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Gerrymandering: The Perversion of Democracy

The Constitution of the United States empowers Congress to carry out a census at least once every ten years, and to use the resulting population totals to determine representation in the House of Representatives such that each member represents a constituency of approximately the same population. This concept, which sits at the core of our democratic system, was unprecedented at the time of the Constitution’s passage into law, and has served well in affording equal representation to the populations of the various states. After the census is completed, the population totals are made publicly available and are used to inform the redistricting processes that occur in each state, both for congressional districts and state legislative districts (Census). In the process, certain states will gain or lose representation in the House of Representatives due to population shifts, forcing them to carve out new districts that more accurately reflect the new information. Even the states that neither gain nor lose representation must redraw the lines of their districts in order to adequately account for the shifts of the population within the state (Draper 2012).

It must be noted, however, that the United States Constitution does not dictate the processes by which the states redesign districts. This has resulted in highly differentiated and often highly politicized redistricting processes in many states. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, 37 states afford their respective state legislatures the authority to control state legislative redistricting, and 43 states give the state legislature primary control over the process of drawing congressional districts (Brennan Center). This means that whatever party is in control of the legislature of a given state when the census occurs is capable of redrawing districts in a way that disproportionately favors their own party in both the state legislature and in the state’s congressional delegation. This process often results in the creation of very oddly-shaped districts for the sake of political gain, a tactic known as gerrymandering. Allowing state legislatures to control the redistricting process provides them with a set of incentives that are problematic to the goals of democratic representation; legislators are allowed to use completely legal redistricting processes to effectively rig elections in their own favor.

Defining the Problem
In the words of Thomas Mann, a Senior Fellow of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, “Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders)”(Mann). The bipartisan gerrymandering that Mann mentions refers to the fact that legislators also have substantial motivation to gerrymander districts even when such redistricting does not provide an advantage to their party. Gerrymandering of state legislative districts can effectively guarantee an incumbent’s victory by ‘shoring up’ a district with higher levels of partisan support. This becomes highly problematic from a governance perspective, because forming districts to ensure high levels of partisanship will ultimately lead to even higher levels of partisanship in Congress. If a substantial number of congressional districts are designed to be polarized, then the representatives they elect will also act in a heavily partisan manner, which leads to the kind of partisan gridlock that has become commonplace in recent years.

When assessing the possible impact that bipartisan gerrymandering on the success of incumbent candidates for the House, it can be helpful to compare incumbency rates between the gerrymandering-subjected House of Representatives and the Senate because the Senate is not subject to redistricting. Figure 1 compares the rates at which incumbents seeking reelection win in the House and Senate from 1964 through 2010, revealing that the House generally has significantly higher incumbency rates than those found in the Senate. While a certain amount of this difference could be attributed to random chance and the shorter term lengths of House members, there seems to be a high likelihood that the redistricting processes have had a significant impact on the likelihood of incumbents’ victories in the House.

Figure 1

House Reelection Rates

Senate Reelection Rates

The 2012 election provides us with a number of examples as to how partisan gerrymandering can have a substantive impact on the results of an election. In Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received 83,000 more votes than Republican candidates. Despite the fact that Democratic candidates won more votes, however, the Republican-controlled redistricting process in 2010 resulted in Democrats losing to their Republican counterparts in 13 out of Pennsylvania’s 18 districts (Ting 2013). In the seven states where Republicans had complete control over the redistricting process, Republican House candidates received 16.7 million votes and Democratic House candidates received 16.4 million votes. The redistricting resulted in Republican victories in 73 out of the 107 affected seats; in those 7 states, Republicans received 50.4% of the votes but won in over 68% of the congressional districts. On the national level, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received 1.4 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, yet Democrats only won 201 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives (Wang 2013). Regardless of one’s party affiliation, this kind of disproportional representation of the public will cannot be considered good for the legitimacy of a democratic system.
The redistricting processes as they are currently carried out by the states pose a serious threat to both the legitimacy of our democratic system and the functioning of our legislative bodies. Both partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering are salient problems that must be addressed if representative democracy is to function properly in the United States. Partisan gerrymandering has resulted in elected bodies that no longer represent the political composition of our citizenry, and bipartisan gerrymandering has caused a significant degree of hyper-partisanship, especially in the 112th Congress which set records as the least legislatively productive congressional session in over 60 years (Terkel 2013).

Works Cited
The Brennan Center for Justice. “Brennan Center for Justice.” National Overview of Redistricting: Who Draws the Lines? New York University Law School, 1 June 2010. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.

Draper, Robert. "The League of Dangerous Mapmakers." The Atlantic., Oct. 2012. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.
Kusnetz, Nicholas. “Behind Closed Doors: GOP and Dems Alike Cloaked Redistricting in Secrecy.” NBC News. 1 Nov. 2012. Web. 03 Mar. 2013.

