ANS -- Term Limits Won't Drain the Swamp: They'll Flood It

Here is an article from Thom Hartmann on why term limits are bad.  They increase corruption and give lobbyists more power.  Read it. 

--Kim

Yesterday, I came home from the studio and turned on the TV to see an MSNOW host and her guest agree on how important it is that Democrats “unite around the issue of term limits” for members of Congress. Last week, the Democratic governor of a swing state said on my program that he was pushing for term limits.

In just the past 48 hours I’ve heard three different commentators on MSNOW and CNN speak of them as if term limits are the “solution” to “elderly” legislators or to the naked corruption that’s so rampant in DC.

This is the wrong issue for Democrats to be promoting now: term limits actually do more damage than good, which is why Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them for decades.

For example, they’d get rid of good, effective, high-quality legislators like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, among others.

But the problem with term limits goes far deeper than that.

Unfortunately, term limits are popular because they seem like an easy fix to the corruption crisis in American politics (over 70 percent of Americans favor them) but in reality they simply hand more power over to giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Here’s how:

First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often speak fondly of them.

Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.

With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.

Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, we have an actual experiment we can look to. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all have term limits.

Research has shown, repeatedly and unambiguously, that in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers, and thus have outsized power and influence, far greater than they had before the term limits were instituted.

Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who, in those states with term limits, are forced to lean on them for guidance.

This simple reality is not lost on the GOP, which has been pushing these restrictions on service at the federal and state legislature level for years: term limits are law in 16 states, all as the result of heavy Republican PR efforts and lobbying during the George HW Bush presidency.

Pappy Bush rolled the idea out in 1990 as a central part of his failed run for re-election in 1992. An unpopular president who was being blamed by voters for the destruction of unions and factories rapidly moving offshore, his advisors thought it would be a great way to blame Congress for the problems that neoliberal Reaganomics had inflicted on the nation.

As The New York Times noted on December 12, 1990:

“President Bush has decided to push for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms for members of Congress, his chief of staff, John H. Sununu, said today. Doing so as he prepares for his re-election campaign will put Mr. Bush squarely and publicly on the side of an idea that is as widely popular among voters as it is wildly unpopular among members of Congress…

“But even though passage of such an amendment is unlikely, there is little risk for Mr. Bush in associating himself with this movement. Politically, the move fits nicely with the growing effort by the White House to depict Congress as the source of most of the nation’s problems.”

While the US Congress never seriously took up the idea, Bush’s advocacy of it echoed through the states and was heavily promoted by Rush Limbaugh, whose national hate-radio show had rolled out just two years earlier in 1988.

Newt Gingrich made term limits the cornerstone of his 1994 Contract On America, but the issue died at the federal level in 1995 when the Supreme Court, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, ruled term limits imposed on federal officials are unconstitutional.

This doesn’t mean Congress can’t impose term limits on itself; it would just require them to be done as a constitutional amendment or via some other mechanism that gets around the Supreme Court like court-stripping (which, itself, is dicey). Term limits were imposed on the presidency by Congress in 1951, a GOP backlash against FDR’s having won election to four consecutive terms in office, but that took ratification of the 22nd Amendment.

Following Bush’s promotion of them, Oklahoma picked up term limits for its legislature in 1990, with Maine, California, Colorado, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and Missouri debating them during the 1991 and 1992 legislative sessions and all putting them into law in 1992. Louisiana and Nevada put them into law in 1995 and 1996, respectively, Nebraska in 2000, and North Dakota finally got around to them in 2022.

In every single case, term limits have worked to the benefit of billionaires and special interests and against the interests of average citizens. It’s why the Koch brothers and rightwing think-tanks have been pushing them for decades, like you’ll find in the article “Term Limits: The Only Way to Clean Up Congress” on the Heritage Foundation’s website.

In addition to strengthening the hand of lobbyists, term limits also prevent good people who aren’t independently wealthy from entering politics in the first place.

What rational person, particularly if they have kids, would take the risk of a job they know will end in six years when instead they could build a career in a field that guarantees them security and a decent retirement?

Also because of this dynamic, term limits encourage legislators to focus on their post-politics career while serving.

