Republican Party

In early 2006, dubious spending by both entities came under sharp scrutiny by the American Prospect (where I was then the investigative editor) and the Philadelphia Daily News, which jointly published a two-part examination of Santorum's tangled finances by reporter/blogger Will Bunch.

What Bunch found wasn't very edifying, especially for a politician who had just been named to rewrite ethics rules for the Senate Republicans in the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The Operation Good Neighbor Foundation, billed by Santorum as a "compassionate conservative" project to uplift the poor, was raking in money but spending most of the proceeds on overhead, salaries and fundraising, with relatively little devoted to actual charitable endeavors:

A review of federal tax returns filed by the foundation for 2001, 2002, and 2003 shows that the charity spent just 35.9 percent of the nearly $1 million raised on its charitable grants, while spending 56.5 percent on expenses like salaries, fund-raising commissions, travel, conference costs, and rent. Charity experts say that charitable groups should spend at least 75 percent of their money on program grants, and that donors should beware of organizations that spend as little as Santorum's has.

"The majority of organizations are able to meet that 75 percent figure," says Saundra Miniutti of Charity Navigator, a watchdog group. Without addressing Santorum's charity specifically, she noted that nonprofits spending in the range of just one-third on programs are "extremely inefficient."

Moreover, the foundation is not registered with the Pennsylvania Department of State. A spokeswoman for the state agency said that any charity that solicits and raises more than $25,000 in Pennsylvania is required by law to register. Records included on the foundation's 2002 tax filing list $94,000 in donations from sources in the state. State law says that violators of the registration law run the risk of civil penalties and possible legal action by the state.

The list of 2002 donors -- displayed on a Web page marked "not open to public inspection" -- includes several major donors to Santorum's political campaign. Most notable is Philadelphia Trust Company, the same private bank that refinanced Santorum's Virginia home in 2002, which gave $10,000. The CEO of Philadelphia Trust, Michael Crofton, is chairman of the charity's board of advisers. The foundation also raised $25,000 from the PMA Foundation, the charitable arm of a risk-management firm in suburban Philadelphia; $25,000 from the suburban Philadelphia development firm Preferred Real Estate; and $10,000 from J. Brian O'Neill, the brother of that firm's founder and himself a developer.

The charity also received $10,000 from the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, owned by Louis DeNaples, a controversial Scranton businessman who is fending off published allegations that he associates with organized-crime figures. [DeNaples is in fact a casino owner whose alleged ties to the Bufalino mob family in Pennsylvania have landed him in very hot water over the past few years.]

The donor list isn't the only overlap between Santorum's charity and his political operation. The charity's treasurer is Barbara Bonfiglio -- who works out of the Washington, D.C., lobbying firm of Williams and Jensen and serves as treasurer of the senator's leadership PAC, America's Foundation.

Operation Good Neighbor also paid $50,000 in total salary in 2002 and 2003 to Rob Bickhart, Santorum's finance director, who is also the charity's executive director. It has paid $118,710 in fundraising fees to Maria Diesel of Chester County, Pa., who also raises money for Santorum's political efforts.

Under Bickhart's direction, in other words, Santorum's tax-exempt nonprofit "charity" filled the wallets of his political operatives while shortchanging the poor. The story provoked immediate revulsion. The Washington Post ran a strong editorial complaining that outfits like Operation Good Neighbor were marred by "an inevitable element of extortion" and noting its shoddy self-dealing. Santorum stepped aside as the Senate leadership's ethics spokesman and lost his bid for reelection.

Four years later, everybody associated with that dingy episode is back in business, thanks to short memories and enduring gall.

Bickhart is collecting huge fees on top of a big salary at the RNC, where Chairman Steele has now asked him to investigate his own misconduct. Santorum raised well over a million dollars for his still-active PAC last year, which he is using to promote himself as a potential presidential nominee. Just the other day, he addressed a major religious right group in Iowa, where he was introduced by none other than Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader and Abramoff crony -- who is also trying to refurbish his career.

