Few demos, many dollars
By David Brooks
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
NEW YORK – While in the cradle of democracy the demos [the people] went to the polls last Sunday [June 17] to determine Greece’s immediate fate; while the democratic attempt in Egypt was being debated with anger and pain, and while demos in Mexico, Chile, Canada and Spain forge democracy on the streets, in the self-proclaimed “model of democracy” American politicians are doing everything they can to void, corrupt, distort and buy the electoral process.
The most spectacular assault on the democratic process in the United States is being waged by big money. The fact that money has more influence on elections than citizens is not new, but the attempt to buy the presidential and legislative elections this year is so barefaced that few people remember anything like it.
No doubt, they will be the most expensive elections in the nation’s history – perhaps in any other nation’s history. They increasingly resemble a spectacle called “democracy,” where the multimillionaires will determine the future and control a script where millions of citizens are summoned to participate only as supporting actors.
The question going around is whether a few mega rich will manage to buy this election. This federal election will be the first one being played under less-than-strict rules on political campaign financing. That was the result of a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that allowed the invention of a mechanism known as the Super PAC (political action committee), which allows rich people, companies or groups to spend unlimited funds for electoral purposes, so long as they operate “independently” from the official campaigns. All this is done under the excuse of “freedom of expression.”
According to the Center for Public Integrity, 80 percent of the funds collected by the PACs come from only 100 donors (3.7 percent of the total). Worse yet, the 46 biggest donors have so far donated $112 million to the PACs, all with a minimal donation of $500,000.
This select club is formed mostly by mega rich individuals, almost all of them male and white, mostly from the sectors of finance, energy, hotels or casinos. Most of the contributions have been made to conservative PACs, which are favoring the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, though they’re also giving smaller amounts to Barack Obama.
It should be noted that some of these big donors, individuals, businesses or groups are bipartisan. For example, JP Morgan executives gave millions both to Obama and his opponent, John McCain, in the 2008 election and are doing the same today, both in the presidential and legislative races.
The members of the Senate Banking Committee have received a total of $13 million in donations from the financial sector in past years. Its chairman, a Democrat, has benefited the most from JP Morgan’s largesse. Banking Committee members are the public’s representatives in matters concerning the financial sector, but it is fairly clear to see whose interests they truly represent.
In fact, these politicians have repaid the magnates’ generosity by deregulating the financial sector, a move that led to the current crisis. The more intelligent moneybags bet on both horses so they can win, no matter which candidate wins at the polls. Almost always, the candidates have to be approved by the wealthy even before an election begins.
Historian Thomas Frank, interviewed by the great journalist Bill Moyers, stated that “the connection between private wealth and public power and the force of government has never been clearer.” He pointed out that millions of dollars are required to run for the Senate or the House and when those are the prices to occupy a legislative seat, it is the multimillionaires who decide who can win and who can’t.
“The choices have already been made for us” before any election, Frank says. The rich “have chosen two candidates who have made it through the money primary and that’s who we get to take our pick from.”
Paul Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center told CNN Money that “the U.S. elections are financed by a very reduced number of special interests and that makes our democracy look a lot more like a plutocracy.”
Historian Thomas Frank wrote not long ago in Harper’s Magazine that “the world belongs to the rich. Over the course of the past few decades, the power of concentrated money has subverted the professions, destroyed small investors, wrecked the regulatory state, corrupted legislators en masse, and repeatedly put the economy through the wringer. Now it has come for our democracy itself.”
Meanwhile, there are at least three different attempts promoted by Rick Scott, Florida’s governor, and his conservative allies who, under the pretext of combating potential fraud at the polls (for example, by immigrants, who are always the suspects), have the explicit purpose of suppressing the vote of Afro-American and Latino communities (with the exception of the Cuban community) and others who oppose the Republicans.
The rate of fraud is so small – 0.0004 percent – that Scott’s move is obvious: reduce the suffrage of thousands of voters.
Watching all this here, while reading the news of the fury and joy of movements by democracy in so many countries (with all their particular distortions, defeats, outbursts of violence, etc.) offers a contrast and a condemnation of the American process.
But that does not seem to shame the U.S. government enough, as it continues to call itself the democratic example to be followed by the whole world. In the United States, the Athenian gift has turned into a Greek tragedy.