Many busily legislate favors for particular industries in the hope of being rewarded with a job when they leave office. This is just one of several ways term limits increase the level of and incentives for corruption.

Because term limits encourage independently wealthy people to enter politics and push out middle-class would-be career politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they always shift the Overton window of legislatures — regardless of the party in power — to the right.

Probably the strongest argument against term limits, though, is that they’re fundamentally anti-democratic. In fact, we already have term limits: they’re called elections.

The decision about who represents the interests of a particular state or legislative district shouldn’t be held by some abstract law: it should be in the hands of the voters, and term limits deny voters this.

And, because term limits weaken the power of the legislative branch by producing a constant churn, they strengthen the power of the executive branch, a violation of the vital concept of checks-and-balances.

Even where governors or presidents are term-limited by law or constitution, the concentration of power in a single executive is inherently problematic, requiring a robust legislative branch to balance it. Term limits thus neuter a legislature’s ability to mount a muscular challenge to a governor or president grasping for excess power.

States that have instituted term limits generally suffer from “buyer’s remorse.” As the Citizens Research Council of Michigan noted in a 2018 report titled Twenty-five Years Later, Term Limits Have Failed to Deliver On Their Promise:

“Legislative term limits in Michigan have failed to achieve their proponents’ stated goals: Ridding government of career politicians, increasing diversity among elected officials, and making elections more competitive.

“Term limits have made state legislators, especially House members, view their time as a stepping stone to another office. Term limits have failed to strengthen ties between legislators and their districts or sever cozy relationships with lobbyists. They have weakened the legislature in its relationship with the executive branch.”

A scholarly study of term limits in Florida similarly concluded:

“The absence of long-serving legislators under term limits equates to a significant loss of experience and institutional memory. … Those who had built a career in the Legislature were not applauded for the expertise they had developed but were castigated…

“After the first full decade with term limitations in place, the Florida Legislature is a dramatically different institution. Term limits increased legislator turnover and drastically affected legislative tenure, all but destroying institutional memory.”

The Brookings Institution, in a paper titled Five Reasons to Oppose Congressional Term Limits, notes that the primary results of term limits are to:

— “Take away power from voters,”

— “Severely decrease congressional capacity,”

— “Limit incentives for gaining policy expertise,”

— “Automatically kick out effective lawmakers,” and

— “Do little to minimize corruptive behavior or slow the revolving door.”

As a result, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming have all repealed their legislative term limits.

For people who’ve never worked in politics or held elective office — which is most of us — term limits sound like a quick and easy answer for the complex problems of corruption and congressional dysfunction. But the only truly reasonable place for term limits to be applied are to the presidency (which we’ve already done) and the unelected members of the Supreme Court (18 years is generally suggested as an appropriate limit to their terms).

So, the next time you hear some politician or TV pundit proclaiming that term limits are the “best solution” to the “problem” of corruption or congressional dysfunction, consider their real agenda.

Unless they’re simply naïve or cynical, it’ll almost always be that they are or once were (before Trump) a Republican and just can’t help themselves.

hartmannreport.com

Term Limits Won’t Drain the Swamp: They’ll Flood It

ANS -- They shut down the Las Vegas Strip.

Here is a story about a woman, back in 1971, who, when the state of Nevada cut 3,000 needy families off of welfare, took it upon herself to organize and get the situation solved.  I am sending this because it seems like a good idea of how to do it.  Maybe we could learn something from it.

--Kim

The 1971 Nevada welfare cuts eliminated 3,000 families from the rolls on a Tuesday. The mothers didn't hire lawyers. They shut down the Las Vegas Strip.

Ruby Duncan was thirty-eight years old. She had a fifth-grade education and a torn knee.

She used to clean rooms at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. The work was invisible, measured in folded towels and emptied ashtrays. One afternoon, she slipped on a patch of grease in the hotel kitchen.

The hotel management let her go without severance. She couldn't stand for long periods. The casinos wouldn't hire her back.

That was how she ended up on state assistance. She was raising seven children in a segregated housing project on the Westside of Las Vegas, Nevada. The neighborhood had dirt roads and open ditches. It was only three miles away from the neon glow, but it operated as an entirely different world.

