by Bill Moyers and Bernard Weisberger
We might wish the uproar from the convention halls of both parties
these busy weeks were the wholesome clamor of delegates deliberating
serious visions of how we should be governed for the next four years. It
rises instead from scripted TV spectacles -- grown-ups doing
somersaults of make-believe -- that will once again distract the
public's attention from the death rattle of American democracy brought
on by an overdose of campaign cash.
No serious proposal to take the money out of politics, or even reduce
its tightening grip on the body politic, will emerge from Tampa or
Charlotte, so the sounds of celebration and merriment are merely prelude
to a funeral cortege for America as a shared experience. A radical
minority of the superrich has gained ascendency over politics, buying
the policies, laws, tax breaks, subsidies, and rules that consolidate a
permanent state of vast inequality by which they can further help
themselves to America's wealth and resources.
Their appetite for more is insatiable. As we write, Mitt Romney,
after two fundraisers in which he raised nearly $l0 million from the oil
and gas industry, and having duly consulted with the Oklahoma
billionaire energy executive who chairs the campaign's energy advisory
committee, has announced that if elected president he will end a century
of federal control over oil and gas drilling on public lands, leaving
such matters to local officials more attuned to industry desires.
Theodore Roosevelt, the first great advocate for public lands in the
White House, would be rolling in his grave, if Dick Cheney hadn't
already dumped his bones in a Wyoming mining shaft during the first
hours of the Bush-Halliburton administration.
We are nearing the culmination of a cunning and fanatical drive to
dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons,
and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that were slowly and
painstakingly built over decades to protect everyday citizens from the
excesses of private power. The "city on the hill" has become a fortress
of privilege, guarded by a hired political class and safely separated
from the economic pressures that are upending the household stability,
family dynamics, social mobility, and civic life of everyday Americans.
Socrates said to understand a thing, you must first name it. As in
Athens then, so in America now: The name for what's happening to our
political system is corruption -- a deep, systemic corruption.
How did we get here?
Let's begin with the judicial legerdemain of nine black-robed
magicians on the Supreme Court back in the l880s breathing life into an
artificial creation called "the corporation." An entity with no body,
soul, sense, or mortality was endowed with all the rights of a living,
breathing "person" under the Constitution. Closer to our own time, the
Supreme Court of 1976 in Buckley vs. Valeo gutted a fair
elections law passed by a Congress that could no longer ignore the
stench of Watergate. The Court ruled that wealthy individuals could
spend unlimited amounts of their own fortunes to get themselves elected
to office, and that anyone could pour dollars by the hundreds of
thousands into the war chests of political action committees to pay for
"issue ads," clearly favoring one side in a political race, so long as a
specific candidate or party was not named.
Money, the justices declared in another burst of invention, was simply a form of speech.
Then, just two years ago, the Roberts Court, in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission, removed any lingering doubts that the marvelous "persons" that corporations
had become could reach into their golden troughs to support their
candidates and causes through such supposedly "educational" devices as a
movie trashing Hillary Clinton.
Meaningful oversight of campaign expenditure, necessary if
representative government is to have a fair chance against rapacious
wealth, was swept away. Hail to a new era in which a modestly financed
candidate is at the mercy of nuclear strikes from television ads paid
for by a rich or corporate-backed opponent with an "equal right" to
"free speech." As one hard pressed Connecticut Republican, lagging
behind in a primary race against a billionaire opponent outspending him
twelve to one, put it: "I'm fighting someone with a machine gun and I've
got a pistol." When the votes were counted, even the pistol turned out
to be a peashooter.
A generation ago the veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew warned
against the rising tide of campaign money that would flood over the
gunwales of our ship of state and sink the entire vessel. Noah's Flood
was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the tidal wave that has
fulfilled Drew's prophecy. The re-election of every Member of Congress
today is now at the mercy of corporate barons and private princes who
can make or destroy a candidacy by giving to those who vote "right," or
lavishing funds on opponents of those who don't.
Writing the majority opinion for Citizens United, Justice Anthony
Kennedy would have us believe corruption only happens if cash passes
from one hand to another. But surely as he arrives at his chambers
across from Capitol Hill every morning, he must inhale the fetid air
rising from the cesspool that stretches from Congress to K Street -- and
know there's something rotten, beyond the naked eye, in how Washington
works.
Senator John McCain knows. Having been implicated in the Keating
Five scandal during the savings and loan debacle 30 years ago, he
repented and tried to clean up the game. To no avail. And now he describes
our elections as nothing less than "an influence-peddling scheme in
which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to
the highest bidder."