If Republicans worry about the party's lousy public image, they should ask themselves why figures like Bickhart, Reed and Santorum always prosper in their midst -- and why such political grifters are never punished or ostracized.

Similar tactics have, of course, been used by shameless broadcast evangelists to pry open the piggy banks of elderly shut-ins since the invention of mass media. The antichrist will get you if you don't watch out!

Just imagine the uproar that would have attended the Democratic National Committee's caricaturing President Bush as, say, a Nazi prison guard from "Hogan's Heroes," or as Wile E. Coyote, the incompetent cartoon predator. But when it comes to Obama, anything goes.

Wealthy donors, as the world knows, need their posteriors kissed and their egos stroked. Hence GOP fundraisers ply them with access to party bigshots and tchotchkes ranging from "luxury retreats in California wine country to tickets to a professional fight in Las Vegas." And who could resist rubbing elbows with Newt Gingrich or Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol at a Napa Valley wine tasting? Kind of an Ayn Rand meets "Sideways" thing.

"Tchotchkes" is New York Yiddish for promotional freebies handed out at trade shows like the Oscars or the Republican National Convention. The idea is to flatter wealthy donors and make them feel important. It's the way of the world.

But what's so unusual about the document accidentally left behind in the hotel hosting the RNC's $2,500-per-person event, explains reporter Ben Smith, is the "air of disdain for the party's donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives." Indeed, the thing makes high-ranking RNC operatives -- Terpeluk was Bush's ambassador to Luxembourg, the cushiest of sinecures -- sound like carnies setting up sideshow exhibits at a backwoods county fair. What will open the yokels' wallets, the two-headed rattlesnake or the hoochie-coochie show?

No sooner did the document become public than Republicans took flight in all directions. Party Chairman Michael Steele's spokesman said he hadn't attended the conference, "disagrees with the language and finds the use of such imagery to be unacceptable. It will not be used by the Republican National Committee -- in any capacity -- in the future."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, "I can't imagine why anybody would have thought that was helpful. Typically, the way parties raise money is because people believe in the causes they advocate. I think the way we raise money from donors across America is to stand for things that are important for the country."

Ah, but there's the rub. What's telling about the RNC sales pitch isn't so much its borderline offensiveness and condescending tone. It's a classic bait and switch, revealing its authors' bad faith. The people who put the thing together not only don't believe in the causes they advocate; they have no intention of delivering on their implied promises should they return to power.

Socialism? When it comes to economics, today's GOP has nothing to advocate except the very policies that got us into this mess to begin with. They're simply trying to trick tea party activists into believing that this time, Republicans will deliver the fiscal conservatism they always advocate but haven't delivered since Herbert Hoover.

The simple truth is, they can't. The reasons, moreover, aren't far to seek. For all the anxiety President Obama's election has generated among those who perceive that people like them are losing power, everyone knows the America of the "Andy Griffith Show" and "Leave It to Beaver" isn't coming back. (Actually, it never existed, but that's a different column.)

Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of the budget deficits tea party activists rail about were created on President Bush's watch. When it comes to spending, surveys show that fewer than 25 percent of self-identified conservatives support cuts in government programs supporting science, protecting the environment, building highways, helping the poor, etc. When it comes to big-budget drivers such as defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, forget about it.

GOP politicians say government can't create jobs, but that's theology, not economics. They all want federal projects in their districts.

Hence the RNC's bait-and-switch campaign. It's all they've got.

Except for this: Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona recently argued that unemployment-insurance benefits prevent people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working." Former GOP House Speaker Tom DeLay echoed him on CNN over the weekend. Just keep talking, boys. You're coming through loud and clear.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.

© 2010, Gene Lyons. Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

There are four main problems with contemporary American immigration policy: Our immigration laws are not adequately enforced; most of the 12 million or more illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. should be allowed to become citizens; guest-worker programs create a two-tier labor market with an ever-expanding category of indentured servants; and emphasis needs to be shifted from unskilled to skilled immigration.  To address these problems, any acceptable immigration reform should include the following four elements:

Strict and effective enforcement of federal immigration laws: There is no point in enacting immigration reform at all if the new provisions are not going to be enforced.