In the winter of 1971, the state decided to tighten its budget. The welfare director, a man named George Miller, announced a sudden crackdown. He claimed the system was rampant with fraud.

The department didn't conduct individual interviews. They didn't review case files or speak to the mothers. They ran a newly installed computer program to identify discrepancies and mailed the envelopes.

The Nevada welfare cuts were designed to be permanent, a bureaucratic sweeping of the books.

The letters arrived on a Tuesday. The termination was immediate.

If the letters stood, three thousand women would have zero dollars for rent, heat, or food by the first of the month. In 1971, a gallon of milk cost $1.18. Rent in the Westside was $60 a month. These families had no alternative safety net.

The women gathered in the recreation room of a community center. Some held the state envelopes in their hands. They had no savings to lean on. They had no union representation in the national welfare rights movement.

Ruby stood at the front of the room. She didn't have a background in political organizing. She had a background in surviving.

"We can't fight them in the courts," she said.

The courts took years. The rent was due in nine days. She owed two months of back rent the morning she stood up to speak.

They needed a lever. They looked across the city, past the railroad tracks, toward the boulevard.

The state government was up in Carson City, four hundred miles away. It was insulated and out of reach. But the money that ran the state government was right down the street.

The casinos.

At the time, the Nevada gaming industry operated in a carefully curated bubble. Tourists came to the desert to forget reality, not to be confronted with poverty. According to local ordinances from the era, demonstrating on the Strip was functionally illegal. The sidewalks were routinely classified as private property owned by the hotels. A protest wasn't just a disruption of traffic. It was a disruption of the state's primary economic engine.

The state welfare board defended the cuts publicly. They stated the system was bloated. They argued that the state budget had to be maintained at all costs.

They expected the mothers to absorb the blow silently, as poor women in the Westside historically did. The power dynamic relied entirely on their invisibility.

One mother brought her eviction notice to the local welfare office. She showed the paperwork to the man behind the glass. The clerk slid it back across the counter and called the next number.

Ruby walked out of the office. She didn't file an appeal. She didn't write a letter to her congressman.

She went back to the housing project and started making phone calls. She called women in the Westside. She called organizers in other cities.

On March 6, 1971, the mothers marched out of their neighborhood.

There were hundreds of them at first. Then the crowd swelled into the thousands. They walked past the rail yards. They crossed Interstate 15.

They brought their children. They wore their Sunday clothes. They linked arms.

The local police lined the boulevard. The Clark County Sheriff had deployed his entire daytime shift. They stood with nightsticks ready.

Ruby kept walking.

It was the Strip. Millions of dollars a day. Unregulated cash. The absolute center of Nevada's political power.

They didn't just stand on the sidewalks holding signs. They walked straight through the heavy glass doors of Caesars Palace.

The security guards didn't know what to do. There was no protocol for hundreds of mothers entering a casino floor.

The women marched past the baccarat tables. They walked through the slot machine aisles. They sat down on the thick velvet carpets in front of the roulette wheels.

The pit bosses froze. The dealers stepped back from the tables. The tourists stopped pulling the levers.

Some of the tourists stared. Others complained. The mothers did not move.

The noise of a casino is a continuous roar of coins, bells, and shuffling cards. For the first time in years, the floor of Caesars Palace went totally silent.

The mothers stayed.

They moved to the Sands. Then they marched into the Sahara.

They formed a human chain across Las Vegas Boulevard. They blocked the taxicabs. They stopped the limousines from reaching the valet stands. They forced the city's main artery to close entirely.

The casinos began losing thousands of dollars a minute. The gambling had stopped, but the overhead costs were still running.

Hotel executives called the governor in Carson City.

They didn't ask him to arrest the women. There were too many of them, and arresting mothers in front of tourists was incredibly bad for business.

They asked him to fix the problem.

They couldn't vote the governor out of office. So they stopped the money that kept him there.

It took less than two weeks of sustained economic pressure.

A federal judge ordered the state of Nevada to reinstate all three thousand families to the welfare rolls. The judge ruled the sudden terminations unconstitutional.

The state complied. The checks were mailed. The power dynamic shifted.

Ruby Duncan went back to the Westside. She didn't sign a movie deal. She didn't go on a speaking tour.

