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August 30, 2012
Money
in Politics: Where Is the Outrage?
We might wish the uproar from the convention halls of both parties
these busy weeks were the wholesome clamor of delegates deliberating
serious visions of how we should be governed for the next four
years. It rises instead from scripted TV spectacles — grown-ups doing somersaults of make-believe
— that will once again distract the public’s attention from the death
rattle of American democracy brought on by an overdose of campaign cash.
No serious proposal to take the money out of politics, or even reduce
its tightening grip on the body politic, will emerge from Tampa or
Charlotte, so the sounds of celebration and merriment are merely
prelude to a funeral cortege for America as a shared experience. A radical minority of the super-rich has
gained ascendency over politics, buying the policies, laws, tax breaks,
subsidies, and rules that consolidate a permanent state of vast
inequality by which they can further help themselves to America’s
wealth and resources.
Their appetite for more is insatiable. As we write, Mitt Romney, after two fundraisers in which
he raised nearly $10 million from the oil and gas industry, and having
duly consulted with the Oklahoma billionaire energy executive who
chairs the campaign’s energy advisory committee, has announced that if
elected President, he will end a century of federal control over oil
and gas drilling on public lands, leaving such matters to local
officials more attuned to industry desires. Theodore
Roosevelt, the first great advocate for public lands in the White
House, would be rolling in his grave, if Dick Cheney hadn’t already
dumped his bones in a Wyoming mining shaft during the first hours of
the Bush-Halliburton administration.
We are nearing the culmination of a cunning and fanatical drive to
dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons,
and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that were slowly and
painstakingly built over decades to protect everyday citizens
from the excesses of private power. The “city on the hill” has become a
fortress of privilege, guarded by a hired political class and safely
separated from the economic pressures that are upending the household
stability, family dynamics, social mobility, and civic life of everyday
Americans.
Socrates said to understand a
thing, you must first name it. As in Athens then, so in America
now: The name for what’s happening to our political system is
corruption — a deep, systemic corruption.
How did we get here?
Let’s begin with the judicial legerdemain of nine black-robed magicians
on the Supreme Court back in the l880s breathing life into an
artificial creation called “the
corporation.” An entity with no body, soul, sense, or mortality
was endowed with all the rights of a living, breathing “person” under
the Constitution. Closer to our own time, the Supreme
Court of 1976 in Buckley vs. Valeo gutted a fair elections law passed
by a Congress that could no longer ignore the stench of
Watergate. The Court ruled that wealthy individuals could spend
unlimited amounts of their own fortunes to get themselves elected to
office, and that anyone could pour dollars by the hundreds of thousands
into the war chests of political action committees to pay for “issue
ads,” clearly favoring one side in a political race, so long as a
specific candidate or party was not named.
Money, the justices declared in another burst of invention, was simply
a form of speech.
Then, just two years ago, the Roberts Court, in Citizens
United vs. Federal Elections
Commission, removed any lingering doubts that the marvelous
“persons” that corporations had become could reach into their golden
troughs to support their candidates and causes through such supposedly
“educational” devices as a movie trashing Hillary Clinton.
Meaningful oversight of campaign expenditure, necessary if
representative government is to have a fair chance against rapacious
wealth, was swept away. Hail to a new era in which a
modestly-financed candidate is at the mercy of nuclear strikes from
television ads paid for by a rich or corporate-backed opponent with an
“equal right” to “free speech.” As one hard pressed Connecticut
Republican, lagging behind in a primary race against a billionaire
opponent outspending him twelve to one, put it: “I’m fighting someone
with a machine gun and I’ve got a pistol.” When the votes were
counted, even the pistol turned out to be a peashooter.
A generation ago, the veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew warned
against the rising tide of campaign money that would flood over the
gunwales of our ship of state and sink the entire vessel. Noah’s
Flood was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the tidal wave that has
fulfilled Drew’s prophecy. The
re-election of every member of Congress today is now at the mercy of
corporate barons and private princes who can make or destroy a
candidacy by giving to those who vote “right,” or lavishing funds on
opponents of those who don’t.
Writing the majority opinion for Citizens
United, Justice Anthony Kennedy would have us believe
corruption
only happens if cash passes from one hand to another. But surely as he
arrives at his chambers across from Capitol Hill every morning, he must
inhale the fetid air rising from the cesspool that stretches from
Congress to K Street — and know there’s something rotten, beyond the
naked eye, in how Washington works.
Senator John McCain knows.
Having been implicated in the Keating Five scandal during the savings
and loan debacle 30 years ago, he repented and tried to clean up the
game. To no avail. And now he describes our elections as
nothing less than “an influence-peddling scheme in which both parties
compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.”
