If the ignorance of the American voter about the mechanics of our political system did not produce such toxic and disastrous consequences, it might be as laughable as late-night talk shows suggest. In this campaign season, the mass media is awash in language identifying “voter anger”, “disillusion”, “being fed up” and “burned out” with “those politicians.” This is exactly equivalent to blaming Pinocchio for the deeds of Gepetto.
Let’s begin with the stark conclusions of an excellent book: Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back On the Middle Class, (2010) written by two young economists, Jacob S. Hacker, the Director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a cum laude graduate of Harvard with a Phd from Yale and Paul Pierson, holder of the John Gross Endowed Chair of Political Science (and he holds/held the Avice Saint Chair of Public Policy) at the University of California. Their book was an exhaustive study of the growing economic divide between the 1/10 of 1% of our nation’s wealthiest men and women, and everyone else. After examining every conceivable option---inequities of education, globalization, labor policies , imports and exports, etc. ad nauseum, the authors finally arrived at a clear and incontrovertible cause.
What they discovered was that both parties were fully financed in electoral and re-election campaigns by the same 1/10 of 1%--- the corporate, financial, and real-estate sector, known in shorthand as FIRE. Because both Democrats and Republican candidates and office-holders drink from this same well, the only way they create or maintain their personal value to their masters is by achieving or remaining in public office and gaining possession of the keys to the public treasury. Once safely there, Hacker and Pierson discovered the myriad ways in which they alter tax law, substitute “escape hatch language” in legislation, send their aides to visit and help with resolving problems and offer myriad forms of aid which all result in shifting the flows of public money in their direction. These actions are virtually invisible to the general public, but their sum total has completely altered and destroyed any parity of social power and leverage between the 1/10 and everyone else---including the rest of the 1% compared to whom the 1/10 are approximately 700 times more wealthy.
This central fact generates the virtually endless electoral campaigns and seasons that we have come to know and loathe ( and which makes the supposedly neutral media awash in money) where the politicans’ sole task is to organize focus groups and hire consultants to determine the buzz-words and issues that will win them a trip to Washington. Once elected, despite the fact that Democrats will allow you to “put it anywhere and in anyone” there is no difference between them and their Republican counterparts in Corporate or FIRE policies.
It was President Clinton remember, passing as a 60s hipster (who never inhaled) who ended the decades long financial protections of Glass-Steagall (The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) and passed the Financial Modernization Act removing restraints (and inhibited profits) from the financial sector. Installing Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs as his Treasury Secretary was literally putting the Fox in the Hen-house. (The fact that Mr. Rubin left that position to head Citigroup shortly after Glass-Steagal was repealed might suggest to all but the pathologically credulous, that he could see where the money was headed and intended to be in position to receive it.) This was the Democrats! Once friends to Labor and the Little Guy.
Black voters flocking to the Clintons today must be sufferring amnesia about the Clinton administration’s putting more young black men and women in prison than the administration of Ronald Reagan. This was accomplished by creating extraordinary disparities in drug sentencing. If a person (usually black and poor) was caught with five grams of crack cocaine they received a mandatory five year prison sentence. (How’s that for a bad day?) However another person (most often a rich white person, like campaign contributors and friends) could possess 500 grams of powdered cocaine before the same sentence was invoked. Obviously, such a policy targeted punishment towards low-level users and dealers and exempted wholesale distributors and the wealthy. In short order the prisons were filled with black folks (by our nation’s “first black President”) and the private corporations increasingly running them became as wealthy as their investors. The Nation had succesfully monetized crime.) The fact that Black neighborhoods were decimated and black families destroyed was of little consequence— Congressmen and women did not live in those neighborhoods and this new criminal class supported middle-class wages to the Probation-Parole sector, the Judicial sector, the Construction industries, etc. These were the Democrats, folks.
Today the entire Congress has been conscripted as a concierge for the corporate financial sector. The voters have failed to realize that they no longer live in a Democracy, but a Corporatocracy. They blame the results of these disastrous pro-FIRE policies on the visible political class, while the real purveyors of power remain incognito and their money remains cloistered and beyond the reach of the tax-man in foreign havens. (So much for paying your fair share.) Rather than waving signs in the streets, the surest way that We-the-People might gain the attention of the real power brokers would be to stop or reduce our shopping to a minimum and let it be known why.
Keep your car another three or four years
Take care of your clothes and invent your own fashion statements.
Pull your money out of managed mutual funds (which are taking up to 1-1.5%%of your net assets every year, win or lose, and another 1.5% in hidden fees and charges.)
Change your bank to a community/local/ or cooperative bank.
Use as little gas and electricity as you can. Make it a challenge.
We can’t fault the political sector for doing what they must to stay in office while we suck at the same teats alongside them—demanding our toys, our 300+ horsepower cars, smart phones and tablets, huge homes, jet-skis, motor-homes, and snow-mobiles---the crumbs we’re thrown to keep us placated by our ability to Tweet about whatever we want.
Getting rid of Citizen’s United will help; public financing of elections (as it is done all over Europe and Scandinavia) will help, but our protests should not be waving signs in the street, but to the degree to which we are able, keeping our checkbooks and credit cards in our pockets and letting those in power know why. Why throw good money after bad?