For the ultimate absurdity of money's role, we must look to another
group of happy billionaires, the corporate owners of the television
stations which reap handsome profits for selling the public's airwaves
to undisclosed buyers (also known as campaign contributors) who pollute
the political atmosphere with millions of dollars spent on toxic ads
designed to keep voters angry, dumb, or both. Every proposal is shot
down or undermined that would make it a duty for those stations to
devote free air time for public purposes in order to earn the licenses
that they treat as permits to get rich. In one of the great perversions
of the Constitution foisted on its subjects by their overlords, the
public airwaves where free speech should reign have become private
enclosures to which access must be bought. Free? It's about as free as
Tiffany pearls.
Money rules. And in the foul air democracy chokes and gasps, the
middle class falls behind, and the poor sink from sight as political
donations determine the course and speech of policies that could make
the difference in the lives of ordinary people struggling in a
dog-eat-dog world.
The Devil must grin at such a sorry state of affairs and at the
wicked Catch-22 at its core. To fight the power of private money, it is
first necessary to get elected. To get elected it is necessary to raise
astronomical amounts of private money from people who expect obedience
in return. "That's some catch," says Yossarian to Doc Daneeka, and Doc
agrees: "It's the best there is."
Where is the outrage at this corruption? Partly smoothed away with
the violence, banality, and tawdry fare served up by a corporate media
with every regard for the public's thirst for distractions and none for
its need to know. Sacrificed to the ethos of entertainment, political
news -- instead of getting us as close as possible to the verifiable
truth -- has been reduced to a pablum of so-called objective analysis
which gives equal time to polemicists spouting their party's talking
points.
As ProPublica journalists recently reported: "Someone who gives up to
$2,500 to the campaign of President Barack Obama or challenger Mitt
Romney will have his or her name, address and profession listed on the
FEC website for all to see. But that same person can give $1 million or
more to a social welfare group that buys ads supporting or attacking
those same candidates and stay anonymous." But when is the last time you
heard one of the millionaire anchors of the Sunday talk shows
aggressively pursue a beltway poobah demanding to learn about the
perfidious sources of the secret money that is poisoning our politics?
At our combined ages we've seen it all; hope no longer springs
eternal. We know the odds against reversing the hardening grip of the
monied interests are disheartening. Those interests are playing to win
the ferocious class war they launched 40 years ago with a strategy
devised by the corporate lawyer Lewis Powell (later a Supreme Court
justice) and a call to arms from the Wall Street wheeler-dealer William
Simon, who had been Richard Nixon's treasury secretary. Simon argued
that "funds generated by business" would have to "rush by multimillions"
into conservative causes in order to uproot the institutions and the
"heretical" morality of the New Deal. He called for an "alliance"
between right-wing ideologues and "men of action in the capitalist
world" to mount a "veritable crusade" against everything brought forth
by the long struggle for a progressive America. Business Week
noted at the time "that some people will obviously have to do with
less... It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea
of doing with less so that big business can have more."
This was not meant to be. America was not intended to be a winner-take-all country. Our system of checks and balances -- read The Federalist Papers
-- was to keep an equilibrium in how power works and for whom. Because
of the vast sums of money buying up our politics, those checks and
balances are fast disappearing and time is against us.
We are losing ground, but that's the time when, more than ever, we
need to glance back at the progressive crusades of a century ago to take
note of what has been forgotten, or rather what braying blowhards like
Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have been distorting or attempting to flush
down the memory hole. Robbing a nation of its historical memory is the
most devastating of all larcenies because it opens the door to far worse
crimes.
We have been here before. The two of us have collaborated in studying
the example of the populists and progressives who over a century ago
took on the financial and political corruptors. They faced heavy odds,
too -- a Supreme Court that exalted wealth as practically a sacred
right, the distortion by intellectual and religious leaders of the
theory of evolution to "prove" that the richest were the fittest to
rule, the crony capitalism of businessmen and politicians.
With government in the grip of such exploiters, child labor was a
fact of life, men and women were paid pittances for long hours of work
and left unprotected from industrial diseases and accidents, and workers
too old to be useful to employers any longer were abandoned to
starvation or the poorhouse. No model laws existed to protect them.
But these pioneers of progressivism were tough citizens, their political
courage fueled by moral conviction. They sensed, as the Kansas editor
William Allen White wrote, that their country had fallen into the hands
of self-seekers, their civilization needed recasting, and a new
relationship must be forged between haves and have-nots. When the two
major parties failed them they gave full throat to their discontent by
fighting from outside, and when Theodore Roosevelt's breakaway
Progressive Party held its organizing convention in l912 -- exactly one
hundred years ago -- they shook the rafters with "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic." Oh, for such defiance today!
