Hasta La Gadget!

In 2014, Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout emerged as a political star of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party after challenging New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary elections and performing far better than expected. Teachout received 35 percent of the vote and won over twenty counties despite hardly raising any money. She ran on a strong populist platform that emphasized two principles that she hopes to bring to the fore of American politics: anti-corruption and antitrust.

In that vein, she also published a comprehensive book in 2014 called Corruption in America tracing the legal history of the concept of corruption in the American court system from the founding of the United States to the present. The book was intended, as she tells it, to be a long letter to the Supreme Court’s conservative majority detailing how they have gotten major campaign finance cases so wrong in recent years.

The Huffington Post sat down with Teachout after she gave a talk at the New America Foundation on November 17 to discuss her campaign, her book, the principles that she discussed in both and what she plans to do next. To note, Teachout and I briefly worked together at the pro-transparency nonprofit Sunlight Foundation from 2006 through early 2007.

Q: In the past year, you released a major book on the history of corruption in america. That makes sense from a perspective of you being a law professor, but at the same time you also challenged a sitting governor in a primary election who was embroiled in a scandal over shutting down his own anti-corruption panel. How did this run for office come about?

Teachout: I’ve been involved in politics for a long time. I was director of online organizing for Howard Dean’s campaign. I’ve worked on a lot of hyper-local campaigns as well and worked on banking reform, other forms of organizing. So, I was approached in March to see if I would consider running against Andrew Cuomo and I said I would — actually I said no, immediately no because I need to get tenure. And then about two hours later I called back the person and said I really want to talk more about this and I came into a meeting with the folks who were talking to me about it and spent about a month deciding to run. In New York, there’s a Working Families Party, which is — because of New York’s system you can actually run on more than one party line and, so, I was initially recruited to run on a blend of the Working Families Party line and the Democratic Party line. I’m a Democrat. So, it was Working Families Party who approached me, but I was always planning to run on the Democratic Party line. So, it was an interesting month.

Really I wanted to get involved in direct electoral politics for a long time. I had a thought perhaps that I would live in New York for five years that–I sort of thought it would be a few years later, but Andrew Cuomo had been such a failure as a reformer and such a failure as a governor in so many ways and I chose to run finally because I thought I had a chance of winning. I knew the chance was low, but I knew there was a real chance. And I think I would do a better job as governor, as well.

Q: And in your run you had to get involved with the dirty part of politics, raising money. and Cuomo raised a lot —

Teachout: Yes, he did.

Q: — raised a lot of money from hedge fund executives, a lot of Republican donors. How did you view the fundraising that you had to do? How much money did you raise and what did you learn from that, particularly from the perspective that you’re coming from?

Teachout: First of all it was my job. If I was going to run for governor to win, and again I knew the odds, I needed to raise as much money as possible. So, I had a wonderful finance director. We used some consultants who gave us advice on how to raise money. And I’ll admit at first I was pretty bad. (Laughs) I wasn’t good at the ask. I would make every excuse to avoid call time. So, you’re supposed to–what our consultants told us is that I should spend 40 hours a week in the first month fundraising. You’re supposed to make 30 dials and hour, which still to me seems unlikely. Of the hits you get, you’re supposed to get 25 percent of the number who give. And you start with friends and family.

It was very awkward for me because the reason i wanted to run for governor had nothing to do with the sort of long standing personal connections, there was a sort of disconnect. It felt strange to call people to start talking about antitrust and schools and fracking, inequality. So, honestly a lot of early fundraising is based on people who believe in you and that’s a hard ask. It’s much easier for me to ask people for money based on what I believe in than to ask them to back you as a person. We got better at it. The people who I called were much more comfortable with the interaction than I was. (Laughs) It was kind of a great surprise.

I think our biggest donors were in the $4,000 to $20,000 range. In New York state, you can raise as much as $60,000 from an individual or $120,000 from a couple. So, you have to understand that I was up against Andrew Cuomo who was getting $120,000 from a couple and then bundle $1 million from a couple of people.

And I hated it, but it was my job. …But I would often think this is not as bad a job as making $22,000 a year working at a crosswalk. And I would use that to motivate me. As terrible as this was it was just part of what I got to do and it enabled me to do something I really cared about. So, what did i learn? I learned to be a better fundraiser.

Q: Did you learn anything about what politicians have to put themselves through to raise that money?

