Clean and Open American Elections

For at least 44 years, it has been illegal for foreign corporations, countries and individuals to make political contributions in the United States for any election, either directly or indirectly. It is even against the law to solicit such contributions. But in this Wild West year of political money, that longstanding ban is being set aside. The United States Chamber of Commerce – one of the biggest advertisers in midterm races around the country – is actively soliciting foreign money, and government enforcers seem to be doing nothing to stop it.

According to a report issued by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, the chamber is getting “dues” payments of tens of thousands of dollars from foreign companies in countries such as Bahrain, India and Egypt, and then mingling the money with its fund to advocate for or against candidates in the midterm races.

The chamber firmly denies the charge, saying its internal accounting rules prevent any foreign money from being used for political purposes. Money, however, is fungible, and it is impossible for an outsider to know whether the group is following its rules.

The chamber has vowed to spend more than $75 million before the November election, and it has already run 8,000 ads, most of which support Republican candidates. The ads do not urge a vote for or against a specific candidate.

Because the United States Chamber is organized as a business league under the federal tax code, it does not have to disclose its donors, so the full extent of foreign influence on its political agenda is unknown. But Tuesday’s report sheds light on how it raises money abroad. Its affiliate in Abu Dhabi, for example, the American Chamber of Commerce, says it has more than 450 corporate and individual members in the United Arab Emirates who pay as much as $8,500 a year to join.

Because of a series of court decisions that culminated in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling earlier this year, these and similar nonprofits have become huge players in the year’s election, using unlimited money from donors who have no fear of disclosure.

The possible commingling of secret foreign money into these groups raises fresh questions about whether they are violating both the letter and spirit of the campaign finance laws. The Federal Election Commission, which has been rendered toothless by its Republican members, should be investigating possible outright violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act by foreign companies and the chamber.

The Internal Revenue Service, which is supposed to ensure that these nonprofit groups are not primarily political, has fallen down on the job. Last week, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, demanded that the I.R.S. look into whether the tax code was being misused for political purposes, and, on Tuesday, two watchdog groups made the same request of the agency.

The government needs to make sure that the tax code – and American control of American elections – is not being violated.

The New York Times, October 5, 2010

Task 5. What is the structure of the text above?What are its constituent parts.

Task 6. Read the article above for the second time, find the sentences that may be regarded as the author’s arguments. Do they sound convincing to you? How informative are they?

Task 7. Why are some word combinations in the material above are italicised?

Task 8. Watch Video 7 (Folder Unit 6), transcribe news presenter’s commentary to each paper being reviewed and translate it into Russian.

Task 9. Read the article below, determine its genre.

It’s our class, not our colour, that screws us up

Lots of children are lazy and look set for poor exam results. The difference is that

the kids from wealthier backgrounds are likely to be thrown a lifeline

Barbara Ellen

Black academic Tony Sewell is a brave man, but he’d be even braver if he were white. Had he been white, his opinions in his recent article for “ Prospect” magazine might have got him denounced as a Nazi head-measurer.

The son of Caribbean migrants, Sewell claims that institutionalised1 racism in British schools is not failing black children. He says that the routinely disquieting exam results, particularly from boys (in 2008, only 27 % of black boys achieved five or more A*– C GCSE grades), are because of the pupils themselves.

As well as being poorly parented, these children are disrespectful, lazy and badly behaved. This is why they fail their exams, not because they are being held back. In decades gone by, such children may have been “burned out in a racist school system”, but times have changed. These days, says Sewell, school leaders are so afraid of being branded racist, they prefer to cast black children as victims. Meanwhile, black boys in particular rush to embrace victimhood.

Sewell has wide-ranging experience of educating black children – one of his hats is director of the charity, Generating Genius, which targets African-Caribbean children, to get them to university. Sewell is also one for tossing flare bombs into race debates: a few months ago, he argued on these pages that absent fathers were a bigger problem for black boys than racism.

So is Sewell right? Is there such a thing as an obsolete racial victimhood thriving in our school system? Victimhood as comfort blanket, an excuse for bone-idle black kids, who don’t seem to have noticed that Asian children tend to do pretty well in British schools?

In turn, is there what could be described as a “racism excuse” in schools? A chilling attitude of: “Nothing is your fault or your own responsibility – you’re just black, you poor thing.” It’s difficult to tell. Maybe we should ask the hordes of failing white kids.

One presumes that Sewell realises that his descriptions of failing black children could just as easily be applied to failing white children, in particular poor white boys who sometimes do even worse than their black counterparts (girls, whatever their race, tend to do better).

Moving away from the hot topic of Asbo-toting hooligans, there are the other kinds of white children who rarely get mentioned in these debates – children who are much better off in material terms, but who are lazy, disrespectful and balls up exams. The difference is not that these children are white, which means little if you're extremely poor, it’s that they are middle class, which means that when they start sliding towards the cliff edge of educational failure, their parents often have the resources to rescue them.

Having gone through exams with a child, it has been an eye-opener to see the complex, expensive series of educational safety nets (tutors, retakes, courses, crammers) that are in place for children whose parents can just about afford it. Then there is the middle-class culture of 24/7 involvement in the child’s education. This sort of behaviour takes time, energy and, all too frequently, money. These are resources that poor families, black and white alike, simply don’t have.

All children have the capacity to be disrespectful, lazy screw-ups. The difference is that when better-off kids start drowning, they tend to be rescued, while poorer kids sink straight to the seabed. No one is judging the middle-class way (I’m as guilty of the exam rescue mission as anybody). However, this is a crucial class factor, which dovetails inexorably into race.

Sewell makes a valuable point that black children, or their parents and teachers, must not use “racism” as an excuse to embrace victimhood. However, we should still acknowledge that for all children the social status of their parents is often a deciding factor in their education success and whatever the intricate details of UK wealth distribution these days, it’s not likely to be concentrated in black communities. Indeed, while class remains the headline for educational outcome, more often than not, race will be writhing about in the subtext somewhere.

The Observer, September 26, 2010

Task 10. What is the structure of the article above? Find its constituent parts.

What is the meaning of the colloquial phrasal verb in the headline?

What do the underlined word combinations in the lead mean?

Task 11. Analyse the author’s argumentation in the article above. What linguistic and stylistic means does he employ? Do they sound convincing to you? Why? Put forward your arguments.

Task 12. Read the two LTEs below. What motive was behind writing those letters?

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