Mann, Thomas E. “Redistricting Reform.” The Brookings Institution., 1 June 2005. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.
Nagourney, Adam. “New Faces Set For California In the Capitol.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2012. Web. 05 Mar. 2013. “Reelection Rates Over the Years.” OpenSecrets Center for Responsive Politics., n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.

Siegel, Jim. “Study of GOP Maps Points to Politics.” The Columbus Dispatch, 13 Dec. 2011. Web. 05 Mar. 2013.
Terkel, Amanda. “112th Congress Set To Become Most Unproductive Since 1940s.” The Huffington Post., 28 Dec. 2012. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.

Ting, Jan C. “Boehner and House Republicans Lack Mandate to Oppose Obama.” NewsWorks. NewsWorks.Org, 14 Dec. 2012. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.

United States Census Bureau. “Census in the Constitution.” – 2010 Census. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.
Wang, Sam. “The Great Gerrymander of 2012.” The New York Times. 2 Feb. 2013. Web. 5 Feb. 2013.


The Problem with News

News was once about keeping people informed about issues of substance and fact, about giving the public access to enough facts that they would be able to draw their own conclusions. At some point in the past twenty or thirty years, however, that grandiose notion fell by the wayside with the rise of a more conglomerated, profit-driven form of media. Special interests have spent decades gradually depriving the news of its objectivity; much of what is now called news is no longer focused on letting the public know what they need to know about what is going on in the world, but rather it is either about giving the people a fixed narrative through which they are expected to view the world, or just pandering to the public’s inattention to things that matter.

We have a system that promotes media conglomerates as for-profit organizations, organizations where the primary objective is making a dollar. One would think that to be incredibly counter-intuitive for a democratic political system, where the control of the flow of information has such a direct impact on government and governance. With the growth of these massive media conglomerates, the media has garnered incredible sway over public sentiment.

The problem with news is quite simple: it is now easier for the media to manipulate the facts to fit the narrative than it is for them to manipulate the narrative to fit the facts, and there does not seem to be any coherent effort, political or otherwise, to change that. In 2003 a Florida Court of Appeals went so far as to unanimously affirm in court that FOX News had the right to intentionally lie, distort, and obfuscate in their broadcasts. FOX is certainly not the only news that has been guilty of stretching the truth, but it does seem to be their forte. To be fair, this is perfectly in line with the right to free speech.

A recent poll of 600 New Jersey citizens by Fairleigh Dickinson University actually found that FOX News viewers in the state were actually significantly less well informed on a number of foreign policy issues than people who actually avoid watching and reading the news altogether. This is somewhat unsurprising give that many contemporary news sources care more about viewership than accuracy.

This is, however, an incredibly troubling precedent for a society. Shouldn’t we want our news to have an obligation to tell the truth?

News as we know it has come to be as much about the selective omission of inconvenient facts as it is about keeping the public informed. While some organizations, such as NPR and PBS, manage to maintain their journalistic integrity through public funding, the public can no longer rationally expect the media as a whole to provide unbiased perspectives on practically anything. The interests of these huge media conglomerates that have come to control the flow of information in the US are now so extensively intertwined with the vested interests of big business that it would be almost foolhardy for us to even expect objectivity. I’m not trying to say that objectivity has entirely left the corporate media, simply that subjectivity has become the new norm. The success of contemporary news sources is measured not by how well-informed the audiences of the different programs are, but rather by how many people are watching.

Roger Ailes, President of FOX News Corp, went on television a couple years ago and stated “I’m not in politics. I’m in ratings. We’re winning.”

As a nation, we should be saddened and disturbed by the fact that he is right.

The High Cost of GPOs: American Dollars and American Lives

This is the story of how our healthcare costs are being driven up by huge medical manufacturing companies with a vested interest in preventing the expansion and distribution of potentially life-saving medical innovations. This is a systemic problem that shows how things can go wrong when you give people the wrong incentives.

Today, approximately 98 percent of our nations hospitals currently manage their medical equipment procurement through massive entities called Group Purchasing Organizations, or GPOs, and, according to the Government Accountability Office, roughly 73 percent of all non-labor purchases made by hospitals in 2009 were through these entities.

Originally formed in the 1960s, GPOs were non-profit organizations, funded by dues from member hospitals, established to give large groups of hospitals bargaining power when purchasing medical equipment from large medical manufacturing companies, allowing them to push down the price of certain items that their hospitals understandably required in bulk. By the 1970’s, many hospitals began forming for-profit GPOs, and the for-profit business model started taking over the industry.

In 1986, a federal policy change (that was originally designed to save hospitals money on their GPO dues) shifted sources of GPOs’ revenue streams by allowing them to receive their funding through agreements with the large medical equipment manufacturers. These agreements allowed GPOs to receive fees from the manufacturers that were based on percentages of manufacturers’ profits from the goods sold to member hospitals.