Teachout: It is, it is — in some ways it’s not the individual call that is humiliating. Every call has it’s own virtues, especially if you’re talking to people you like, but there’s something almost hazing like about it, like a perpetual hazing of elected officials or candidates for office, who are constantly put in this situation of begging for $500 or $2,000 from a set of people who — whose decision whether to give for $500 or $2,000 is gonna make a big difference in your campaign. And it’s this perpetual situation of begging and begging and being a sycophant in a lot of ways, that I think — I think has absolutely affected our politics in the last thirty years. And actually, I think the public feels it. There’s a lot of analysis of why people aren’t voting. Well, I think one of the reasons is it’s hard to vote for somebody who feels like they are, you know, in a fundamentally subservient position to the wealthiest Americans as opposed to a fundamentally leadership position. It’s not just about the message. It’s that people want to vote for leaders. They don’t want to vote for people who feel like they’re beggars. and the job right now is to be a very, very, very good sycophant.

Q: Do you think that attracts a certain type of person to the office?

Teachout: Well, I do think there are some amazing people who go into public life. Look, I’m not gonna criticize all politicians because I am one of them. Good luck with getting me to slam everybody! (Laughs) I think the bigger tragedy is the number of people who are turned off by it.

So, I am huge supporter of public financing and I thought all the time about how different my job would be if we had public financing of campaigns in New York. So first of all, I love talking to crowds. That’s also hard. It’s also work. It’s not– but it’s not like, it takes work to do the policy research, it takes work to learn about the town, it takes work to speak well. But, if we had public financing of elections I would have spent all of my time talking and listening to people because I would know that every $50 I raised would be matched by the state by $300. Instead of spending so much of my time just making lists of people who make over $100,000 a year, in a lot of cases over $200,000 a year. It would have been hard and I think, in a way, it would have served the public a lot more. But, so, I think it detracts a lot of people. I think it detracts a lot of young people. I think it detracts a lot of people because, you know, being a salesperson is hard work. Being a salesperson in a room where you’re trying to sell yourself is a very strange job.

Q: You sort of got your start in 2003 doing internet politics with Howard Dean. How does the Internet politics translate to this more retail politics and would did you bring from that experience to this campaign?

Teachout: So, I was the director of online organizing for Gov. Dean, which meant in practice a lot of human interaction because what we were doing was using this tool called Meetup to enable local groups to come together and build their own power and strategy. And my focus was really on the states that were not — the non-strategic states outside of Iowa and New Hampshire. So, actually after I hired some of the first programmers on any presidential campaign. We built tools to basically– an early version of MySpace or what we now think of as Facebook perhaps. We built a social media network for our supporters. We built call systems so that people could call from afar. Now, these are standard in campaigns. But, once we were done building tools, when there was about 5 months out, I felt like my basic job with tool building was done because I’ve been building structures so I went out on the road. … So, I went out on the road and visited 25, no, maybe 27 states in a ten week road trip and went from group to group in the states that we not the key states that were Iowa and New Hampshire giving speeches about the campaign and then talking to the organizers. So, although the title was online organizing I was sort of in this active learning about what makes a good local community and what doesn’t.

That was unbelievably valuable to actually have the face to face meetings and then to have the practice of giving speeches. I’m a huge fan of Emerson and the old tradition of giving talks as a way to connect. It’s something I always wanted to be good at. I actually at one point wanted to be a minister. I applied to divinity school. (Laughs) I applied to divinity school and law school and I got into a better law school so I went to law school. (Laughs) This is certainly engaging something that I’ve always wanted to do and I got some training in 2003.

But the key lesson that I learned in Howard Dean’s campaign was not about technology, but it was about power. Because we had three months to run this campaign against Andrew Cuomo, we could not build any tools and we did not have any money to buy the best tools. So, we used Facebook and Twitter. But, otherwise the way in which we modeled– we had a very similar model — is that we empowered local groups to do their own organizing and that made a huge difference because we had a tiny staff until we raised money.

So, I went to Poughkeepsie in June and there were five reporters there because the local group had organized an event. We said we’d come if they organized an event. They organized an event. They called all the local papers and we had an event and got in the local paper. And actually I went to over half the counties in the state and a lot of the places where we did well were places where we got a lot of hyperlocal media coverage and we got that local media coverage because we empowered local supporters. So, I won in the north country, where I never went, but I had this guy who we called the north country press secretary who was always getting me on the radio in the north country and with hyperlocal papers. And we just gave him the power to do that. So, the lesson was one of empowerment.

Q: You write a lot about corruption, a particular type of corruption, a conception of corruption, it sort of seems like in your run against Cuomo you were sort of running against an archetype of this —

Teachout: (Laughs) Yes!

