34. Yes, We’re Rome (II)

I went to the beach this weekend, and when I wasn’t watching the grandchildren gambol in the waves, I read a little Cicero.  He was a character – a vain, pushy, windbag attorney who lived at the exact moment of the demise of the Roman Republic, just prior to its transformation into a despotic Empire.  He knew the Republic was in trouble, and rather ineffectually tried to do something about it, losing his life in the process.  So, he’s very relevant to my current topic:  the looming downfall of American democracy.  Some of his best speeches are the ones he made when the fight was already hopeless, which is kind of how I feel about this blog.

Concentration of wealth is the first step in the process of converting a democracy into an oligarchy, and last Monday’s post noted how far that’s progressed in the United States.  It turns out that a rather small number of super-rich individuals have come to control a significant, and growing, portion of our country’s wealth.  Today, I’m going to explain why – despite a century’s worth of federal laws designed to limit the influence of money in our elections – these gazillionaires are today perfectly free to combine all of that financial power for purposes of political control.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to give you the full story.  It’s not especially uplifting, but the legalistic cleverness and rank hypocrisy on display render it a darkly amusing tale.  I’ll hit the high points.

Early in the twentieth century, Congress perceived the growing economic power of the corporate sector.  It seemed inappropriate and dangerous for corporate boards of directors to use what is legally the property of the shareholders to sway the electoral process.  So, in 1907, Congress passed the Tillman Act, which made corporate campaign contributions illegal in federal elections.

Later, attention shifted from corporations to wealthy individuals – “fat cats.”  In 1974 and again in 2002, Congress enacted reform measures putting limits on individual contributions – originally $1,000, now about $2,700 – and requiring that all donations of $100 or more be reported.  The 2002 law also contained provisions designed to eliminate or regulate certain abuses – primarily “soft money” and “issue ads” – that had arisen as ways of getting around the 1974 law.

The United States Supreme Court, in a prolonged fit of right-wing activism, has rendered all this regulation null and void, by essentially equating campaign spending with free speech.  The process began with a ruling – Buckley vs. Valeo (1976) – throwing out the contribution limits with regard to self-financing candidates and funds spent for a candidate independently of the candidate’s official campaign.  As a result of this decision, the parties nowadays actively recruit fat cats to run for office, since they can finance themselves, and most of the spending in our campaigns is done independently of the candidates, to get around the limits – which have been effectively negated.

Another decision – Wisconsin Right to Life vs. Federal Election Commission (2007) – basically shredded the reporting requirements, by disallowing the attempt to regulate issue ads.  Without going into detail, issue ads are a dodge whereby a political ad can pretend not to be political, so the folks running the ad can avoid reporting the source of their funds.  This is known as “dark money.”  SCOTUS says it’s OK.

Finally, worst of all, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010) struck down the century-old Tillman Act prohibiting corporate contributions – presumably on the theory that corporations, like other “people,” have the right to buy elections.  If any of my readers were reassured to learn from the last post that the 400 richest Americans own “only” one to two percent of our country, they should remember that the eighteen largest US corporations added together account for 36 (!) percent of US wealth, and that the CEOs of these organizations – Microsoft, Google, Coca-Cola, and the like – can now collude and secretly funnel as much as they desire of their extensive resources into any political race.

If that doesn’t disturb you, you’re imperturbable, and not in a good way.

James Madison put it very succinctly, in Federalist #10 – “the smaller the number of individuals … and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.”  In the United States, the distributive results of Reaganomics – the rich have gotten richer – have combined with a perverse reading of the First Amendment by the US Supreme Court, to create a state of affairs in which a tiny plutocratic elite is almost invited to connive and take control of our political system.  We Americans have never liked concentrated power, but money is power, and we now face a concentration of power in the private sector of our country, that we would never allow in the workings of the government.

I’ll add one last bit of trivia:  the legalistic ruses that undermined the efforts to control campaign spending largely had their origin in Democratic machinations of the 1990s, when the Clinton-era Democratic Party colluded with Republicans to induce the federal regulators to allow soft money – the parent of many later abuses.  This is yet one more thing, along with overflowing prisons and a bungled Presidential campaign that gave us the Don, for which we have the Clintons to thank.

Blessed be.

# # #

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