For those of you paying attention, that means that the vast majority of US hospitals are buying their medical equipment through profit-seeking GPOs that are financially invested in the hospitals themselves spending MORE money on medical products, because the more money the hospitals spend, the more the for-profit GPOs get in kickbacks from the manufacturers. Smart, right?

It gets worse.

In 1996, the FTC and the Justice Dept. gave for-profit GPOs a categorical exemption from antitrust legislation. The theory behind the move seems sound: the larger the GPO, the better prices they could negotiate for member hospitals. This resulted in a flurry of mergers between the different GPOs, and, as of 2008, 6 GPOs controlled 90% of GPO-related purchases by US hospitals.

Now this means that not one, but two thoroughly counterintuitive, and arguably moronic, systems are now in place:

First off, there is the incredibly perverse system of financial incentives for GPOs: GPOs are supposedly in charge of bartering on behalf of their member hospitals in order to get the best possible deals on medical equipment, but meanwhile, the GPOs’ profits are largely dependent on those Hospitals spending more money than is necessary on the equipment they purchase; in some instances, GPOs have received as much as 94 percent of manufacturers’ profits from products sold to GPOs’ member hospitals. So now you have GPOs and manufacturers supposedly bartering over the price of these goods, yet both the GPOs and the manufacturers have a financial incentive for the prices not to go too low. Which is profoundly stupid, no matter how you look at it.

Second, you also have huge numbers of hospitals that are tied into supply agreements THROUGH these GPOs. What this means is that GPOs are allowed to use their supply contracts with big medical manufacturing conglomerates to restrict their own member hospitals’ ability to procure medical equipment from any outside sources, regardless of whether or not those other sources provide equipment that is superior in either quality or design to the equipment that the GPOs provide.

So not only are GPOs likely responsible for inflating the cost of equipment for which we, healthcare consumers, end up footing the bill, but they are also capable of decreasing the quality of the care we receive by preventing smaller medical manufacturing companies from gaining any share of the market, regardless of whether or not the products of those smaller companies are superior to the competing products that hospitals are already carrying.

By restricting hospitals’ ability to procure medical equipment from suppliers other than those in possession of GPO contracts, the GPO’s have actually stifled innovation in the medical field; any medical innovation that is patented, but not by a large medical equipment manufacturer, sees its manufacturer immediately incapable of selling their product in any serious quantity to the vast majority of US hospitals, because those hospitals are bound by GPO contracts with huge medical manufacturing conglomerates that sell competing, if inferior, equipment.

I don’t want to give the impression that I am making any brazen accusations of explicitly illegal conduct in the GPO industry. While I am positive that much of the GPOs’ conduct is certainly ethically dubious, it was the government that arranged the counterintuitive and inefficient system in which they operate. I am simply making the point that GPOs would almost certainly save their member hospitals more money than they do if their own profit margins were not implicitly tied to the profits of their suppliers, and if those suppliers were not frequently paying them off to continue their contracts.

Adding to the worrisome mess is the fact that some huge GPOs, such as MedAssets (ranked between largest and 4th largest GPO in the country, depending on the website you use), are publicly traded, which means that they have an organizational obligation to provide their stockholders with profits. This is where we should start to get worried; MedAssets has necessarily conflicting interests in concurrently pursuing the best prices for member hospitals and the best return for shareholders.

As it stands, the shareholders are the better off of the two: a Texas-based company named MEMdata that helps hospitals and other health service companies process and compare bids for different products has found that GPO’s consistently overcharge their member hospitals by an average of 22%. The CEO of MEMdata, Bob Yancy, revealed in a 2010 Washington Monthly article that he had received two quotes for the same equipment on the same day from the same vendor. One quote, labelled “aggresive pricing,” was priced at $83,000, and the other, for the exact same equipment, was priced at $131,000. The quote for $131,000 was through a GPO.

Furthermore, a recent study performed by the Medical Device Manufacturer’s Association found that GPOs are responsible for overcharging US hospitals by approximately $37.5 billion dollars annually for equipment. Beyond this, there are numerous accounts of hospitals and other healthcare providers dropping the GPO procurement system entirely and immediately saving anywhere from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars annually.

It should be obvious, at this point, that our healthcare prices should be lower, and our equipment should be better, but GPOs are standing in the way of both. Every dollar paid to a GPO by a supplier is a dollar that some patient has to pay to a hospital. And while they’re counting their money, there is a constant flow of medical innovations that are written off as collateral damage.

The truly sad part is that those innovations’ inability to get a foothold in our healthcare market isn’t just costing American money, it’s costing American lives.