She spent the next forty years building a medical clinic, a library, and a daycare for her neighborhood. She built the infrastructure the state had refused to provide.

She never held public office.

The Sahara Hotel, where she once slipped on the kitchen floor and lost her job, eventually changed hands. It underwent massive renovations.

The kitchen floor was replaced. The casino expanded its footprint.

The boulevard still runs straight through the desert, glowing loud enough to be seen from space. The money never stops moving.

Ruby Duncan: the mother who shut down the Strip.

Source: Ruby Duncan and the Clark County Welfare Rights Organization.

Verified via: The Nevada Women's History Project, University of Nevada Oral History Archives.

(Some details summarized for brevity.)

ANS -- "All you had to do was pay us enough to live."

Here is a piece about economic justice.  The math is interesting.  Something must be done to fix this.  

--Kim

Qasim Rashid 

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“All you had to do was pay us enough to live. All you had to do was pay us enough to live. There goes your inventory.”

Those are the words Chamel Abdul Karim spoke while filming himself allegedly burning down a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario, California. The fire caused an estimated $500 million in destroyed inventory and hundreds of millions more in rebuild costs. He also allegedly texted: “Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”

The Justice Department has charged him. Corporate media has covered it as a crime story. And that’s where most outlets stopped.

I’m not stopping there. Let’s Address This.

The Math That Corporate Media Won’t Do

I want to be clear: I am not endorsing what Chamel Abdul Karim did. Destruction of property is not a policy platform, and I am not treating it as one.

What I am saying is this: his anger is grounded in a documented, quantifiable, economic reality that billion-dollar corporations and their political allies have worked very hard to keep you from seeing clearly. So let’s see it clearly.

Chamel was not even a Kimberly-Clark warehouse employee. He was a contractor earning approximately $18 an hour — roughly $36,000 a year.

Kimberly-Clark’s own warehouse workers fare only marginally better, earning approximately $23 to $24 an hour — about $46,000 to $47,000 a year.

And lest anyone claims these are livable wages, let’s look at what it actually costs to live in Ontario, California. A simple living, not luxuriously, not comfortably, but simply to get by: approximately $67,000 a year for a single person.

That means Kimberly-Clark was paying its own employees $20,000 less per year than the basic cost of living in the city where they worked. It was paying contractors like Chamel $30,000 less per year than what it costs to survive.

And now for the number that should make every American furious.

On just over $20 billion in annual revenue, Kimberly-Clark generates approximately $2.55 billion in net profit every single year. The company employs roughly 38,000 people. If Kimberly-Clark chose to pay every single one of those employees an additional $20,000 per year — bringing them to the basic cost-of-living threshold — it would cost the company approximately $750 million annually.

They would still pocket nearly $2 billion in profit every single year.

The warehouse Chamel allegedly burned cost $750 million in damage.

Read that again: the cost of one act of economic desperation is identical to the annual cost of simply paying 38,000 workers enough to live. Kimberly-Clark chose the latter outcome through years of wage suppression. The math is not complicated. The choice was deliberate.

This Is Not an Isolated Story

Chamel Abdul Karim is one person. But his circumstances are shared by tens of millions of Americans.

Right now, 60% of Americans are not being paid enough even just to get by. Let alone enough to save or enough to build wealth. Not enough to absorb a single unexpected expense. And when we dare to name this reality, we are told the same tired mythology: Americans are lazy. People just need to work harder. If you give low-income workers more money, they’ll stop being motivated.

This is not economics. It is a weapon — deployed specifically to protect the interests of those at the top of the income ladder while convincing those at the bottom that their suffering is their own fault. Let’s examine who actually stops working when they get more money.

The Trickle-Down Scam, By the Numbers

The Trump administration sold its tax policy on a simple promise: cut taxes on billionaires and corporations, and they will create jobs, raise wages, and the prosperity will trickle down to working people.

Here is what actually happened.

This week alone, Oracle laid off 30,000 employees. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees. Both companies are posting record profits. The billionaires who run these companies are not creating jobs with their tax windfalls. They are eliminating jobs while hoarding wealth at a scale this country has never seen.