Experts may debate what combination of national I.D. verification, tough penalties for employers of illegal immigrants, local police enforcement of federal immigration laws, border fencing and expedited deportations would replace the rule of scofflaws with the rule of law in this critical aspect of American public policy. But there would be no point to an amnesty for many of the illegal immigrants already here unless, following the end of the amnesty period, the government permanently cracked down on subsequent illegal immigration. Otherwise, what would deter employers from simply firing the newly legalized immigrants and hiring new illegal immigrants?

A rapid path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants: The federal government is not going to arrest and deport more than 12 million illegal immigrants who are already incorporated into American workplaces and communities. Just as unworkable is the "attrition" strategy favored by some on the right -- make life miserable for millions of illegal immigrants until they go home.

Two goals are in tension. On the one hand, we want to replace a huge and harmful black market in labor by incorporating former illegal immigrants into a one-tier labor force consisting of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents with identical rights, including the right to join unions. That means the quickest possible amnesty.

On the other hand, we do not want to punish immigrants who have not violated U.S. laws and have waited patiently in line, in many cases for years. Amnestied illegal immigrants should go to the end of the line of those awaiting legal permanent resident status (green cards). One solution to this dilemma, which I have proposed elsewhere, is that the naturalization process from getting a green card to obtaining full citizenship be reduced from five years to two years.

The faster the legal-immigrant backlog is reduced, the sooner amnestied illegal immigrants can be naturalized, and the more rapidly we will approach the ideal of a one-tier national labor market where almost all workers share the same economic rights.

Abolishing indentured servitude among immigrants: Adam Smith, who thought little of the morality of business elites, observed that any rational employer, given the opportunity, would prefer slaves to wage workers. Following the abolition of chattel slavery by the 13th Amendment, unscrupulous American employers began to import indentured servants in the form of contract workers or "coolies" from Asia to replace and compete with American workers, including freed slaves.

The first great triumph of the U.S. labor movement -- marred, to be sure, by a strain of xenophobia -- was the outlawing of immigrant contract labor in the late 19th century. Labor and liberals triumphed again in the 1960s, when Democrats abolished the exploitative Bracero Program that brought in Mexican "guest workers" to labor in serf-like conditions on Southwestern ranches and farms.

In recent decades, however, some American industries have tried to replace the free labor of citizen-workers and legal immigrants with indentured servants in the form of so-called guest workers who are brought in to work for a specific employer and must leave the U.S. if they are fired. Needless to say, workers who are dependent on their employers to remain in the U.S. are afraid to assert their rights or protest against abuses.

The main beneficiaries of indentured servitude today are Silicon Valley, which relies heavily on professional guest workers under the H1B and other programs, and some sectors of American agribusiness, which have re-created Bracero-style programs on a small scale.

We need not take seriously the self-serving argument of agribusiness corporations that we will all starve if they are forced to hire Americans to harvest crops for decent wages instead of bringing in serfs from other countries. The tech industry, many of whose entrepreneurs and inventors are foreign-born, makes a legitimate case for admitting more skilled immigrants, including foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. universities.

But those skilled immigrants should be legal permanent residents who are free to quit one job and take another, not information-age coolies indentured to particular companies. Once a point system for skilled immigrants is adopted (see below), guest worker visas should be limited to short-term visitors, such as visiting professors, and abolished entirely in the case of unskilled labor.

Shifting the basis of immigration from nepotism to skills: The single biggest category of U.S. immigrants includes relatives sponsored by U.S. citizens. At the moment this nepotistic policy happens to increase Latin American immigration to the U.S., but in theory it could benefit any group with large families, a characteristic that tends to be associated with premodern social attitudes and lower educational and income levels.

