Quite A Week Of Legacy Bashing
It was quite a week in the annals of Legacy Bashing.
First, Edward Kennedy’s forty-year efforts to reform the health insurance industry appear to have come to naught with Scott Brown elected to fill his vacated Senate seat. And two days later, John McCain’s campaign finance laws go down in flames in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision (Citation: Citizens United over the Federal Election Commission (warning, PDF file) striking down spending limits on corporate and union electioneering in candidate elections.
A victory of the philosophical over the practical, the decision hands unionist and corporatist interests a literal blank check for further subverting democracy in America. With virtually unlimited budgets to influence public policy and persuade elected officials into doing their bidding, this ruling guarantees that Congress-members will spend an even bigger majority of their time in fundraising pursuits instead of causing mischief in the legislative chambers. SCOTUS has, in effect, turned K Street into the American electorate, and handed the likes of GE and NewsCorp the right to elect our leaders for us.
In spite of all the wailing and rending of garments, this may not be an entirely bad thing. After all, corporations and unions do represent their membership—unduly influenced though their labor force and shareholders may be by their management. Without the political clout of a powerful parent entity or family empire behind them, the chances of an individual American prospering on the strength their own efforts are hugely diminished—if for no other reason than from anti-competitive strategies employed against them by larger, better-established rivals. After all, these entities are de facto republics, ostensibly using their power of representation to bargain and fundraise on behalf of their shareholders and memberships; the ultimate expression of free market enterprise at its collectivist finest…er, oops.
And let’s face it, when 42% of Americans never buy and read another book after graduating from college, Winston Churchill’s famous dismissal, “All I need to know about democracy can be gleaned from one five-minute conversation with the average member of the electorate,” seems increasingly sage. Just consider how many voters (let alone candidates,) still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks, or could explain why there is a border between North and South Korea. In 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not levy a poll tax or literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting in state and local elections. Maybe this Supreme Court will want to reconsider those arguments as well?
To people who argue that markets allocate resources better than politics do, I would say that in America, markets are our politics. Markets determine policy—and who gets taxed to pay for what, (and in whose pockets those monies end up.) Wall Street, literally The Market, is in every sense of the word the driver of American policy, both foreign and domestic.
Markets determine social policy. The housing bubble did not come about out of a heightened sense altruism on the part of the credit lending or real estate industries. The American Dream (whatever that may once have meant,) was reconfigured by Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, to mean “owning” a house. Period. Clever manipulation of both credit markets and the mass media combined to pull off the biggest con game of all time; and legitimate issues groups like HBB are left essentially powerless in its wake. Even if every single reader of this blog pledged $10 a month to lobbying efforts, it wouldn’t even make a dent in what a concerted campaign by the NAR could counter—let alone one launched by a privately-held corporation like the Fed. Our best intentions and efforts to the contrary, we’ve all seen what Mozillo’s Money did to the standards and practices of the mortgage lending industry. Now Big Money is free to take over the rest of our public decisions for us too.
Markets determine who gets to make the laws. Mrs. Palin would never have been considered a realistic candidate for elected public office had she not been perceived by the Oiligarchs as an easily-manipulated stooge for the oil industry. Arnold Schwartzenegger would never have been elected to the governorship of California had he not made a pact with Kenny Lay and Michael Milken to drop Gray Davis’s federal lawsuit against Enron and its shadow energy subsidiaries once he reached office. Chris Dodd would never have come to chair the Senate Banking Committee without the explicit backing of the insurance and financial industries headquartered in his home state. Worse for issues groups, markets only tend to strengthen incumbencies. Money buys loyalty–just ask the aforementioned Senator Dodd.
But to some, this Supreme Court decision is a victory for free speech. Such smaller but outspoken issues organizations as Planned Parenthood and gay rights groups, the ACLU, and the NRA are corporations, too. They are now free to raise and spend as much money electing public officials as their supporters– limited only by their consciences and pocketbooks– care to donate. Buying and maintaining a legislator is a time-honored American tradition. Now in the time of internet fund-raising, it’s not outside the realm of possibility for an issues group in, say, Utah to purchase the services of a Congressman in North Dakota. Or an anti-civil rights amendment in California. Conversely, through a well-conducted national email campaign, a wine store in Maine can overturn an interstate ban on wine sales to Massachusetts. The sword cuts both ways.
But herein lies the essential problem. Although free speech is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, equal access to it is not. And equal campaign financing is definitely not. Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign raised over a half a billion dollars from PACs and private individuals– far exceeding the hundred million or so reportedly donated to John McCain. Although by exploiting loopholes in McCain’s own campaign finance reform law, the RNC was able to funnel additional hundreds of millions more to him, he was nonetheless at a disadvantage because he chose to accept his own government public financing option and forego the beneficence of The Market. Now that the RNC’s reserves have been drained in that failed effort and they need a way to replenish them, this SCOTUS ruling in favor of corporations should come as no huge surprise to anyone familiar with the politics behind the power.
Howard Dean’s health reform proposal and Ron Paul’s campaign against the Fed are classic examples of populist causes subsumed by corporate interests. Now that SCOTUS has given unions and corporations free rein to buy out private voices, it remains to be seen whether or not these voices will be stilled completely, or whether the wave of public outrage sweeping our nation will force a reexamination of the inner workings of our judiciary along with those our other national institutions.
It’s not unprecedented. If Congress has the will and the backing of the American people, Supreme Court rulings can indeed be overturned or circumvented. FDR’s 1937 attempts at “court packing” could be revisited. Or it’s possible that Congress could pass a Constitutional amendment overturning the SCOTUS “Prohibition” on campaign finance limitations. But neither of these options is likely, given the number of equally pressing and philosophically less challenging concerns already threatening to overwhelm our Country. With a dead economy, two un-winnable wars, the failed states of Haiti and Mexico at our doorstep, and a generation about to retire bankrupted, such frivolities as whether or not America remains a democratic republic seem almost superfluous.
But some good may yet come out of all of this. In a time of rampaging unemployment, particularly in the creative arts industries, those recent “communications” graduates we all take such delight in disparaging may find their career outlooks vastly improved with the billion$ that are sure to flow into the coffers of the production companies and advertising agencies who bring us the 2010 political season. Certainly pollsters and lobbyists will get a new $hot in the arm, and at least one enterprising politician is taking advantage of this controversy to make himself –or rather, his campaign—a pile o’ money. Congressman Alan Grayson, (D. FL.,) most recently of the successful House campaign to bring daylight into the shrouded inner chambers of the Fed, has already announced a petition and fundraising campaign to protest the ruling. Look for Elliot Spitzer to restart his political career on its coattails, and a host of hopefuls from the run-the-bums-out provinces to jump on the Reform Party bandwagon. Elizabeth Warren comes to mind, as do the rational wings of the Ron Paul Contingency and MoveOnHuffKos. Who knows, when enough “ordinary” Americans get sick of seeing “This Assembly brought to you by Verizon” plastered all over their State Houses, and “The Beer of Proposition 8″ imprinted on their brewskis, this might just be the one issue that finally unites our Country’s disparate politics in favor of a true American Democracy again.
by Allena Hansen
