Then as now, labor rights and labor's voice in politics are under heavy attack.

Today, October 11, is Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday, a good day to reflect on the First Lady’s values and how she translated those values into action on behalf of ideas and people she supported. Eleanor Roosevelt strongly believed in workers, their unions, and their involvement in the political process. A member of The Newspaper Guild, AFL-CIO for over 25 years, she came to see unions as fundamental to democracy itself. In 1941, she told striking IBEW workers that “it was important that everyone who was a worker join a labor organization.” Under her guidance, the right to join a union was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet workers’ rights remain under heavy attack today. Her legacy is still in need of protection and promotion.

The fact that U.S. workers have a collective voice in the political process is firmly rooted in the New Deal. Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt believed that workers had a right to a voice at work as well as a voice in politics. They also saw the two as closely intertwined as they worked with labor to win elections and support their progressive agenda. John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers Union, and Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union, led the labor movement in contributing money and getting out the union vote for President Roosevelt’s re-election efforts. Resistance was fierce. Then, as now, they were outspent by anti-union forces. Yet by 1947, Mrs. Roosevelt concluded in her “My Day” column that while “labor today is stronger than it used to be, it is no stronger than organized capital.”

Similar anti-union initiatives continue to this day. Many people in California are members of labor unions, from airplane pilots and grocery store clerks to nurses and teachers, mail carriers and electricians, police officers and fire fighters. Through their unions the pay dues, elect officers, and participate in decisions that affect their pay, benefits, and workplace safety. Should these union members also be allowed to have a collective voice in our political process through their unions?

Proposition 32, on the November ballot in California, says “no.” This proposition exempts powerful corporate interests from the limits on political spending but imposes formidable barriers to unions. Paycheck deductions – money raised through voluntary deductions from workers’ paychecks – could no longer be used for political activities. Only unions, however, not companies or wealthy individuals, rely on voluntary paycheck deductions as their source of funding to support political action.

Proponents of Proposition 32 hail it as “campaign finance reform.” Yet it places no meaningful restrictions on corporate contributions to candidates, campaigns, or Super PACs. Members of the 1 percent or the 10 percent don’t use paycheck deductions to contribute to politics. They use profits, interest, dividends, salaries, and bonuses. Professor John Logan, director of labor and employment relations at San Francisco State University, reports that the backers of Prop 32 are also some of the same wealthy individuals who helped bring us the Citizens United Supreme Court decision leading to the most expensive election year on record.

This is also a “one-two punch.” In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt led a national effort opposing right-to-work laws in six states, including California, where the law was defeated.  Most recently, the fight has escalated in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana and has now returned to California. If Prop 32 passes this year, workers will have diminished political power and next year we can expect to see these other anti-labor propositions further weakening private sector unions. Workers’ ability to fight back in California will be stopped in its tracks by Prop 32.

Mrs. Roosevelt saw unions as fundamental to the democratic process. She thrived on educating union members and rallying them to register people to vote, participate in conventions and campaigns, and get people to the polls on Election Day. She warned that when fear and prejudice are running high, “We may wake up to find that in trying to remedy certain wrongs, we have shorn ourselves of certain very precious freedoms.” In 1958, Mrs. Roosevelt called the right-to-work effort a “predatory and misleading campaign,” an equally apt description of Proposition 32 today.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday is a fitting time to remember that when asked where human rights begin, she answered, “In small places close to home…unless they have meaning there they will have little meaning any where.” Proposition 32 is very close to home for Californians, and if it passes here it could come to your neighborhood soon.

Brigid O’Farrell is an independent scholar in Moss Beach, California, and member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981, whose most recent book is She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker, now available in paperback.

The wealthy donors behind right-wing ads want more than victory in November. They're trying to permanently reshape the political landscape.

We’ve all seen the numbers; we know Super PAC politics is a slow-motion disaster unfolding before our eyes, and that a handful of rich people have the ability to dramatically swing elections. But beyond influencing individual races and shifting the way national campaigns must be run, Super PACs and the messages they are promoting may have a dramatic long-term effect on how we as a society view our government. 

Super PAC spending has already hit $200 million this cycle, and with the big players reporting plenty in their reserves, the top of this mountain of cash is not yet in sight. We’re not talking about an even layer of money covering the political landscape, either. This money is going to support conservative causes at a disproportionately high rate. Not only does Open Secrets identify three-quarters of the Super PAC funds as being raised and spent by conservative groups, but ProPublica has tracked media buys and reported that “conservative social-welfare groups” have already spent some $70 million on television ads, compared to $1.6 million spent by liberal groups.

