Ever since the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for money to buy elections (because money is now equivalent to free speech according to the Supreme Court), every candidate out there knows that whatever positions they may take on issues, there will be a flood of attack ads and worse funded by those with the money who are threatened by the 'wrong' positions on those issues.
The power of money is corrupting our political system in ways both overt and covert. It influences policy debates and determines what gets 'put on the table' and what doesn't. But there's one aspect of it that is really setting us up for trouble.
UPDATE: Huffington Post has an interview with Zephyr Teachout that ties in with this diary. Link at the bottom below the Orange Omnilepticon.
It's not just politicians who need to be wary of the power of Big Money; anyone or group acting in the political sphere is a target. Example here. An 11-21-14 eMail from Public Citizen notes that:
Murray Energy is now claiming that Citizens United — the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that has allowed unlimited election spending by billionaires and Big Business to corrupt our democracy — may also give corporations privacy rights previously belonging only to people.
In response to our motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Murray Energy is arguing that radio ads we ran about it challenging new worker safety and clean air protections “invaded its privacy” and caused it “mental anguish and emotional distress.”
Remember, Murray Energy is a corporation.
And Murray Energy sued us, not the other way around.
But in this post-Citizens United, “corporations are people” world, companies claim to have human privacy that can be invaded and human feelings that can be hurt.
emphasis added (If you want to contribute to Public Citizen's defense,
go here.)
In a world run by real people instead of corporations, the use of money as a club to beat out of the public what that money wants wouldn't be getting as much traction as it seems to be lately. And that's where an article over at Salon by Sean McElwee is an important read. The title sums it up: The death of working-class politics: How the wealthy conquered Congress and abandoned blue-collar America - As Congress gets richer and richer, research proves that it's leaving the rest of us behind.
It has become so expensive to run for national political office, only people who are financially assured to begin with have a realistic shot at success. We are selecting a political class to run the country that has less and less direct, personal understanding of what life is like for people of ordinary income, the working class as opposed to the ownership class. As McElwee notes in his opening:
Congress is rich. The average net worth in Congress is a bit more than $6 million, while the median net worth is $1 million. To put that in context, $4 million in net worth is enough to put someone in the top 1 percent, and $660,000 is enough to put an individual in the top 10 percent. Meanwhile, the median family wealth for whites is $134,000 and for blacks is $11,000. Emerging political science research suggests that the implications of this class bias are profound and important.
Political scientists have long debated the importance of “descriptive representation” or “reflective democracy.” Reflective democracy means that representatives share salient characteristics with their constituents. Most political scientists now agree that reflective representation leads to better substantive representation: that the interests of constituents are being reflected by legislator choice.
emphasis added
If there is a lot of consternation among the grass roots at the Democratic leadership's obtuseness about populist messaging on economic issues and speaking for the working class (including those missing white male voters), this does a lot to explain it. They increasingly live in a different world. One of the consequences of the decline of unions is that it has deprived the party of a source of potential candidates and leaders with working class origins and connections - while the neoliberal embrace of corporations has brought in a flood of people more disposed to plutocratic ways of thought. And for all the party's embrace of social issues, that embrace seems to slacken where they start to run into economic considerations.
McElwee cites research by Nicholas Carnes of Duke University; as Carnes writes:
If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress.
Those data end in 1998, but Carnes maintains his own database using similar metrics that picks up again in the mid-2000s. He finds that the line has remained flat, or if anything declined. At the state and local level, the picture isn’t much better. According to the National Council of State Legislators, the share of legislators who worked in business in a non-managerial position (i.e., workers) has declined from 4.4 percent in 1976 to 2.8 percent in 2007.
emphasis added
McElwee isn't the only one who has been reporting on the problem of a political class with less and less in common with the commoners they are supposed to represent. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has been on this beat for a while. From 2011:
The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.
Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.
If you're wondering why the budget deficit seems to be a bigger deal in DC than unemployment or inequality, well
Drum has the goods here.
A large body of research, from Bartels and others, demonstrates that lawmakers respond to the desires of the upper middle class and the wealthy, but not much to anyone else. So if you're wondering why official Washington is all atwitter over budget deficits, but doesn't seem to care much about unemployment, this is why. It's because that's what rich people care about.
Mother Jones is definitely one of the places to go if you want to stay on top of this kind of reporting. (
As per this article.) Which brings up another question - why doesn't this get more attention from the rest of the media?
As Congress has become wealthier, the transmogrification of money on the Fourth Estate has had a similar effect. The decline of print newspapers and the consolidation of them into chains driven more by investment thinking than doing actual reporting has choked off the rise of reporters who used to do local beat reporting and had contact with working class people on a regular basis, plus the freedom to follow up on stories. Shrinking newsrooms and a management more interested in ad revenue has not encouraged economic journalism - especially with the perception that there's no one out there who wants to read that stuff. (No one who matters, anyway.)
For broadcast journalism, the problem is even more pronounced as cable and network channels are dominated by media consolidation, corporation ownership - and a stable of 'reporters' who identify more with the people they're supposedly covering than their audience. (FOX doesn't count here, because it was never expected to do actual journalism - something the rest of the media largely ignores.)
You may hear stories on the news about the flood of money pouring into politics, but the coverage is generally shallow, as in talk of "billionaires and unions" behind it - but you never hear a break down of how much money is coming from where, and whose candidates prevail. Local news stations may do some reporting on the number of attack ads (if only because viewers are complaining about them) - but they never reveal A) who is paying for all the ads running on their stations, or B) how much money they're taking in from them.
Because no one wants to look too closely at who is feeding the cash cow they're milking as long as the milk keeps coming.
Bottom line. It's not just that money is flooding our elections; it's that the people running in those elections ARE money - on both sides. If people are wondering why the turn out for the mid terms was so low, it's not just because one side has become really good at freaking out its base with hot button issues. It's also because a lot of people do not see where voting is going to get them a government - from either party - that truly understands their needs and gives a shit about them. There's a word for that kind of government.
Randy Newman spells it out as well as anyone. http://youtu.be/...
UPDATE: Zephyr Teachout challenged Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York in the primaries, and did surprisingly well considering the odds against her run. Huffington Post has an interview with her and what she's up to. Here's one quote that illustrates the problem of money in politics.
...And Andrew Cuomo is a Wall Street politician. He works for Wall Street. He works for hedge funds. The more involved they got, the more he became a spokesperson for charter schools, at the same time he was radically cutting public school funding and class sizes were increasing. You may not know this, but New York state is both the most unequal state in the country and has the most segregated schools. And Andrew Cuomo’s tenure -- cutting schools and creating more tax loopholes for the big banks and wealthiest New Yorkers -- was not helping in either of those trends -- in fact, hurting.
What I do see is that there is a fight within the Democratic Party. There’s a fight for the soul of our country with big money, and that’s very serious. I think the house is on fire in terms of our democracy. We are very close to having nonrepresentative democracy in government because of how much candidates and elected officials work for their donors as opposed to the public. And then there is a fight within the Democratic Party which mirrors that, which is that some Democrats are becoming so corporate that they aren’t representing the middle class at all. I think Andrew Cuomo is like that.
The trend is towards Democrats who are working for a new class of donors, who are big banks and concentrated power and who have a deep libertarian streak, who have a trickle-down economic theory. Andrew Cuomo’s economic theory is indistinguishable from [President Ronald] Reagan’s: trickle-down. And I don’t think it’s because Andrew Cuomo has that belief in a deep way. I think it’s because that’s where his donors are.
emphasis added
Read The Whole Thing.