John Kerry (Republican Version)

Well, it looks like Romney is the Republicans John Kerry. It was kind of fun seeing a rich, born on third base, silver spoon in his mouth, east coat, elitist, Neo Crybaby getting the treatment. It seemed like all the candidates tried to take at least one shot at him.

My personal favorites:

Romney : In my plan, blah, blah, blah.

Huckabee: Which one?

A little later,

Romney: I am for change, blah, blah, blah.

McCain: Well, Romney we do agree on one thing you are the candidate of change (always changing his mind).

Why the NPV Takes us No Where

One of the ideas for election reform that emerged after the 2004 election was the National Popular Vote. The theory is simple, states will enter into gentleman’s agreements with other states and  collectively they will commit their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner.

David Sirota recently argued for the NPV. For the record, David is one of my favorite bloggers but I think he is wrong on this issue.  The whole logic of NPV is that a somewhat equal number of Democratic and Republic states will sign on.  As David himself acknowledges many of these likely Republican candidates are pushing a plan that allocates electoral college votes by congressional district.

What both these plans do is question the logic of electoral college. While there is much to dislike about EC, is there anything worth preserving? Many seem to have forgotten the one thing EC aimed to correct was regional domination in politics. The fear was that a straight NPV would empower a particular region of the country and disenfranchise others. The EC was an attempt to make the national election for president representative of the various regions and the many states.

The biggest problems of EC are shared by NPV. They both are based on plurality rather than majority.  By design they greatly limit the participation of multiple political parties. If too many political parties participate, the plurality shrinks and shrinks until the winner has a minority of voters. Think of Clinton in 1996 when he won with only 43% of the popular vote.

I actually think there is a viable compromise between the NPV on the one hand and EC by congressional district on the other. That compromise is STV, or single transferable vote. This works much like IRV, but with the intent of electing multiple people with one vote. In the case of electoral college, STV is simply the tool that allows electoral votes to be allocated by the proportion of the state popular vote.

Lets take a state like Wisconsin. It has ten electoral votes, so roughly speaking a candidate would get an electoral vote for every 10 % of the state popular vote. I go more in depth with how it would actually work in Wisconsin Must Lead. In addition since its a preferential voting system all votes are counted not just those for the top two candidates.

Bad Santa

Last week I posted a few interesting maps, one was this one that highlights toy imports. One sees very clearly that Americans, are highly dependent on other nations for our toys. One might assume things have always been this way, or its simply the natural order of things.

(HT Sirota) Public Citizen (Damn you Ralph Nader) recently put out a report titled Santa’s Sweatshop. The anti-fair traders might tell you unsafe toys are simply a negative byproducts of globalization. They may, like Obama recently, even call for tough measures for food and toy inspection. What they fail to tell you is most of these anti-fair trade byproducts are by design.

There was a time when 90% of toys were made in he U.S.A.

During the 1970s, nearly 90 percent of U.S. toys were produced domestically. U.S. toy manufacturers began sending production to countries with low wages and weak safety regimes, and by the late 1980s,imports overtook domestic toy production.

Yes, globalization has had a cost, but is it really a natural phenomena as corporatist would have us believe. Not exactly, the lack of safety and inspection rates were deliberately written into the various AFTA legislations. In fact, the investment incentive went to those countries that were more likely to have sweat shop labor.

These agreements also include rules that limit safety standards andinspection rates for the goods sent back to the United States for sale. Santa’s sweatshops were “Made in D.C.” by corporate lobbyists who convinced the U.S. Congress to pass the bad trade policy that underwrites their overseas operations.

Both Edwards and Obama have said in recent days they wanted greater inspection rates. This and many other acts (on trade) in front of congress are illegal. As the report mentions nearly 80% of all U.S. trade cases on safety grounds have been denied by the WTO.

This is not a time for triangulation, or I was for it after I was against it. This is not a time to “fix it” as I have heard John Edwards say. What we need is the braveness of a little elf from Ohio, and declare in simple, straight forward terms that my first act as president will be to withdraw from the WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, and other trade agreement that puts the national security and the general welfare of the American people at risk.