From the fighters of that era came a renewal of the social contract
first set forth in the preamble of the Constitution -- the moral and
political notion of "We, the People." Equitable access to public
resources was its core, so that when the aristocrat De Tocqueville came
here from France in the l830s he marveled at the egalitarian spirit he
found in the new country. Public institutions, laws and regulation, as
well as the ideas, norms, and beliefs embedded in the American mythos
pointed to a future of prosperity open to all. That ideal survived the
fires of the civil war and then the hard, cold cruelties of the
industrial era and the First Gilded Age because people believed in and
fought for it. They neither scorned nor worshipped wealth but were
determined it would not rule.
It was on these foundations that the New Deal built the structure now
under attack, with the support of a Depression-stricken nation which
realized that we were all in it together -- as we were in the war against fascism that followed.
But in the succeeding fat years the nation forgot something -- the
words of the great progressive senator Robert LaFollette from Wisconsin:
"Democracy is a life and demands constant struggle." Constant
struggle. No victory can be taken for granted, no vigilance relaxed.
Like the Bourbon kings of France, the lords of unrestrained, amoral
capitalism never forgot anything. They learned from their defeat how to
organize new strategies and messages, furnish the money to back them,
and recapture control of the nation's life. And in the absence of
genuine, fight-to-the-finish resistance, they are winning big-time.
Think of where we are now. One party is scary and the other is
scared. The Tea Party, the religious right, and a host of billionaires
dominate the Republican Party. Secret money fills its coffers. And in
the primaries this year almost every Republican inclined to compromise
to make government work went down before radical and well-funded
opponents with a fundamental "anti-government" mindset.
Yet even now President Obama says he is sure the Republicans will be
willing to negotiate if he is re-elected. Sure, and the wolves will sit
down with the lamb.
Nor is that all. In Wisconsin, salvo after salvo of campaign cash for
union-busting Governor Scott Walker defeated the effort to recall him.
In Pennsylvania a hardline judge has given his approval to a voter ID
law specifically targeted to making it harder for low-income would-be
voters to register. And such laws are proliferating like runaway cancer
cells in state after state. The Tea Party and right-wing Christians
furnish the shock troops of these assaults, but those who could be
counted on for sturdy defense are not immune to the grinding pressures
of nonstop fundraising. Democratic incumbents and challengers, in
national and state canvasses likewise garner corporate contributions --
including President Obama, whose fundraising advantage is about to be
overtaken by Mitt Romney and the Deep Pockets to whom he is beholden.
And at both conventions the prime time show is merely window-dressing;
the real action occurs at countless private invitation-only parties
where CEOs, lobbyists, trade associations and donors literally cash in
their chips. Writing in the New York Times, for example,
Nicholas Confessore reports how The American Petroleum Institute will
entertain with a concert and panels, all the while promoting an agenda
that includes approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, opposition to new
transparency rules for American energy companies operating abroad, and
the expansion of oil production on those public lands Mitt Romney is
preparing to turn over to them.
Does this money really matter? Do owls and bats fly by night? Needed
reforms are dead on arrival on the floor of Senate and House. Banking
regulations with teeth? Mortgage relief? Non-starters when the banks'
lobbyists virtually own Washington and the President of the United
States tells Wall Street financiers he is all that stands between them
and the pitchforks of an angry mob. Action on global warming? Not while
the fossil fuel industries and corporate-back climate deniers have their
powerful say in the matter. Cutting bloated military expenditures?
Uh-uh, when it means facing a barrage of scare stories about weakening
our defenses against terrorism. Spend money on modernizing our rail
system or creating more public transportation in our auto-choked city
streets? What heavy artillery the auto, gasoline and highway
construction lobbies would rain down on any such proposal.
All of which would make a Progressive Rip Van Winkle shake his head
in disbelief and grind his teeth in fury. "Where is the passion we
shared for driving money from politics?" he would ask.
Where indeed? Not on the floor of either of these conventions. You are
unlikely to hear the name of Theodore Roosevelt praised by Republicans
or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by the Democrats, except in perfunctory
terms (It was FDR, after all, who said he feared government by money as
much as government by the mob.)
Each party will sing the obligatory hosannas to the middle class,
give the silent treatment to the working poor, and bellow forth the
platitudes of America's "spirit of enterprise and innovation" that will
restore our robust economy and world leadership. If the stagnant
recovery and sufferings of the unemployed and underemployed get any
mention, it will be to blame them on the other party. As for taking on
the predatory rich, forget it.
Our advice: Learn something from the emptiness of what you see and
hear -- and if it doesn't make you mad as hell and ready to fight back
against the Money Power, we are all in real trouble.
The journalist Bill Moyers and the historian Bernard A. Weisberger have collaborated on several television series, including A Walk Through the 20th Century and Report from Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention. They are now working on The Fighting Spirit: The People vs. The Gilded Age.
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