Q: — sort of corruption you’ve been writing about —

Teachout: Oh my god, I felt like I was living my book so often because one of the things the founders cared so much about was the corrupting force of centralized power and New York state has the most powerful governor and the governor’s office repeatedly was corrupting local lawmakers and shutting them up to talk about real issues because he holds such the power of the purse. I felt like I was living my founders’ fear of monarchy.

Q: I was sort of wondering, just looking at Cuomo, a democrat, which is the traditional, historical party of labor and working people, how the policies that he is pursuing and adopting is representative of a larger shift in politics or society?

Teachout: Yeah, I wish he was not representative. He is kind of an outlier in how right wing he is as a Democrat in a deeply Democratic state. This is — New York is Democratic, 60% Democratic, 30% Republican, you know, and has an extraordinary Democratic tradition. And Andrew Cuomo is a Wall Street politician. He works for Wall Street. He works for hedge funds. The more involved they got, the more he became a spokesperson for charter schools, the same time he was radically cutting public school funding and class sizes were increasing. You may not know this but New York state is both the most unequal state in the country and has the most segregated schools. So, and Andrew Cuomo’s tenure, cutting schools and creating more tax loopholes for the big banks and wealthiest New Yorkers was not helping in either of those trends, in fact hurting.

What I do see is that there is a fight within the Democratic Party. There’s a fight for the soul of our country with big money and that’s very serious. I think the house is on fire in terms of our democracy, I said that earlier today. But, that we are very close to having non-representative democracy in government because of how much candidates and elected officials work for their donors as opposed to the public. And then there is a fight within the Democratic Party which mirrors that, which is that some Democrats are becoming so corporate that they aren’t representing the middle class at all. I think Andrew Cuomo is like that.

I know some people are mad at me for saying that I think he’s “not a Democrat,” but I will tell you as the governor after he defeated me he did not go on to fight for a Democratic Senate at all in New York and seems quite happy with a Republican Senate. So, there’s a genuine question if he’s just using the title of Democrat because it’s good to be a Democrat in New York.

But, the trend is towards Democrats who are working for a new class of donors, who are big banks and concentrated power and who have a deep libertarian streak, who have a trickle down economic theory and Andrew Cuomo’s economic theory is indistinguishable from Reagan’s–trickle down. And I don’t think it’s because Andrew Cuomo has that belief in a deep way, I think it’s because that’s where his donors are.

So, in the Democratic Party you see this donor driven drift and you know it’s– a good friend of mine who I work with, [Harvard law professor] Larry Lessig, is sort of focusing on corruption in both parties and I respect that and I would be thrilled to see more Republicans come out as populists as well. But, as a Democrat, I think that if we don’t actually stand up for the FDR Democratic Party and the party that really cares about the middle class than nobody is.

Q: Do you have any kind of conception or historical analysis about how we got here? When did this turn? When did politics so heavily begin to tilt towards the rich?

Teachout: So, it’s interesting. there’s a few different moves. One is 1976 when the court in Buckley v. Valeo strikes down spending limits. So, after the Watergate crisis, I think the country realized we were moving towards too much big money and with great popular support passed laws that limit campaign spending, which we have in most other countries. That got struck down by the court. And so, if spending increases so does fundraising and if fundraising increases so does obligations to the donors. So, the court’s role is nontrivial.

Also you see that labor money formed a significant part of the base of the Democratic Party funding base from really the 1936 election through the seventies. And though labor still tends to contribute to the Democrats as opposed to Republicans, the percentages of overall funding is much smaller that fundamentally they don’t play the same bulwark role. They were really, really important in being a source of funding that’s basically small dollar funding because labor funding is based on dues which is based on working class Americans providing those dues.

And so, in a lot of ways it’s amazing — after 1896, I don’t know how detailed you want to get, most political money came from outside politics instead of inside politics. Before 1896, more political money, you have some business money, but you see more political money come from basically the spoils system, basically the people who were working in politics contributing to their own campaigns — the party’s campaigns. After 1896 you have a private funding system in this country that has never been truly stable and has never provided a long term meaningful way to be a political party that works for the working class. The closest we got was from the thirties to the seventies when there was enough labor funding to basically allow Democrats to be more populist and care about inequality. After the seventies you see this increasing of big money and then it really gets exaggerated at a few points, like after Citizens United. So, that’s huge swathes of history all in three minutes but what that says to me is we’re lucky we got from the thirties to the seventies in a private funding system.

