I. Who Contributes to Political Campaigns
In 2012, fewer than 200 Americans -- a minuscule 0.000063 percent of the population -- contributed 80 percent of all Super PAC donations. Of the top 100 contributions in 2012, only 11 were made by women. The percentage of spending coming from groups that aren't required to disclose their donors rose from 11 percent to 47 percent between the 2006 mid-terms and the 2010 mid-terms. 72 percent of the political advertising by outside groups in 2010 came from sources that were prohibited from election spending in 2006. In 2004, 98 percent of outside groups disclosed their donors, versus 34 percent in 2010. Only 26,783 Americans donated more than $10,000 to federal campaigns in 2010, or about one in every 10,000 Americans. The average donation from the elite groups that make up the majority of Super PAC donations is $28,913 -- more than the median individual American income. (The source for the above is People for the American Way)
According to a study of 467 congressional races in 2012, the candidate with more money won the race 91 percent of the time.
II. Citizens United
The Citizens United Supreme Court decision has drawn the ire of many U.S. citizens. Over 650 cities and towns have passed resolutions on ballot initiatives calling on Congress to pass an amendment overturning Citizens United. A poll by the Associated Press and the National Constitution Center found that eight in ten Americans support limits on the amount of money given to groups that are trying to influence U.S. elections. Even the public isn't buying the "money is speech" argument, as 95 percent of respondents told Hart Research Associates in 2010 that corporations spend money on politics to buy influence. Just to note that a high percentage of Americans are worried about the effect of big-spending groups, a 2012 Brennan Center poll found that 70 percent of respondents believe that Super PAC spending will lead to corruption.
Justice John Paul Stevens said the following in his dissent to Citizens United: "Corporations have no conscience, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires..." "They [corporations] are not themselves members of 'We the People,' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."
III. Rape in the Congo
"Rape in war is as old as war itself. But the intimate nature of sexual assault means that the horrors often go undocumented, sanitized out of history books and glossed over in news accounts that focus on casualties and refugee numbers." [1]
The UN reports that 200,000 Congolese women and children have been raped during the Congo's simmering conflicts. In eastern Congo alone, as many as 50,000 children were born of rape over the past two decades. In many countries in Africa and the Middle East, they are not eligible for national IDs without a father's name on the birth certificate, which prevents them from going to school or receiving government assistance.
In 1998, rape was first prosecuted as a tool of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, for crimes committed during the country's genocidal conflict.
Syrian Torture
"The Commission for International Justice and Accountability's (CIJA) work recently culminated in a four-hundred-page legal brief that links the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad." The CIJA interviewed roughly two hundred and fifty victims across several provinces to secure 'pattern evidence' "showing that crimes had been perpetrated in a systematic manner, in accordance with evidence in the documents. In hundreds of witness interviews, the CIJA found consistent patterns in interrogation practices across all branches of the security services. Detainees were routinely kept in inhumane conditions for months or years without entering the judicial system." [2]
Footnotes
[1] Bryn Baker, "War and Rape," The Nation, April 8, 2016.
[2] Ben Taub, "The Assad Files," The New Yorker, April 8, 2016.
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