For the ultimate absurdity of
money’s role, we must look to another group of happy billionaires, the
corporate owners of the television stations which reap handsome profits
for selling the public’s airwaves to undisclosed buyers (also known as
campaign contributors) who pollute the political atmosphere with
millions of dollars spent on toxic ads designed to keep voters angry,
dumb, or both. Every proposal is shot down or undermined that
would make it a duty for those stations to devote free air time for
public purposes in order to earn the licenses that they treat as
permits to get rich. In one of the great perversions of the
Constitution foisted on its subjects by their overlords, the public
airwaves where free speech should reign have become private enclosures
to which access must be bought. Free? It’s about as free as Tiffany
pearls.
Money
rules. And in the
foul air democracy chokes and gasps, the middle class falls behind, and
the poor sink from sight as political donations determine the course
and speech of policies that could make the difference in the lives of
ordinary people struggling in a dog-eat-dog world.
The Devil must grin at such a sorry state of affairs and at the wicked
catch-22 at its core. To fight the power of private money, it is
first necessary to get elected. To get elected it is necessary to
raise astronomical amounts of private money from people who expect
obedience in return. “That’s some catch,” says Yossarian to Doc
Daneeka, and Doc agrees: “It’s the best there is.”
Where is the outrage at this
corruption? Partly smoothed away with the violence, banality, and
tawdry fare served up by a corporate media with every regard for the
public’s thirst for distractions and none for its need to know.
Sacrificed to the ethos of entertainment, political news — instead of
getting us as close as possible to the verifiable truth — has been
reduced to a pablum of so-called objective analysis which gives equal
time to polemicists spouting their party’s talking points.
As ProPublica recently reported: “Someone who gives up to $2,500 to the
campaign of President Barack Obama or challenger Mitt Romney will have
his or her name, address and profession listed on the FEC website for
all to see. But that same person can give $1 million or more to a
social welfare group that buys ads supporting or attacking those same
candidates and stay anonymous.” But when is the last time you heard one of the
millionaire anchors of the Sunday talk shows aggressively pursue a
beltway poobah demanding to learn about the perfidious sources of the
secret money that is poisoning our politics?
At our combined ages we’ve seen it all; hope no longer springs
eternal. We know the odds against reversing the hardening grip of
the monied interests are disheartening. Those interests are
playing to win the ferocious class war they launched 40 years ago with
a strategy devised by the corporate lawyer Lewis Powell (later a
Supreme Court justice) and a call to arms from the Wall Street
wheeler-dealer William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon’s treasury
secretary. Simon argued that “funds generated by business” would
have to “rush by multimillions” into conservative causes in order to
uproot the institutions and the “heretical” morality of the New
Deal. He called for an “alliance” between right-wing ideologues
and “men of action in the capitalist world” to mount a “veritable
crusade” against everything brought forth by the long struggle for a
progressive America. Business Week noted at the time “that some
people will obviously have to do with less… It will be a bitter pill
for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big
business can have more.”
This was not meant to be. America
was not intended to be a winner-take-all country. Our system of
checks and balances — read The Federalist Papers — was to keep an
equilibrium in how power works and for whom. Because of the vast
sums of money buying up our politics, those checks and balances are
fast disappearing and time is against us.
We are losing ground, but that’s the time when, more than ever, we need to glance back at
the progressive crusades of a century ago to take note of what has been
forgotten, or rather what braying blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and
Glenn Beck have been distorting or attempting to flush down the memory
hole. Robbing a nation of its historical memory is the most
devastating of all larcenies because it opens the door to far worse
crimes.
We have been here before. The two of us have collaborated in
studying the example of the populists and progressives who over a
century ago took on the financial and political corruptors. They
faced heavy odds, too — a Supreme Court that exalted wealth as
practically a sacred right, the distortion by intellectual and
religious leaders of the theory of evolution to “prove” that the
richest were the fittest to rule, the crony capitalism of businessmen
and politicians.
With government in the grip of such exploiters, child labor was a fact
of life, men and women were paid pittances for long hours of work and
left unprotected from industrial diseases and accidents, and workers
too old to be useful to employers any longer were abandoned to
starvation or the poorhouse. No model laws existed to protect
them.
But these pioneers of progressivism
were tough citizens, their political courage fueled by moral
conviction. They sensed, as the Kansas editor William Allen White
wrote, that their country had fallen into the hands of self-seekers,
their civilization needed recasting, and a new relationship must be
forged between haves and have-nots. When the two major parties
failed them they gave full throat to their discontent by fighting from
outside, and when Theodore Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party held
its organizing convention in l912 — exactly one hundred years ago —
they shook the rafters with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Oh, for such defiance today!