We’ve got to get rid of this private funding system because private funding inevitably leads to the corruption of politics. And we need to– right now, we don’t have a system of funding that allows you to be a populist Democrat and run for office even if your ideas are wildly popular. We don’t have that system, we haven’t built it. In New York City, they’ve built it because they have a public funding system. In maine, they built it. In Connecticut, they built it because they have public funding systems. But in a federal elections system we don’t have that. And so we don’t have that.

It’s not that the country is moving right. The one story about Clinton is that Clinton was smart to move to the center because that’s where the country was moving, but the other story is that Clinton was just following the money.

We need to build a sustainable system for populists because Americans still want their public schools and they still want equality and they still want an economy that works for entrepreneurs, but that’s not where the big money is. That’s a lot of political philosophy in five minutes. … There are a lot of different dynamics going on but these are just some and they’re important to call out.

Q: In your campaign and in your talks about the book you talk a lot about antitrust, mergers, acquisitions, trust-busting and these kind of– I’m sure to a lot of people seem like really old concepts, like why are we talking about this in the 21st century? I was wondering if you could explain why these are things that are so important to pay attention to?

Teachout: Thomas Jefferson wanted an antimonopoly clause in the constitution and for most of American history people have understood that you cannot have a truly responsive democratic power and radically concentrated industry. That if you have monopolies, whether it’s Comcast/Time Warner or what’s happening with the big banks, that they will take over government in so many ways. That they will fund campaigns, they will become too big to fail, they will directly influence their employees, they will start having a feudal relationship with other industries like the way Amazon in some ways owns part of the publishing industry and therefore owns our access to ideas in some way.

A premise of democratic self-government is decentralized economic power. It’s also a premise of innovation. you see a lot more innovation when you have decentralized economic power. In 1981, Reagan basically killed antitrust law and most Democrats went along with him redefining antitrust as something that’s just about efficiency. … So, for 34 years now we have had a critical American concept that has been taken out of American political life and it’s amazing if you take a word out, if you take out a concept, it’s hard to organize around.

So, right now you say people — they don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say antitrust, honestly, or monopoly. But they know what I’m talking about when I talk about Comcast/Time Warner or what’s happened at the big banks and I think we should revive this old Jeffersonian concept of trust-busting because we need to save our democracy. Because we have far too concentrated powers leading to less innovation, less power, less entrepreneurship and most importantly those monopolists are taking over our government.

So, you know, in my book and in my campaign I guess in both cases– I don’t have any fantasy about the founders being perfect. They’re deeply imperfect, to put it mildly. They got race and sex wrong and tragically and terribly wrong. But, I do think at this moment in genuine crisis it’s valuable to call back on some of the best ideas in American history. One is the anti-corruption idea and the other is the antimonopoly idea as deeply American ideas and revive them. I just think there’s a sleeping giant out there on antimonopoly laws. … I don’t have a little sentence package on the antitrust and antimonopoly laws but I will tell you that if you get in a room people believe that too much power is held by too few. It’s why they’re dropping out of politics, it’s why they’re despairing about their jobs, it’s why they don’t feel like the gifts that they bring to political or economic society are even being heard because there’s basically a few very powerful forces.

Q: There are lots of excuses bandied about, reasons why the Democrats didn’t do very well in the 2014 elections or did worse than maybe expected, including that they didn’t run on anything. One thing that I noticed is that they did a lot of running against billionaires, wealthy corporate interests, but it sort of seemed– it was disconnected from any potential policy response.

Teachout: Right, so you have to explain: we can stop Comcast/Time Warner and see candidates out there saying I am going to try and stop Comcast/Time Warner, not just bad billionaires. Or we can break up the big banks. So, candidates explicitly saying, not only is JPMorgan a problem in campaign funding, but let’s actually talk about breaking it up. And, uh, yeah that’s real exciting leadership.

Q: A lot of the problem with campaign spending stems from the Supreme Court redefining corruption —

Teachout: Half of it —

Q: — as strictly quid pro quo bribery.

Teachout: So, some of it does, but to be clear a lot of it doesn’t. The Supreme Court is responsible that we do not have spending limits. That we have fewer contribution limits and that corporations can get involved in campaigns. The Supreme Court is not responsible for the fact that we’ve never passed a public financing system.

In fact, it’s perfectly constitutional to have the New York City, Maine, Connecticut system. So, the political sphere — I actually, there was that hearing in Washington where they condemned Citizens United recently. What exactly happened? It was Democrats holding a hearing against Citizens United.

Q: For the constitutional amendment.

Teachout: I’m not in favor — I mean, I’m fully in favor of a constitutional amendment. That would be great, but it’s too easy by half because you can sit there and say I want to overturn Citizens United knowing full well it’s not going to happen.

