This is an article worth a read. It is written by a guy who I’m pretty sure wrote a Conlaw hornbook or something very academic and smart. It touches on the central weakness in our modern democracy – Congress and the corrosive influence of corporate cash.
Whether on the left or the right, there is an endless list of critical problems that each side believes important. The Reagan right wants less government and a simpler tax system. The progressive left wants better healthcare and a stop to global warming. Each side views these issues as critical, either to the nation (the right) or to the globe (the left). But what both sides must come to see is that the reform of neither is possible until we solve our first problem first–the dependency of the Fundraising Congress.
The author stops just a little short of calling for a Constitutional Convention. It’s a very exciting idea, but probably only because I’m in law school.
This very long article, I think, makes an oblique yet elaborate point here. It’s a point that might cause some to throw tinfoil hats at you for saying it in plain and simplistic terms: Corporate money controls policy and government. There is only the facade of a democracy left. The plebians are distracted with fights over tangential wedge issues. The elite are using a masterful sleight of hand to divide people with emotionally charged issues so that no one holds the Marie Antoinette class accountable for turning Congress (and by extension the nation) into it’s very own low-rent brothel:
Members of Congress are insulted by charges like these. They insist that money has no such effect. Perhaps, they concede, it buys access. (As former Representative Romano Mazzoli put it, “People who contribute get the ear of the member and the ear of the staff. They have the access–and access is it.”) But, the cash-seekers insist, it doesn’t change anyone’s mind. The souls of members are not corrupted by private funding. It is simply the way Americans go about raising the money necessary to elect our government.
But there are two independent and adequate responses to this weak rationalization for the corruption of the Fundraising Congress. First: whether or not this money has corrupted anyone’s soul–that is, whether it has changed any vote or led any politician to bend one way or the other–there is no doubt that it leads the vast majority of Americans to believe that money buys results in Congress. Even if it doesn’t, that’s what Americans believe. Even if, that is, the money doesn’t corrupt the soul of a single member of Congress, it corrupts the institution–by weakening faith in it, and hence weakening the willingness of citizens to participate in their government. Why waste your time engaging politically when it is ultimately money that buys results, at least if you’re not one of those few souls with vast sums of it?
“But maybe,” the apologist insists, “the problem is in what Americans believe. Maybe we should work hard to convince Americans that they’re wrong. It’s understandable that they believe money is corrupting Washington. But it isn’t. The money is benign. It supports the positions members have already taken. It is simply how those positions find voice and support. It is just the American way.”
Here a second and completely damning response walks onto the field: if money really doesn’t affect results in Washington, then what could possibly explain the fundamental policy failures–relative to every comparable democracy across the world, whether liberal or conservative–of our government over the past decades? The choice (made by Democrats and Republicans alike) to leave unchecked a huge and crucially vulnerable segment of our economy, which threw the economy over a cliff when it tanked (as independent analysts again and again predicted it would). Or the choice to leave unchecked the spread of greenhouse gases. Or to leave unregulated the exploding use of antibiotics in our food supply–producing deadly strains of E. coli. Or the inability of the twenty years of “small government” Republican presidents in the past twenty-nine to reduce the size of government at all. Or… you fill in the blank. From the perspective of what the People want, or even the perspective of what the political parties say they want, the Fundraising Congress is misfiring in every dimension. That is either because Congress is filled with idiots or because Congress has a dependency on something other than principle or public policy sense. In my view, Congress is not filled with idiots.
It’ll be interesting to see where this meme goes. I do hope it takes root, especially among the right. If any group in American politics knows how to construct a coherent narrative that gets people all riled up and waving flags in solidarity, it’s the right/libertarians. USA! USA!
Call me cynical and a hyperventilator, but my guess is that people will continue to be distracted by fun, emotional and easy to contemplate divisive issues like abortion, gay rights, and socialist plots to destroy America with healthcare reform and the like. Until, that is, things get very bad and no one knows who to blame.
What will be most interesting to see is who shapes the inevitable populist rage and how it is channeled when ‘The Great Economic Meltdown of 2010/2011 Remix” happens (I’ve got my money on it happening).
Posted by WK 