How BP Made You Pay To Clean Up Their Mess Without You Noticing



It would be fair to note that these numbers come from different sources, and so it is difficult to verify their relative relevance. Either way, however, this is starting to look like a massive con. They came in and tried to exploit hard-to-reach resources, and their own ineptitude caused the failure of their project and directly resulted in negative externalities for the American people that are truly incomprehensible in scale. And then WE PAID FOR THE CLEANUP.

Seriously, people. You should be pissed.

Mind you, I’m not saying what they did was illegal. I’m saying that the fact that they were allowed to do so is unethical. It is patently absurd that BP spent only $14 billion on the Deepwater Horizon cleanup over a two-year period, yet it claimed related tax deductions for $12.8 billion in 2010 alone, before much of that money had been disbursed, and probably before much of that money had even been planned for disbursement for cleanup purposes.

The big picture says those 12.8 billion dollars are 12.8 billion dollars that would have funded federal programs that are currently riding up the deficit. It’s 12.8 billion dollars that are now a debt for the Federal Government, and therefore for American taxpayers.

I’m not claiming that we directly financed the cleanup, but I’m definitely saying that we indirectly financed the living hell out of it.

On Student Loans

As one of the people unfortunate enough to have started my undergraduate degree the year before the democrats decreased the interest rates on college loans (which also means that all the loans I have taken from the government AFTER the tuition decrease will remain at the doubled rate, 6.8%), the ongoing battle over interest rates for Federal Student Loans offends me.

The fact that I still have to pay the doubled rate because the Dems didn’t feel like including my ongoing loans in their rate decreases in 2007 also offends me. Obviously it is easy to understand that there were budgetary restraints involved, but it nonetheless seems to have been a cop-out to halve the rates for incoming freshmen while I had to concurrently take out loans at twice their interest rate for no reason other than that they started their college education a couple years after I started mine.

But of all of this, the part that offends me the most has almost nothing to do with my personal financial circumstances. In all the hubbub over the interest rates, the underlying problem continues to be ignored. The part of the problem that I find truly offensive is this:

Since 2001, median weekly earnings for 25-34 year-olds have fallen 5%. In the same period, college tuition rates have increased at a rate of 8% per year on average (

For those of you too lazy to do the math, that means this:

Today’s young people will be receiving 5% less money than their counterparts from 10 years ago while paying about 216 percent of the total tuition costs of those counterparts. 216 percent. And that’s not even taking the interest rates into consideration.

It is profoundly disturbing to me that college is becoming more and more necessary for young people who want a place in the workforce while the education sector as a whole is starting to look more and more like a racket.

The aggregate student debt of the US now stands at $876 billion, and for the first time in recent memory there is more student debt than credit card debt in this country. Of that debt, currently $85 billion is classified as past-due. When accounting for the fact that a large portion of that credit card debt is credit card debt held by students (just under $3,200 in credit card debt per student on average, which calculates out to $57 billion total credit card debt held by students;, this becomes an even more remarkable statistic.

When one includes the fact that around 50% of student loan recipients are in deferment or forbearance due to circumstances such as ‘currently getting an education,’ and another ~9% of loan recipients have defaulted on loans for which they are in the repayment period, problems become even more apparent. That means that ~20% of the student loans that are actually in their repayment periods are in default, a much more notable and troubling statistic than the aforementioned 9%.

The bottom line is this: the US is in desperate need of reform in the higher education sector. This is an economic model that is obviously and fundamentally flawed, and we need to address it before it becomes a serious economic and fiscal liability moving forward.

On Wealth Disparities







War Is A Racket, By Major General Smedley Butler.

Major General Smedley Butler was the most decorated Marine in US history upon his death in 1940. By the 1930’s, he had become an avid and outspoken anti-war activist. This is his essay, War Is A Racket. It has withstood the test of time as few such political essays can, and I simply hope that you take the time to read it.

Most of the content of this post originated at the following site:

Smedley Darlington Butler

Born: West Chester, Pa., July 30, 1881
Educated: Haverford School
Awarded two congressional medals of honor:
capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914
capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917
Distinguished service medal, 1919
Major General – United States Marine Corps
Retired Oct. 1, 1931
On leave of absence to act as
director of Dept. of Safety, Philadelphia, 1932
Lecturer — 1930’s
Republican Candidate for Senate, 1932
Died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, June 21, 1940
For more information about Major General Butler,
contact the United States Marine Corps.


War Is A Racket

WAR is a racket. It always has been.






And what is this bill?

















Yes, and what does it profit the nation?




Who Makes The Profits?











A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.



























Who Pays The Bills?


But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.









Napoleon once said,









But wait!








How To Smash This Racket!

WELL, it’s a racket, all right.





Why shouldn’t they?













We must take the profit out of war.


We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.


To Hell With War!




Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?





So . . . ”












So…I say,