What's that, Justice Alito? Not true, you say?
Ask Alan Grayson about this. Until his recent defeat, he had been a member of Congress. Here's how he sized up our predicament: "We're now in a situation where a lobbyist can walk into my office and say, "I've got five million dollars to spend and I can spend it for you or I can spend it against you. Which do you prefer?" Now recall Karl Rove's slush funds, including American Crossroads. Alito was either disingenuous, naà ¯ve, or deluded. He can't be in this world without knowing that he and his four fellow corporatists were giving big donors the one thing they most want in their campaign against working people: an unfair advantage.
Come with me and let's visit Washington's red light district
I refer, of course, to the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the front group for the plutocracy's prostitution of politics. The Chamber boasts that it represents more than three million businesses and approximately 300,000 members. But in reality it has almost nothing to do with the shops and stores along your local streets. The Chamber's branding allows them to disguise their political agenda as a coalition of local businesses . . while it does dirty work for corporate titans. When the Supreme Court came down with its infamous ruling earlier this year, the Chamber responded by announcing a 40% boost in its political spending operations. After the money started flowing in, the Chamber boosted its budget again, this time by 50%.
After digging into corporate foundation tax filings and other public records, the New York Times found that the Chamber of Commerce has "increasingly relied on a relatively small collection of big corporate donors" -- the plutocracy's senior ranks -- "to finance much of its legislative and political agenda." Furthermore, the chamber "makes no apologies for its policy of not identifying its donors." Indeed, "It has vigorously opposed legislation in Congress that would require groups like it to identify their biggest contributors when they spend money on campaign ads."
Now let's connect the dots
While knocking down nearly all limits on corporate spending in campaigns, the Supreme Court did allow for disclosure, which would at least tell us who's buying off the government. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell even claimed that "sunshine" laws would make everything okay. But after the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed, McConnell turned around and lined up every Republican in the Senate to oppose it. Hardly had the public begun to sing "Let the Sunshine In" than McConnell & Company went tone deaf. And when the chief lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce was asked by an interviewer, "Are you guys eventually going to disclose?", the answer was a brisk "No." Why no? Because those corporations are afraid of a public backlash. Like bank robbers pulling a heist, they prefer to hide their "personhood" behind sock masks. Surely that tells us something about the nature of what they're doing. In the words of one of the characters in Tom Stoppard's play Night and Day: "People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in places where everything is kept in the dark."
That's true in politics, too. Thus it turns out that many of the ads being paid for secretly by anonymous donors are "false, grossly misleading, or marred with distortions," as Greg Sargent reports in his website "The Plum Line." Go to Sargent's site and you'll see a partial list of ads that illustrate the scope of the intellectual and political fraud being perpetrated right in front of our eyes. In a nutshell, money from secret sources is poisoning the public mind with toxic lies in order to dupe voters into giving even more power to the powerful.
On another site -- "thinkprogress.com" -- you can find out how the multibillionaire Koch brothers -- also big oil polluters and Tea Party supporters -- are recruiting "captains of industry" to fund the right-wing infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. Now, hold on to your seats, because this can blow away the faint-hearted: Among the right-wing luminaries who showed up among Koch's "secretive network of Republican donors' are two Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. That's right: 2 of the 5 votes to enable the final corporate takeover of government came from justices who were present as members of the plutocracy hatched their schemes for doing so!
Something else is going on here, too. The Koch brothers have contributed significantly to efforts to stop the Affordable Care Act -- the health care reforms -- from taking effect. Justice Clarence Thomas has obviously been doing some home schooling, because his wife Virginia claims those reforms are "unconstitutional," and has founded an organization that is fighting to repeal them! Her own husband on the Supreme Court may one day be ruling on whether she's right or not. But there's more. The organization Virginia Thomas founded to kill those health care reforms -- also a goal of the Koch brothers, remember -- got its start with a gift of half a million dollars from an unnamed source, and is still being funded by donors who can't be traced. So you have to wonder if some of them are corporations that stand to benefit from favorable decisions by the Supreme Court. Inevitable conclusion: all three branches of our government are now owned, lock stock and barrel, by big corporations and the financial elite. While the vast majority of American voters and citizens were asleep at the wheel, they converted our democracy into a plutocracy, or plutonomy as they now proudly refer it.
Time to close the circle
Everyone knows millions of Americans are in trouble. As Robert Reich recently summed up the state of working people: They've lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings. Their grown children have moved back in with them. Their state and local taxes are rising. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling; gas pipelines are leaking and even breaking, setting fire to their neighborhoods; schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.
So why isn't government working for most Americans? To reiterate the obvious, it's been bought off. It's as simple as that. And unless we somehow manage to get clean money into elections, we're not going to get clean elections; and until we get clean elections, you can kiss goodbye government of, by, and for the people. If so, welcome to plutocracy.
The Supreme Court was lost long ago, so don't go there looking for justice. As Howard Zinn reminded us, "The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than l2 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, and defy the law, the courts, the police, and then create a great movement. That's what won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel and violate the law in order to get justice."
So what are we to do about Big Money in politics buying off democracy? I can almost hear Howard throwing that question back at us: "What are we to do? ORGANIZE! Yes, organize -- and don't count the costs." And some people already are. They're mobilizing. There's a rumbling in the land. All across the political spectrum, a good many people oppose the escalating power of money in politics. Fed-up Democrats. Disillusioned Republicans. Independents. Greens. Even Tea Partiers, once they wake up to realize they have been played for fools by their off-scene bankrollers, who have no intention of ever sharing the wealth they are cleverly, methodically and surreptitiously stealing from the rest of us.
Veteran public interest groups like Common Cause and Public Citizen are aroused. There are the rising voices, from web-based initiatives such as http://freespeechforpeople.org to grassroots initiatives such as "Democracy Matters" on campuses across the country, including a chapter here at Boston University. Then too, http://MoveOn.org is looking for a million people to fight back in a many-pronged strategy to counter the Supreme Court decision.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
18
14
8