What we need to see here is to take real responsibility. It’s too easy. Don’t let your representatives just say that they’re opposed to Citizens United. You have to actively support public financing of elections. And don’t let them get away with just the opposition because our elected officials have to take at least half, if not more than, the responsibility. It should be toxic to support private funding. There’s no good theory, there’s no good theory that explains why private funding would lead to democracy. Like that doesn’t actually make any sense. It should be toxic to defend that.

Q: To the supreme court’s notion of corruption, which you write pretty explicitly about, it seems that the definition is not as narrow as they claim it to be over history.

Teachout: Yeah, the Supreme Court is totally out of touch. They say that corruption is only– this 2014 case [McCutcheon v. FEC] is sort of amazing. Corruption is defined by a reference to a criminal bribery statute. If it’s not criminalized in a criminal bribery statute it’s not corruption. Ask anybody else in history what corruption means and they will say it’s not defined by a criminal bribery statute. It is this harder, vaguer really important idea that private interests are taking over our public channels.

Q: Could you delve more into how the definition of corruption has shifted over time? How we got to this really narrow view?

Teachout: During the founding era they talked about corruption all the time and their understanding of corruption was broad. It encompassed all those situations in which public officials use their public power for selfish ends, private ends. Whether it’s their own or maybe their sponsors or maybe their donors or maybe the King’s but that was a broad understanding. And arguably, the Constitution was written as a kind of anti-corruption protection document. A document to protect against England and elsewhere. And then really until the 1970s courts understood corruption in a broad way. You see references to Montesquieu sort of scattered throughout criminal and contract law cases dealing with corruption. And then starting in the 1970s and then accelerating in the last decade corruption has come to mean only this criminal quid pro quo definition.

And the reason why that has mattered is because the Supreme Court will strike down any law that involves political spending unless it serves an anti-corruption end. So, if I come to the Supreme Court and say this law limiting corporate spending, this is Citizens United, is — they basically said limiting corporate spending does not serve an anti-corruption interest. Everybody knows this is crazy except the Supreme Court. But this is a — the book is a long documentary letter proving that that not only doesn’t make sense now, but that is an aggressive misunderstanding of over 200 years of history.

Q: How would you personally define corruption? At least in America.

Teachout: I’m going to resist the question in this way — I’ll answer the question — but, how would you define equality? How would you define love? Or even separation of powers? Or liberty? All of these, you understand that these are meaningful concepts but you don’t try to make them a single sentence definition where you can answer it and put it in a statute. and corruption is more like those words than not like them. And so, broadly speaking then, I understand corruption, corruption in America, to be when private– when those with public power use it for private ends. But, I think, like equality or with federalism, it’s a longer conversation.

Q: Do you think that American politics are corrupt?

Teachout: Yes! Clearly! Yes! I mean right now you see a blend of things with the revolving door and Congress members going to become lobbyists. You see, pretty straightforward, people using public office for private ends. Using Congress as a stepping stone to becoming a lobbyist.

But then more broadly the deep corruption comes from private powers. It’s Dan Loeb in New York spending $1 million to serve his own interests in the New York Senate elections. He’s a hedge fund guy. Or the Koch brothers. Or highly self-interested private parties using our public powers for their own selfish ends. And that’s the deepest corruption that I see right now.

Q: Do you think that this entrance into the public sphere by these wealthy private actors goes beyond just campaign funding? You have Gates and the Waltons and you mentioned Dan Loeb and lots of other hedge fund billionaires in New York who fund, you know, charter school advocacy groups. How do you view this sort of new version of philanthropy that seems to overlap into political advocacy?

Teachout: Yeah, it’s a really great and complicated question because I’m not opposed to all philanthropy.

This is part of the reason that I’m such a trust-buster is that Brandeis said that you can have concentrated wealth or you can have a democracy, but you can’t have both. Is that as a structural matter we have given permission for this radically concentrated wealth that’s then used in a whole variety of ways. Some of which might be truly benevolent. A lot of which is questionable, like the advocacy groups that you’re talking about. And so you’d have to give me a particular instance, but if we’re going to look at the system that allows it you see this growing rise of quasi-feudal powers within what should be a capitalist democratic system.

Q: Are there any people out there sort of embodying this spirit? Just to connect back to our discussion of the Progressive Era, Lincoln Steffens the journalist was touring state capitals trying to uncover corruption and then started hearing about this guy Bob LaFolette in Wisconsin. They kept saying, oh he’s actually not corrupt and really believes in what he’s doing and Steffens didn’t believe it until he went there. Are there people like that out there or on the horizon?