Because so much of this cash is hard to track, we don’t know exactly where dollars are going, but those estimates still paint a clear image of a democracy radically remaking itself. David Axelrod summed up the blight nicely (even accounting for the sour grapes that come from being on the wrong side of the ledger) in a recent New Yorker article:

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there’s no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We’re averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or even eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we’re back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

It’s been clear from the beginning that many on the right have been tepid about Mitt Romney as a candidate. I would argue that this ambivalence shows up in donors’ spending habits as well: when it comes to the actual campaign apparatus, President Obama is running sizably ahead of Romney in fundraising. This raises an interesting question: legal limits aside, what other reasons do big-ticket donors have to avoid going straight to the party apparatus? Super PACS give these donors a way to swing elections, but more importantly, they provide a way to control their messaging directly in ways that donating to Romney’s camp would not. Lost in the election-focused discussion of ground game versus ad game is the potential long-term result of the one-sided messaging that is currently blaring from our television sets and computer screens.

Through funding these Super PACs, 30 or so billionaires are running a nation-wide advertising campaign. While the focus is on attacking Obama, this brain trust is playing a simultaneous long game. The reality of issue advertising is that there are subliminal long-term effects on the audience and their associations with political stances and phrases. That’s how advertising works with Lexus or Gatorade, and that’s how it is working here. Sure, it helps Mitt Romney in November if “Obama” is associated with “bureaucracy” and “taxes” and “waste,” but what about the fact that the ads are also connecting “government” with “bureaucracy,” “tax burden,” and “waste,” independent of the candidate?

Check out this ad, brought to you by Americans for Prosperity, one of many targeting a specific candidate in a swing state: 

The point of the ad is clear: Donnelly, and through him “sitting government,” are bureaucratic spenders, and they sure don’t have your best interest at heart. It's not a new message. But the scope of these targeted issue ads is new. Even if this is not a calculated right-wing attempt at moving the needle on how citizens view the role of government, that will surely be a side effect. 

Regardless of whether you favor Democrats or Republicans, the larger concern is with the way we conduct democracy in this country. The root problem here is that a small cabal of wealthy people can fundamentally affect our view of government and how it functions. This new front in the war of ideas will not end with a single battle in November; Super PACs are a giant new tool designed to drive a wedge between the people and their government even more effectively than the right’s “welfare queen” rhetoric of yesteryear. Their messaging makes the case that government is something foreign, alien, and other. On the other side, there are no ads making the case for Medicare, public education, or government as a vehicle for social change. 

One could make the argument that Super PAC supporters see attacking the roots of government as a lucky side benefit to helping the Romney campaign, but that seems naïve. And considering the past 30 years of intentional Frank Luntz-style messaging from the right, I find it impossible to believe that this barrage is merely a philosophical case for greater “freedom.” Rather, it is a calculated attempt to further erode Americans’ sense of government as a positive actor and, with that, the chance for a publicly held good in our society. While it is true that our relationship with government is a complex and evolving one, it must not be defined by such a black-and-white campaign against government in all forms. 

Alan Smith is National Policy & Program Director for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

Finance law image via Shutterstock.com.

Vincent Gray's "shadow campaign" that gave money to both the incumbent and challenger exposes the real reason some fight transparency: the desire to cover up the favors they buy with contributions.

The Senate finally took up the DISCLOSE Act today, which would respond to the post-Citizens United explosion of large and secret political spending by requiring SuperPACs and political nonprofits to promptly reveal their own political spending and their large donors. While Republicans will block it, as they did in 2010, they have developed a new argument that was unveiled by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on June 15: Disclosure would feed the Obama administration in its efforts to “silence” and intimidate its opponents. This new argument was mostly developed by Brad Smith, Steve Hoersting, and their colleagues at the anti-reform Center for Competitive Politics. I wrote about it before the McConnell speech, noting that the conservative argument in the past was to oppose restrictions on political money in favor of disclosure, but now that disclosure is the only option, they have to find a way to oppose that too.

There is a lot that's silly about the “intimidation” argument, most notably that if it were really true that the Obama administration has “got the IRS, the SEC, and other agencies going after contributors, trying to frighten people and intimidate them out of exercising their rights to participate in the American political discourse,” as McConnell said on Fox News, the appropriate remedy would be impeachment. (One of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon in 1974, the one that got broadest bipartisan support, was for just such activities.) Instead, McConnell's remedy for what he claims is a lawless administration is that his party's donors alone should get a special exemption from campaign disclosure laws.

Not only does McConnell have less than zero evidence of actual intimidation, his model of how money works in politics is an imaginary one. Let's look at a case of real corruption here in Washington, D.C. On Tuesday, a fundraiser and friend of Mayor Vincent Gray agreed to plead guilty for her role in a $658,000 "shadow campaign" on behalf of Gray, funded by city contractor Jeffrey Thompson.