And as reported by the Institute on Economic Policy and Taxation:

"Four of the corporations whose CEOs flanked President Trump at his January 2025 inauguration ceremony have now disclosed that they collectively received $51 billion in federal tax breaks in 2025, much of that likely from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that was signed into law by Trump over the summer. The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero. That amounts to a collective tax savings of $51 billion last year for these four giant multinational corporations, versus what they would have paid if they paid the full 21 percent federal corporate income tax rate."

It went to shareholders. It went to stock buybacks. It went to executive compensation. It went to the billionaires flanking a president at his inauguration.

Meanwhile, Chamel Abdul Karim was making $18 an hour and couldn’t afford to live where he worked.

Economic Violence Is Still Violence

There is a concept in human rights law and scholarship called structural violence — the idea that social arrangements and institutions can harm people just as surely as physical force, by systematically denying them what they need to survive and thrive. Poverty is not an accident. Wage suppression is not a market outcome. They are choices — made by specific people, in specific boardrooms, with specific political protection — that have specific, measurable human consequences.

When a corporation makes $2.55 billion in annual profit while paying workers $30,000 below the cost of living, that is not an accident or random circumstance. That is economic violence being imposed on working people while the perpetrators collect billion-dollar bonuses and lobby for further tax cuts.

We have criminalized Chamel Abdul Karim’s response to that violence. We have not criminalized the violence itself.

I am not arguing for equivalence. I am arguing for honesty. And honestly, a society that demands compliance from its most economically brutalized members while offering them nothing in return — not a living wage, not healthcare, not dignity, not a basic acknowledgment that their labor has value — should not be surprised when that compliance eventually breaks.

What We Must Demand

The solutions here are not complicated. Chamel already gave the answer—all you had to do was pay us enough to live. This is common sense, but politically inconvenient for those infected with the sickness of hoarding wealth at the expense of human rights.

We must demand a living wage — not a minimum wage calculated decades ago and eroded by inflation, but a wage indexed to the actual cost of living in the places where people work. If Kimberly-Clark can afford $750 million in warehouse losses, it can afford to pay its workers $67,000 a year. As FDR declared when he signed a minimum wage into law in 1933:

"It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."

By this standard, Kimberly-Clark had no right to continue to do business in this country. The problem is too many of our elected officials are feckless, lack the basic courage to stop this economic violence, and lack the will to hold exploitative corporations like Kimberly-Clark accountable.

We must demand that billion-dollar corporations pay their actual tax rate—not the 4.9% their lobbyists have engineered. But a rate that reflects the public infrastructure, educated workforce, legal system, and stable society from which they extract their profits. We must demand an end to the trickle-down mythology — a decades-long scam that has transferred at least $79 Trillion from working people to the ultra-wealthy while delivering nothing but record inequality, wage stagnation, and the slow erosion of the American middle class.

And we must be willing to say clearly: the accumulation of obscene, generational, dynastic billionaire wealth while workers cannot afford to live is not a feature of a just society. It is a moral catastrophe.

Abolish billionaire tax shelters. Tax corporations at rates that reflect their actual profits. Pay workers enough to live where they work. These are not radical demands. They are the bare minimum requirements of a society that takes human dignity seriously.

The Real Crime in This Story

The real crime story I’ve described here is one you won’t hear from corporate media. Because their goal is to extract profit, not hold power accountable. This is why your support of our platform at Let’s Address This is even more critical—you help us hold the powerful accountable and elevate stories that corporate media ignores. The harsh truth is that Chamel Abdul Karim will likely go to prison. But the executives who spent years paying workers $30,000 below the cost of living, forcing millions of people to suffer in poverty, while themselves pocketing billions—will face no consequences whatsoever. They will, in fact, continue receiving federal tax breaks funded by those same underpaid workers.

That is the real crime in this story.

And until we have the courage to name it, prosecute it, and dismantle the systems that perpetuate it, we will keep producing the conditions that produce Chamel Abdul Karims — and then act surprised when those conditions explode.

When all they had to do was pay them enough to live.

________________________

Read the full article with links and receipts: https://www.qasimrashid.com/.../all-you-had-to-do-was-pay...

Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This — a paywall free platform dedicated to human rights, economic justice, and the accountability that corporate media refuses to provide. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union: https://www.qasimrashid.com/subscribe

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