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Have campaign finance reform laws actually worked? Is money less influential in electing candidates today than it was thirty years ago when legislation was first enacted? Absolutely not, argues Rodney A. Smith in this passionately written, fact-filled, and provocative book. According to Smith, the laws have had exactly the opposite of their intended effect. They have increased the likelihood that incumbents in the House and Senate will be reelected, and they have greatly diminished the chances that candidates who are not wealthy will be elected. Smith’s claims are supported by convincing data; he collected and analyzed information about all federal elections since 1920. These data show clearly that money matters now more than ever.

Smith thinks that reform legislation has created a new inequality for candidates that, if left unchecked, threatens to destroy the American electoral process by obliterating the foundational principle of free speech. He argues that "money buys speech" and when candidates lack money to buy media time and space they are effectively silenced. Their inability to "speak freely" violates the most significant intentions of our nation’s founders: that a sovereign citizenry elect its own leaders based on a free exchange of ideas. For Smith, campaign finance reform has unwittingly unbalanced the checks and balances created by the Framers of the Constitution.

After presenting a detailed historical overview of how we have reached the present crisis, Smith proposes a simple solution: institute a process that completely discloses relevant information about campaign donors and recipients of donations. All disclosures would be available to the media, which would be able to investigate and report them fully. Only then, Smith believes, will the United States have the opportunity to be the democratic republic that its founders intended.

AUTHOR BIO: A certified public accountant, Rodney A. Smith is a political consultant and fund-raiser. In the past thirty years, he has raised over a billion dollars for candidates and political committees. He has been the national finance director for the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee and served as treasurer and finance director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He is the only finance professional ever honored as the "Most Valuable Player in a Campaign" by the American Association of Political Consultants. He lives in Washington, D.C..
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Following the Allied victory in World War II, the United States turned its efforts to preventing the spread of Communism beyond Eastern Europe. Gregory Mitrovich argues, however, that the policy of containment was only the first step in a clandestine campaign to destroy Soviet power.

Drawing on recently declassified U.S. documents, Mitrovich reveals a range of previously unknown covert actions launched during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Through the aggressive use of psychological warfare, officials sought to provoke political crisis among key Soviet leaders, to incite nationalist tensions within the USSR, and to foment unrest across Eastern Europe. Mitrovich demonstrates that inspiration for these efforts did not originate within the intelligence community, but with individuals at the highest levels of policymaking in the U.S. government..
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In this searing indictment of current administration policy, Charles Tiefer, a distinguished scholar of national legal affairs and former solicitor of the House of Representatives, argues that President George W. Bush methodically manipulates the law to promote right-wing causes. The beneficiaries of these machinations range from frontline pro-weapon and anti-women's rights groups to major industries that profit from lax environmental standards and military intervention in resource-rich regions. Accessibly written, legally rigorous, and meticulously documented, Veering Right demonstrates how the administration's already-ample arsenal for accomplishing ideological goals was expanded with weapons such as Attorney General John Ashcroft's social crusades and the polarizing 2004 election campaign. Tiefer lays out a compelling case for how the administration consistently erects barriers to media and congressional oversight that might expose covert motivations to public scrutiny. With an eye on the future, the White House is building a durable and potentially dominant machine for pursuing ideological goals by awarding lifetime judgeships and by exchanging favors for campaign funding. This book presents eye-opening evidence that ultra-conservatives could achieve previously unimaginable successes during a second Bush term.
As a former Solicitor of the House of Representatives, Tiefer possesses a wealth of insight gleaned from decades of no-holds-barred investigations and judicial struggles. His wide-ranging perspective takes into account cultural changes, constitutional issues, partisan and electoral developments, and political personalities. The most exhaustive analysis to date of the Bush administration's real agenda, this book provides a rare insider's view of the strategic, devious, and potentially overpowering ways that presidents make ideological use of the law.
Veering Right Documents How
* President Bush's secrecy and deception undermined the democratic process by misleading Congress and the public about international and domestic matters ranging from doctored Iraq weapons intelligence to covered-up drugmaker subsidies paid for by seniors
* Bush's first term lays the groundwork for even more extreme right wing policies if he is re-elected. This agenda includes tilting the nation's tax structure against the middle class in Democratic states, weakening traditional Medicare by concentrating rising costs on poorer and sicker seniors, and exporting jobs via the trade fast track
* John Ashcroft used religiosity and race-baiting to build his political career and, after 9/11, blocked questioning of his abuses--ranging from concealed undermining of the Bill of Rights to promoting the intolerance of the religious right--by labeling it as suspicious and even treasonous
* Bush turned the public's reaction after 9/11 away from the logical Saudi suspects and against Iraq in a spectacular double-play to push his agenda in the world's oil patch
* Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton and her crew of lawyer-lobbyists ran the public's resources and its pollution controls like a candy store for pariah industries
* Bush's domestic legal gambits around big money paid off in 2004 with a historical gross campaign war chest as a quid pro quo for favors rendered
* The Bush Administration dismantled international legal regimes ranging from arms control and women's rights to global climate control and international tobacco regulation
* Bush's unilateralist alienation of potential support abroad hobbled both the Iraq occupation and the effort against terrorism.
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With uncompromising clarity, Jim Sleeper discusses what liberals need to do to return their political movement to the vital center. He challenges us to transcend race, to reject the foolish policies and attitudes that have only reinforced racial divisions, and to weave a social fabric sturdy enough to sustain the values upon which this country was founded..
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Jesus Circles presents a way to create a new social order based on Jesus' vision, message, and program The movement Jesus started among marginalized peasants in Galilee undermined the Roman/ Judean system of domination and violence. His program incarnated an alternative community in which oppressed peasants experienced healing, wholeness and abundance in the midst of a culture of extreme violence. The author peels away layers of interpretive theological material that obscure Jesus' powerful healing and liberating program. Unfortunately, most of the literature of the New Testament is the interpretive work of upper class men trying to fit the radical Jesus into their Greco-Roman cultural frame. "In the half-century before the creation of the first narrative gospel, the Gospel of Mark, a visionary sage was transformed from an iconoclast to an icon and his radical vision of God's domain dissipated in debates about divinity." Through the work of Biblical scholars who incorporate insights from social anthropology and archeology, we can now look behind those editorial embellishments of early Christian literature.

What comes to light is Jesus' radical nonviolent program: a liberating engagement with the marginalized peasants of Galilee that so undermined the Roman Imperial domination system that they killed him.

The way out of our captivity in the domination systems of the 21st century is a new world order inherent in Jesus' program; a way in which the abundance of the earth is justly shared and violence is no longer sanctioned.

We can experience a contemporary manifestation of Jesus' way of being new humans in the circle process. The book gives specific instructions on forming Jesus Circles that embody an egalitarian path of healing, justice, abundance and peace in the midst of the domination systems of today..
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This digital document is an article from Chief Executive (U.S.), published by Chief Executive Publishing on January 1, 2004. The length of the article is 733 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: How to subvert hierarchy: CEOs must 'skip levels' to manage more effectively.(Chief Concern)
Author: Michael J. Critelli
Publication:Chief Executive (U.S.) (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2004
Publisher: Chief Executive Publishing
Issue: 195 Page: 12(1)

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
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