According to the Washington Post, the fundraiser, Jeanne Clarke Harris, “said Thompson opted to hide his campaign largesse in large part to avoid angering [incumbent mayor Adrian] Fenty, whose administration his businesses relied on for contracts. The Medicaid deal held by his D.C. Chartered Health Plan is the city’s largest contract: It is worth more than $300 million yearly. 'He did not want the sitting mayor to find out he was supporting his opponent,' Harris said. 'If somehow the sitting mayor won, he would be in some serious contractual problems.'"

On the surface, then, this looks exactly like the kind of situation McConnell and his allies have been warning about. Harris may not be telling the truth or accurately representing Thompson's fears, but let's assume she is. Here we have an example of a businessperson fearing retaliation from government for expressing his political views. But I don't see the campaignfreedom.org blog rallying to the defense of Mr. Thompson.

Perhaps that's because its obvious that Thompson was not expressing political views by secretly supporting Gray. He was covering his bets. Like most large political donors, his main view is his interest in making more money. He expected to have more clout in a Gray administration, especially because that administration will feel more obligated to him, but he did not want to jeopardize his partial success with the Fenty administration. So he made his expenditures secretly, through Harris and other channels.

Nondisclosure allowed Thompson to basically operate without expressing a political choice, by making contributions that he hoped would ensure access and influence no matter which candidate won. That's the more general explanation for corporations and individuals wanting to keep large expenditures undisclosed. "Retaliation," if and when it happens (and I'm not including plainly illegal actions like turning the IRS on an opponent's supporters), is just the inverse of the influence and access that motivates giving. And nondisclosure, of course, doesn't mean that the politicians and elected officials who benefit from the money don't know about it. It should really be called uneven disclosure or asymmetrical disclosure.

Disclosure generally, and the DISCLOSE Act in particular, hardly solve all the problems of political inequality. But at least they allow us to begin to see the patterns of corruption, such as the connections between Thompson's spending and his contracts, and demand better – just as D.C. voters and councilmembers are doing in calling for the mayor's resignation.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

The huge role of money in politics can be addressed in ways that don't rely completely on the nine Supremes.

It should have come as no surprise that the Supreme Court would strike down the lower court decision to uphold Montana's ban on corporate political spending. Even if Justice Kennedy, say, had been taken aback by the public reaction to his flawed opinion in Citizens United, it is extremely rare for the Court to directly reverse itself. The more likely outcome, if the Court had taken the case rather than simply reversed the lower court's decision, would have been that it might move even further in the direction of Citizens United – for example, by indicating that it would reconsider prohibitions on direct contributions from candidates. As Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog commented yesterday, “The best way to win before the Roberts Court if you are a campaign reformer (aside from on disclosure issues) is not to play.”

What does it mean “not to play”? It doesn't mean giving up on everything. And it shouldn't mean pursuing the even more futile path of a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United. Rather, it means getting over the obsession with corporate money, which plays a small role in federal elections and Super PACs, and getting refocused instead on the broader question of the ways in which political inequality reinforces economic inequality. To put CU in perspective, corporate money (mostly from privately held companies) represents only 17 percent of contributions to Super PACs, and Super PACs represent, so far, only about 10 percent of the total money in federal politics. That's not to dismiss the issue or the cases, but corporate political spending is only one part of the story of how money distorts democracy.

While Citizens United and the somewhat more important SpeechNow case have certainly brought in a new atmosphere of “anything goes” to money in politics, there are answers that don't involve waiting around for one of the five conservative justices on the Court to retire. One, of course, is generous public financing, such as New York City's system, which provides a six-to-one match on small contributions. State legislators and Governor Cuomo have been pushing to extend the city system to the state level. Everywhere that similar public financing systems have been put in place (Arizona, Connecticut, Maine) they have been popular, resilient, constitutionally sound, and have broadened the role of small contributors and brought new candidates into the process.

The recent court decisions have also opened new opportunities for Congress and state legislatures to require the disclosure of donors to outside groups as well as to candidates. Law professor Ciara Torres-Spelicy recently described this move as a “dramatic 180 degree turn...on the issue of the constitutionality of disclosure.” Disclosure doesn't solve all problems, but a big part of the story of money in politics post-Citizens United is the creation of political entities, such as Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, that are not Super PACs but instead use a section of the tax code for non-profits to avoid limits and also maintain anonymity for donors. This could be fixed by the IRS (these non-profits are not supposed to have election activity as their primary purpose) or by Congress, without the slightest constitutional problem.

While Hasen is right that it would be futile to keep knocking on the door of the Supreme Court, hoping that they've changed their mind, there's a lot of work to be done, and a lot of progress that can be made, without involving the Court at all.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.