Most other advanced democracies have adopted or are debating a "points system" under which immigrants with high levels of education, desirable skills and competence in the host-country language would be given preference in immigration. Combined with the limitation of family-based immigration to the children and parents of U.S. citizens, an American points system would reduce unskilled immigration at a time when mass unemployment has hit less-educated Americans and legal immigrants particularly hard.

At the same time, a points system would enable the U.S. to compete with its economic rivals in luring skilled immigrants from every part of the world. A points system would not be "anti-Latino," any more than it would be "anti-Filipino." (Mexico and the Philippines are the two biggest sources of immigration to the U.S. today.) On the contrary, it would make immigration to the U.S. easier for Mexican or Filipino scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and professionals who lack relatives already living in the U.S.

Would admitting more skilled immigrants drive down wages and fees for educated professionals? In some industries, like tech, more talent gathered together may produce greater growth of the industry as a whole. In other areas, like medicine, increased skilled immigration might well reduce average incomes. American doctors make roughly twice as much on average as European doctors. Doubling the number of doctors in the U.S. while cutting their compensation would benefit most Americans.

If we are concerned about polarizing inequality in the U.S., then a shift from unskilled to skilled immigration that leads to lower salaries for college-educated professionals and higher wages for janitors, nursing aides and other less-skilled workers can produce a more equal America without the need for massive after-tax redistribution.

The immigration reform program I have sketched out is in the tradition of the pro-labor, egalitarian, Rooseveltian liberalism that traditionally has viewed immigration as a labor market issue.

The two commissions on immigration reform appointed by Democratic presidents, the Hesburgh Commission (1981) and the Jordan Commission (1997), came up with similar proposals, including crackdowns on employers of illegal immigrants, reductions in unskilled immigration in the interest of America's working poor, curtailment of guest worker programs and greater focus on skilled immigration.

A recent report by former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) belongs in this venerable pro-labor tradition. Traditionally, business-class conservatives have sought to prevent enforcement of immigration laws and have supported mass immigration in the hope that it would avert tight labor markets that would lead to higher wages and greater bargaining power for American workers. Plutocrats who live off their investments also tend to favor using high levels of immigration to keep wages down, for fear that wage-push inflation might erode the value of their financial assets.

Unfortunately, beginning in the 1980s, some post-New Deal progressives began to view immigration through the lens of anti-racism rather than labor policy. Along with some civil libertarians of the left, they attacked the enforcement of federal immigration laws as inherently racist or authoritarian, at the price of helping unethical businesses evade laws designed to protect American workers.

Some otherworldly academics and pundits even wondered whether discrimination in favor of America's own workers against would-be immigrants is not itself an unjust form of discrimination against the rest of the human species. In their innocence these would-be citizens of the world never asked themselves why the late Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, regularly called for a one-sentence constitutional amendment: "There shall be open borders."

Most important, many Democratic strategists, having written off the white working class that used to be the party's base, decided to oppose any immigration reform that would incidentally reduce the number of immigrants from Latin America, in the hope that a growing Latino vote, by replacing the lost non-Hispanic white Reagan Democrats, would help create a permanent Democratic majority. Some, but not all, leaders of organized labor have bought into this agenda, abandoning traditional liberal concerns about the effects of unskilled labor and illegal immigration on wages and inequality.

Progressive journals have sacrificed truth to partisanship, refusing to publish articles pointing out harmful economic effects of unskilled immigration (one liberal editor refused to publish a commissioned essay of mine on various factors influencing wage stagnation, saying, "I won't publish anything critical of immigration.") Center-left pundits and scholars have been silent on the contribution of unskilled immigration to poverty in the U.S., even though, according to Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution (PDF), "All of the increase in the U.S. poverty rate between 1979 and the mid-1990s was due to immigration.  The poverty rate of Americans in non immigrant households remained unchanged."

Among prominent left-of-center opinion leaders, only Paul Krugman has had the courage to break with conformist center-left groupthink on this issue.

The generation-long mutation of the Democrats from a broadly based working-class party dominated by private sector unions into an ethnic patronage party funded by Wall Street explains why in 2007 most congressional Democrats teamed up with George W. Bush and John McCain to support a profoundly illiberal version of "comprehensive immigration reform."

