Buying an election
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
The great American humorist Will Rogers (1879 –1935) once quipped that “we have the best Congress money can buy.” I wish he could see us today. The malady that Rogers diagnosed so many decades ago was a mere mole on the body politic compared to the monster into which it has metastasized.
As Rogers celebrated quote implies, money has played an important and mostly nefarious role in American politics for a long time. Often the concentrated economic power of very narrow interest groups has found favor in the halls of Congress as a result of well-placed campaign contributions. It is not rare for the most socially destructive industries to have the most effective lobbies funneling campaign money to secure outcomes wholly at odds with the public interest. Thus the gun industry, represented by the National Rifle Association (NRA), and the tobacco industry (the products of the latter are responsible for an estimated 400,000 deaths a year in the United States alone) have for decades fielded among the most successful lobbying operations in Washington.
Nor have the activities of these industries been carried out with any level of discretion. Indeed, in 1995 then-GOP Conference Chairman John Boehner — the man who will become Speaker next year if the Republicans take control of the House — shamelessly passed out checks on the floor of the House to fellow Republicans. The checks were from the political action committee of the tobacco company Brown & Williamson Corp.
Nor has the influence of campaign money been restricted to domestic policy. It is common knowledge that the hard-line pro-Israel and anti-Castro lobbies, for decades and to this day, have exerted enormous influence on U.S. foreign policy. These lobbies have inflicted incalculable harm to the prospects for Middle East peace and the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations.
And, until now, we have not seen anything yet. This is the year that the power of money is being allowed to exert its maximum influence on U.S. politics thanks to a Supreme Court loaded with pro-corporate justices appointed by George W. Bush. In January, in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court gave the power of money one of its greatest victories ever. In a 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court threw decades of precedent that prohibited corporations, associations, and labor unions from giving money to influence elections.
The Citizens ruling opened the floodgates for corporations to contribute tens of millions of dollars to campaigns. This money, which has benefitted Republicans over Democrats by 7-1, is being funneled through established organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as newly-minted Republican front groups created expressly for this purpose. Among these are former top Bush adviser Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS.
Although under the new rules corporations could fund campaign commercials directly, the advantage of using a third party is that it insulates the corporations from repercussions, such as protests or consumer boycotts. For the corporations, the beauty of this arrangement is that the organizations to which they give their political cash do not have to disclose to the public the identity of their contributors. Thus the corporations not only get to try to buy elections, they get to do it without the voter ever knowing who is doing the buying.
The role of money in this election has a secondary source beside the Supreme Court decision: the extreme concentration of individual wealth that has taken place during the last two decades. The upsurge of a miniscule but fabulously wealthy sector of the population makes it possible for a candidate like Meg Whitman, running for Governor of California on the Republican ticket, to spend more than $140 million of her own fortune to try to buy the election. Whitman is only one of many candidates with no political experience but high net worth who have been trying to parlay their personal fortune into political office. The success of Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire New York City Mayor, is being emulated by many a candidate, some of which will find that money alone won’t always win an election. Even Donald Trump, the New York developer and megalomaniac, has been floating the idea of running for president in 2012.
The 2010 and 2012 elections will provide the first tests of the extent to which American democracy can survive the onslaught of plutocracy unleashed by the Supreme Court and two decades of top-down class war.