From the fighters of that era
came a renewal of the social contract first set forth in the preamble
of the Constitution — the moral and political notion of “We, the
People.” Equitable access to public resources was its
core, so that when the aristocrat De Tocqueville came here from France
in the l830s he marveled at the egalitarian spirit he found in the new
country. Public institutions, laws and regulation, as well as the
ideas, norms, and beliefs embedded in the American mythos pointed to a
future of prosperity open to all. That ideal survived the fires
of the civil war and then the hard, cold cruelties of the industrial
era and the First Gilded Age because people believed in and fought for
it. They neither scorned nor worshipped wealth but were
determined it would not rule.
It was on these foundations that the New Deal built the structure now
under attack, with the support of a Depression-stricken nation which
realized that we were all in it together — as we were in the war
against fascism that followed.
But in the succeeding fat years the nation forgot something — the words
of the great progressive senator Robert LaFollette from Wisconsin:
“Democracy is a life and demands constant struggle.” Constant
struggle. No victory can be taken for granted, no vigilance
relaxed. Like the Bourbon kings of France, the lords of unrestrained,
amoral capitalism never forgot anything. They learned from their
defeat how to organize new strategies and messages, furnish the money
to back them, and recapture control of the nation’s life. And in
the absence of genuine, fight-to-the-finish resistance, they are
winning big-time.
Think of where we are now.
One party is scary and the other is scared. The Tea Party, the
religious right, and a host of billionaires dominate the Republican
Party. Secret money fills its coffers. And in the primaries
this
year almost every Republican inclined to compromise to make government
work, went down before radical and well-funded opponents with a
fundamental “anti-government” mindset.
Yet even now President Obama says he is sure the Republicans will be
willing to negotiate if he is re-elected. Sure, and the wolves
will sit
down with the lamb.
Nor is that all. In Wisconsin, salvo after salvo of campaign cash
for union-busting Governor Scott Walker defeated the effort to recall
him. In Pennsylvania a hardline judge has given his approval to a
voter ID law specifically targeted to making it harder for low-income
would-be voters to register. And such laws are proliferating like
runaway cancer cells in state after state. The Tea Party and
right-wing Christians furnish the shock troops of these assaults, but
those who could be counted on for sturdy defense are not immune to the
grinding pressures of nonstop fundraising. Democratic
incumbents
and challengers, in national and state canvasses likewise garner
corporate contributions — including President Obama, whose fundraising
advantage is about to be overtaken by Mitt Romney and the Deep Pockets
to whom he is beholden. And at
both conventions, the prime time show is merely window-dressing; the
real action occurs at countless private invitation-only parties where
CEOs, lobbyists, trade associations and donors literally cash in their
chips. Writing in the New York Times, for example, Nicholas
Confessore reports how The American Petroleum Institute will entertain
with a concert and panels, all the while promoting an agenda that
includes approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, opposition to new
transparency rules for American energy companies operating abroad, and
the expansion of oil production on those public lands Mitt Romney is
preparing to turn over to them.
Does this money really
matter? Do owls and bats fly by night? Needed reforms are
dead on arrival on the floor of Senate and House. Banking
regulations with teeth? Mortgage relief? Non-starters when the
banks’ lobbyists virtually own Washington and the President of the
United States tells Wall Street financiers he is all that stands
between them and the pitchforks of an angry mob. Action on global
warming? Not while the fossil fuel industries and corporate-back
climate deniers have their powerful say in the matter. Cutting
bloated military expenditures? Uh-uh, when it means facing a
barrage of scare stories about weakening our defenses against
terrorism. Spend money on modernizing our rail system or creating
more public transportation in our auto-choked city streets? What
heavy artillery the auto, gasoline and highway construction lobbies
would rain down on any such proposal.
All of which would make a Progressive Rip Van Winkle shake his head in
disbelief and grind his teeth in fury. “Where is the passion we
shared for driving money from politics?” he would ask.
Where indeed? Not on the floor of either of these
conventions. You are unlikely to hear the name of Theodore
Roosevelt praised by Republicans or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by the
Democrats, except in perfunctory terms (It was FDR, after all, who said
he feared government by money as much as government by the mob.)
Each party will sing the
obligatory hosannas to the middle class, give the silent treatment to
the working poor, and bellow forth the platitudes of America’s “spirit
of enterprise and innovation” that will restore our robust economy and
world leadership. If the stagnant recovery and sufferings of the
unemployed and underemployed get any mention, it will be to blame them
on the other party. As for taking on the predatory rich, forget
it.
Our advice: Learn something from
the emptiness of what you see and hear — and if it doesn’t make you mad
as hell and ready to fight back against the Money Power, we are all in
real trouble.
Bill Moyers and historian Bernard A. Weisberger have collaborated on
several television series, including A
Walk Through the 20th Century and Report from Philadelphia: The
Constitutional Convention. They are now working on The Fighting Spirit: The People vs. The
Gilded Age.
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