads designed to influence the US elections and buy favors from politicians, since the money is simply laundered through the USCC (who have no requirement to disclose their donors or donations).

It doesn’t matter than US law forbids foreign corporations from being involved in American elections. We don’t have to worry about foreign countries attacking us. They’ve already bought us, courtesy of the USCC.