Teachout: I am excited. I’m extremely excited about Elizabeth Warren, about Sherrod Brown, who every time I hear Sherrod Brown speak I just want to hear him talk more. .. Warren, [Sen. Jeff] Merkley, Brown, [Sen. Al] Franken, I’m missing some, but individually they’re very powerful but as a club they’re even more powerful so that we have this potential truly trust-busting populist coalition in the Senate. I think it’s really important to give that shape and name and not just make it about personal politics. And all of those are senators that I’m extremely excited about.
…
I think part of our job is to give permission to people to tell the truth about what they see. And so, the value of trustbusting and Warren’s leadership among other things is to say you can talk this way. You’re not alone.

Q: My final question is what’s next for you in politics?

Teachout: Well, I’d love to run for office again. It’d sure be a lot easier if there was a public financing system. You know, (Laughs) if you’re going to take on big cable and big banks and a big governor it would certainly be helpful to have public financing because I know I can raise the money in small dollar contributions. But I certainly hope to run for office again. I don’t know particularly what.

And in the meantime I’m probably back teaching and so figuring out my next research project and I’ll certainly be focused on these monopolistic powers and the laws governing– the existing laws that limit what we can do about these new giants and proposing new laws that can actually break them up and we can do something. I think a lot of people know they’re giants, but they feel totally powerless so I feel like what I can contribute to is to be able to say no we can do this. We can pass– we can actually do something about it.

And then I’ll be very involved in New York politics. We’ve got a session involved where we have to protect our public schools and the hedge fund money that came in during this election in the Senate election, in the state Senate election in New York, was really anti-public school money. So, I’m very, very concerned about what’s going to happen.

And then institutionally I work with Every Voice and Mayday, both of which are groups that work on public financing of elections.

But I would love to be a party of getting thirty people to run for office next year. If I can convince some people who think they aren’t candidates; they don’t fit the profile. Whether they’ve been in the state — you know, Andrew Cuomo sued me trying to get me off the ballot because I’ve been in the state for under five years, but I think deeper down it was because I didn’t own land. (Laughs) Because I didn’t have a lease for five years. You know, I’m just a renter. Well, we need more people who are renters running who don’t fit the traditional profile whose lives haven’t been defined around a kind of superficial ambition. So, if I could be part of encouraging thirty new people to run for things on this platform I’d be thrilled.

Every week, The WorldPost asks an expert to shed light on a topic driving headlines around the world. Today, we look at the case of 43 missing students in Mexico and other disappearances in the country.

Tens of thousands of Mexicans hit the streets of the capital on Thursday evening, angered by the government’s response to the case of 43 students who went missing in Guerrero state in September.

The students disappeared on Sept.

The 43 students, who attended a radical rural teachers college known as Ayotzinapa, disappeared after they went to the Guerrero city of Iguala to hijack buses. Iguala police intercepted them on the mayor’s orders and turned them over to the criminal group Guerreros Unidos, a gang with ties to the mayor, prosecutors have said. Prosecutors say there is evidence the gang members killed the students and incinerated their remains.

More from The WorldPost on Mexico’s missing students:

– Mexico has been looking for 43 missing students. What has been found is truly terrifying.
– 11 numbers to help you understand the violence rocking Mexico
– ‘As a Mexican. I am ashamed’
– ‘Three causes behind Mexico’s crisis of corruption and impunity’
– ‘I am fed up with fear’

Sen. Jeff Merkley: Going After The Koch Brothers Stopped The GOP Wave In Oregon

WASHINGTON — From North Carolina to Colorado to Alaska, Democratic senators were swept out of office on Election Day by a GOP wave. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) was one of the few exceptions.

At one point a target of national Republicans, Merkley handily defeated his Republican opponent, Monica Wehby, by more than 18 percentage points, despite predictions early on that he could be in danger of losing his seat.

Merkley seemed relieved that the campaign was over during an interview with The Huffington Post Wednesday in his office on Capitol Hill, where he reflected on the campaign. He said he was still working through why he and other progressives like Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and incoming Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) won while so many other Democrats lost.

He could, however, point to the turning point in his race: his decision to go after the billionaires Charles and David Koch, whose political groups spent at least $100 million this cycle.

“It was a very deliberate decision to call out the Koch brothers directly,” said Merkley.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Democrats tried hard to make the campaign a referendum on the Kochs, but the strategy failed. The story line has resonance because of how frequently outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took on the Kochs on the Senate floor. But Reid attacking the Kochs on the Senate floor, which picks up coverage in the Washington press and among political junkies, is far different than an individual senator taking them on directly back home.