In return for getting a too-punitive version of amnesty, the Democratic leaders of Congress caved in to cheap-labor employers who demanded a new category of several hundred thousand new indentured-servant guest workers a year. Even more Orwellian was the way that Democrats in Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, attacked a proposed skill-based points system. Much to the delight of the plutocratic wing of the Republican Party, the "progressive" position of 2007 was the exact opposite of the liberal position of Barbara Jordan in 1996 and Theodore Hesburgh in 1980.

Most progressive editors and editorial pages supported the monstrous 2007 bill as mindlessly as they support pro-corporate healthcare "reform" today. If Bush, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had succeeded in passing comprehensive immigration reform, then employers in 2010, in a period of mass unemployment, would have been allowed to import several hundred thousand unfree contract workers from abroad a year instead of hiring Americans.

Immigration, like healthcare, is an issue where traditional, principled progressivism devoted to the long-term public interest is at odds with short-term Democratic electoral calculations. If and when Congress does turn to immigration reform, the Democrats who let the insurance industry write healthcare legislation and let the financial lobby write financial reform legislation may come up with a bill as bad for America as the 2007 legislation, stitched together from pay-offs to favored ethnic constituencies and business lobbies.

If so, then the next round of immigration legislation may provide a test of whether there is a principled progressive movement in the United States, or merely a squad of cheerleaders for a lobby-driven political machine in Washington.

The ad seems more like an attempt to keep the presentation in the news than a direct appeal to voters. At least, that's how it's being used. A DNC spokesman told Salon the ad will mostly air on cable in Washington, D.C., and will get a few hits on national cable as well.

Griffith, a doctor, might seem like a natural to speak on the subject. But Republicans haven't always been so impressed by his medical credentials. A Democratic source reminded Salon that a nasty 2008 attack ad by the National Republican Congressional Committee, during Griffith's first campaign, went after his career as a physician. "What kind of man is Parker Griffith?" the ad asked. Apparently, the answer is that he's the kind of man who doesn't hold a grudge for long against the national GOP.

Watch the ad here:

UPDATE: A spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Ryan Rudominer, sends along this shot at Griffith and the GOP: "If what Republicans said about Parker Griffith's record as a doctor is any guide, their decision to select him as their health care messenger speaks volumes about what the Republican position on health care means for America."

The full text of the e-mail; all emphases in the original:

This week, a confidential fundraising memo from the Republican National Committee leaked to the press, detailing a new, desperate effort to manipulate voters and crush health reform.

The plan calls for "an aggressive campaign capitalizing on 'fear' of President Barack Obama and a promise to 'save the country from trending toward socialism.'" What's worse, the presentation included offensive caricatures of Democratic leaders, including President Obama as the Joker from Batman.

So while President Obama was organizing a bipartisan meeting to discuss real solutions, and incorporating the best ideas into his proposal, right-wing political operatives and their special interest allies were preparing a campaign of fear and falsehoods to personally attack the President and deny Americans the care we need.

Enough. We cannot let the lowest form of politics derail the progress we've made for the American people. To counter their attacks, we'll need to take our message to the air and to doorsteps across the country -- and with a final vote on health reform expected in a matter of weeks, there's no time to lose.

Please donate $5 or more today to help us defeat the attacks and pass reform.

There's still hope that some independent-minded Republican members of Congress will embrace the President's bipartisan proposal. But there's no doubt that reform will face politically-motivated attacks and flat-out lies from those who put politics above an honest debate and the well-being of the American people.

In fact, next week, the lobbyist arm of the insurance industry is setting up headquarters at the Ritz-Carlton in D.C. to direct their own desperate blitz on Congress to block reform.

The final march for reform will be a pitched battle between entrenched special interests who profit from the status quo, and Americans -- of all parties -- who want control over their own health care.

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and everything we've fought for is on the line. Please give what you can to help us beat back the lies and deliver reform.