The price of democracy
By David Brooks
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
Welcome to the land of "one dollar, one vote," as described by one of the banners of those who protest against the "purchase of democracy" by businesses and the wealthy. As the election year begins in the United States, a very special green smell can be detected: here, the "democratic" process reeks of money.
A recent sampler of this scent:
• The debate a couple of days ago on CNN among Republican candidates was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, the association of U.S. oil companies.
• Barack Obama announced that he will accept his party’s nomination in a stadium named after the Bank of America.
• Candidate Mitt Romney stashed millions of his fortune in a tax haven to avoid contributing to the treasury of his country.
• A Supreme Court decision has unleashed what one analyst called "a tsunami of private money into the electoral process."
Predictions say that this will be the most expensive election in history, costing perhaps more than one billion dollars. But this "democratic" round has something new that explicitly proves that the elections here are more about dollars than votes.
Just three years ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission in which it granted businesses and rich people the right to invest unlimited amounts to influence the electoral process by determining that companies are "persons" and therefore have the individual right to "free speech".
Although strict limits are maintained on how much people can donate to the campaigns of individual candidates, there is no limit on expenditures to promote or attack other candidates, as long as that is not made in coordination with a specific campaign.
The effects of this ruling were seen immediately in the legislative and state elections of 2010, when, under the ruling of the Supreme Court, new entities appeared called super political action committees (Super PACs), which serve to channel those unlimited funds, especially for political advertising.
According to the Sunlight Foundation, the Super PACs spent a total of $455 million. The source of 126 of those millions has never been disclosed, because Congress has not passed a law that requires reporting the origin of such contributions to the Super PACs.
These amounts are expected to be much higher in the 2012 presidential election. The Super PACs have already spent almost $30 million (the election is in November).
The Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan research center dedicated to tracking this issue, conducted an investigation of the main donors to the federal electoral process through their contributions to campaigns, parties, PACs and other groups.
In 2010, Sunlight found that fewer than 27,000 individuals, a very small group, each contributed at least $10,000, for a total of $ 774 million. "When it comes to politics, these are the 1 percent of 1 percent," reported Sunlight.
"I think that what you see in the political funding system is the unequal and unprecedented access of rich and influential people to the decision makers in government. They’re the ones who make large campaign contributions … They determine who is running for what office and who wins, what Congress does," said Ellen Miller, of the Sunlight Foundation, in an interview with Bill Moyers in his program “Moyers & Company.”
The executives and investors who make up this "1 percent of 1 percent" in the financing of politics are linked with a small number of companies. In 2010, of the top 10 companies, six were in the financial sector, led by Goldman Sachs executives, followed by Citigroup execs.
Other companies whose "employees" are part of this group of donors are Microsoft, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, American International Group and Bear Stearns.
This "purchase" of the political process through resources furnished to lobby, to contribute to campaigns and political propaganda wars in the mainstream media by companies, executives, lawyers and lobbyists of the wealthiest sectors in this country has always existed, but has become even more pronounced and even explicit in recent decades, and, with the 2010 Supreme Court decision, now reaches obscene levels.
Even the former head of Ronald Reagan’s federal budget office, David Stockman, warns that today in the U.S. "we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism."
The population rejects all this. Several surveys have reported that most citizens believe that the federal government does not represent their interests and share their concerns, and that there is too much private money in elections.
There are protests around the country on this matter, which have multiplied in recent months by the Occupy Wall Street movement, which repudiates what it calls "the hijacking of democracy by the 1 percent," and, in its demonstrations, mocks the system with banners saying "I have no money to hire a lobbyist, all I have is this banner."
None of this is new, of course. "We have the best Congress money can buy," said humorist Will Rogers more than 70 years ago. The musician Frank Zappa said a couple of decades ago that "politics is the entertainment branch of industry." Comedian George Carlin may have summed it all up when he said that "the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
But maybe this time, because the situation is so extreme and obscene, there will be an awakening. Meanwhile, this democracy pauses to deliver another message from its corporate sponsors. There’s a saying basic to every journalist, detective, and anyone who wishes to discover the mysteries of power – it goes: follow the money.