Merkley said candidates had to weigh whether going after them would be worth it. After all, they could pour their personal wealth into any race they wanted and basically overwhelm the average Senate candidate.

“If you call them out squarely, will they double, triple down in your race? That could have happened,” said Merkley.

Instead, Freedom Partners ended up cancelling some of its planned advertising time for October, as it became clearer that Wehby was unlikely to win. It spent more than $1.5 million, according to The Oregonian.

The Oregon Senate race really heated up in August, when Freedom Partners, a group at the heart of the Koch network, began a $3.6 million advertising blitz against Merkley. While that amount may seem small in a state like California or New York, it was big money for Oregon politics.

Merkley said internal polls showed him beating Wehby by about 12 percentage points. But after the Koch ads started, he dropped down to 6 points.

“I couldn’t be on air,” said Merkley, referring to the fact that the Koch brothers had bought up so much of the air time for commercials. “In the middle of August, I was still very worried.”

Merkley started to attack the Kochs, but the pieces didn’t full come together until he and Wehby participated in columns for The Oregonian, in which each candidate had to name seven U.S. Senate votes and critique where the other stood. The Merkley campaign noted that many of the positions Wehby took were in line with positions advocated by the Koch brothers. Those answers, combined with the Koch funding, turned into a winning issue for the senator.

“It created the perfect alignment between her positions and the…Koch brothers. Yes, she was endorsing the agenda, and here they come with their money. It kind of completed the story, if you will,” he said. “It created the contrast: I’m running saying I want to see a ‘We the people’ democracy, by and for the people and not by and for billionaires. That’s very different from my opponent, who signed onto a by and for billionaires agenda. That was the basic dynamic in the campaign.”

Merkley then went up on air in early September, with an ad stating that “Wehby and the Koch brothers share an agenda that will cost us.” It was a statewide spot that ran through most of September. Watch:

“I think the Koch messaging worked,” said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Matt Canter. “It drew a stark contrast between the two people on the ballot, about who they fight for and what kind of agenda they will push in Washington. It’s one of those political messages that has benefit of being true. And that’s why I think it’s so effective.”

Freedom Partners did not return a request for comment, nor did the Wehby campaign or the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The Koch brothers were even more aggressive in Michigan, where Peters, a Democratic congressman, was running against former Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land (R). Land, like Wehby, was expected to be a stronger candidate than she turned out to be. Koch groups planned to spend millions of dollars against Peters but also eventually ended up cancelling some of the airtime.

Peters similarly went after the Koch brothers head-on, saying at a campaign rally in July, “I feel like l’m not really running against Terri Lynn Land. I feel like I’m running against the Koch brothers.”

Of course, Oregon and Michigan are very different states from Kentucky, Arkansas, North Carolina, Iowa and other states where Democrats lost. And not all campaigns are created alike.

“People have different campaigns, they have different quality of opponents, they have different quality of voter turnout operations,” said Merkley. “I do feel like…we had really great coordination in the whole get-out-the-vote effort. Message is a part of the piece, but it’s not the entire piece.”

After all, Sen. Mark Begich (R-Alaska) tried to go after the Koch brothers as well, but he still ultimately lost his race.

Still, the success of candidates who didn’t run away from their progressive positions has heartened activists, who are arguing that it’s time the Democratic Party stop trying to move to the right to appeal to more voters.

Now that Merkey’s been reelected by a comfortable margin, he enters that outer ring of politicians who can credibly consider bids for White House. Merkley, though, asked if he sees that in his future, demurred. “I might take the Fifth Amendment on that one,” he said. “I haven’t seen a stream of people outside my door asking me to run.”

It is a shocking film: Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedixan’s Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait, featuring the footage of the ongoing killing going on in Syria, filmed by the people struck by and in the middle of the violence, on their cell-phones. Director Ossama Mohammed told his public at the Lisbon-Estoril Film Festival, where his film screened in Competition last week, that he wanted to testify to the beautiful perseverance of the human being to record experience. Even though the cell-phone videos (and the video-cam clips of Wiam Simav Bedirxan, Mohammed’s collaborator, who courageously filmed the siege of Homs), are of suffering and death, they are still, he told us, “artistic work, cinematic.”

Yet what we see in the clips is not beautiful. Silvered Water begins with a baby’s umbilical cord being cut, suggesting that this new human being has no idea what horrors await him or her. The horrors include cadavers of children in the streets; a teenager being tortured in prison, a little boy kissing his dead father’s bruised face; a maimed cat limping about Homs without an eyeball.

Throughout, we never lose sight of the fact that these are amateur on-site videos taken at the scene of the crime. The camera spins; the images of a crowd rushing away from snipers blur as the cell phone video shakes—since the owner is running for his life towards a truck.

Expressionist shots of “red” and “white” interrupt the footage. The red blood on the street; the white sky. “How do you say white in Kurdish?” the narrator asks his Kurdish collaborator. “How do you say red?” These images seem deliberately poetic, a modernist meditation on loss. Adding to the aesthetics of this film, we have the haunting strains of music from singer Noma Omran, who sings operatic dirges during some of the devastating scenes.

In making these choices, Mohammed is constantly calling attention to the film as a constructed artifact: to the fact that what we are seeing is not just what it is in the images, but the process of shooting itself. The narrator of the film intermittently intercedes to comment on the act of filming. “What is beauty?” “What is cinema?” “Cinema of the real.” The voice pauses. “Cinema of the murderer. Cinema of the victim.” The cinema question runs as a thread throughout. One of the stories of death told in this film is of a young man who dreamed of starting a cinema club in his home town of Douma. He managed to succeed in his dream. In the heart of his war-torn town, he screened the film “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Then he too was killed.

His friend mournfully quips: “Douma Mon Amour.”

At the end, the camera pans to a pure blue sky: that which hovers over everything, beyond human touch and contamination.

A French filmmaker sitting next to me found the documentary difficult to bear–and “problematic”. The problem, I imagined, is that the lofty philosophical questions of “what is art”, “what is self-expression,” “what is cinema” hover over images of actual people suffering.

I asked the director, a Syrian in exile in Paris, why it was that he erased the context of politics from his film. We never are given any information about the situation in Syria: why it is happening, why it is not stopping. Nor do we ever learn the full story of who these victims are. Who was that teenaged boy who was tortured and forced to kiss his torturer’s boot? Who was that dead father bobbing in a casket on the truck?

“I don’t answer the question of why it is happening–because it should not be happening. It is much stronger than politics. It is beyond politics. It is not a political matter. What is happening is a crime against a great culture.”

As for the metaphysical questions, on art, on beauty: the director explained that his film celebrates the human capacity for self-expression and dignity, despite all.

“Did you see the scene where the crowd ties a rope on a dead body, and does everything to ‘save it’ and bring it to a truck? This sequence for me has a title: The Society of Dead Poets. Syria is the society of dead poets. When people were trying to save the dead body, I can say that it is very beautiful. Why? That man who died was just trying to get bread for his children. Snipers were trying to kill anyone who got this body. Those people were sacrificing themselves to save a dead body! To bring back human value. This is where poesy comes from.”

The images in this film, for Mohammed, also partake in poetry.

Great photography begins when the feelings of individuals come through the images. This is real cinema. Cinema is not describing; it is not making a landscape; it’s not stereotyped beauty; it is not a sunset. Cinema is any moment when a deep and personal feeling participates in the image. These people were not thinking academically about framing, but they were choosing what to film: creating composition. I started with high respect with these images [which Syrians mailed to him]. I saw inside these images the real work of art. Syria is building her portrait; it is Syria filming herself. I cancelled language; I had the rushes of a very big film, filmed by 1001 unknown people.

He passionately lauded the poetic impulse witnessed in his film:

I believe in the depth of the Syrian moment in 2011; it was poetic. I deeply believe this. I did not look at it as brutal. Everything is coming from the fountain of the first moment of this film, from the birth of this child, from the man who says I don’t know how to film, from people saying freedom. Just listening to the deepness of nature; listening to the sounds and images: this can be poetry.

The philosophical aesthetic issues of self-expression and cinema that Mohammed raises are brilliantly provocative. The clips do “save the beauty of the people in these horrible moments.” Still I find it difficult, even now, to resolve the dissonance between Mohammed’s philosophical questions and the cruel images that remain in my mind (one jury member admitted to me she watched the entire film with her “eyes closed” because she wanted none of the images indelibly set in her memory).

But I am thankful to have seen the film: that these 1001 people’s clips, because of Mohammed’s efforts, did make it to a big screen.

As several people in the audience noted: when we see these same videos on television news or on YouTube, in snippets, we are numbed. When we see them all together, in one narrative collage, without interruption, the horror is beyond comprehension.

Flickr’s Wall Art printing service, first announced in October, has expanded quickly in its short time, growing from only allowing U.S. users to print their own photographs to including all users regardless of where they’re located. Now the photo hosting service has announced its latest update for Wall Art, one that some users had hoped would come about: the ability … Continue reading