Big Money is the tsunami of cash pouring into political campaigns since Citizens United opened the floodgates. It flows from the "One Percenters" rewarded so handsomely by today's status quo: the nation's corporate interests and our wealthiest citizens. Their lavish campaign contributions enable them to dominate elections and to tilt public policy toward their interests alone. This is a travesty of democracy, and to maintain their privilege the donors of Big Money will seek the destruction of any threat to it.
The Green New Deal is such a threat, a mortal threat: it promises a brighter future for the rest of the American people, the other 99%.
Big Money's leverage derives from the stratospheric costs of political campaigns. If Congress could limit those costs somehow to a tiny fraction of what they are today, then Big Money would be rendered superfluous and the One Percenters irrelevant.
Congress is not inexperienced in doing this. In a similar political environment more than a century ago it enacted a pair of campaign finance reform laws that did so, one passed in 1907 and another in 1910.
Both laws were repealed six decades later, unfortunately, marking the first stroke in fifty years of savage attacks on American democracy. (The coup de grace was Citizens United.)
Taken whole the Green New Deal seeks to repair the damage. It will reclaim the earlier, humane, more equitable political economy of the mid-20th century, when abundant well-paying jobs provided families with decent housing, wholesome food on the table, and affordable healthcare. When public services, facilities, and infrastructure were well funded, well maintained, abundant. When you could work your way through college. When "welfare" was not ridiculed, but meant compassionate care for the disadvantaged. When a Republican president built the Interstate highways; when his Democratic successor sent us to the moon. Not perfect, not totally free of injustice, but this was a vibrant democracy: before those two campaign-reform laws were repealed in 1971; before Ronald Reagan killed anti-trust enforcement with purposeful neglect, and installed deregulation, privatization, and rancid neoliberalism as Washington's governing memes; before he and his successor George H.W. Bush tripled the national debt in 12 years, slashing taxes and flooding the military with borrowed money; before Bill and Hillary Clinton abandoned the traditional Democratic voters, selling out the party to Wall Street greed and triggering the Great Recession; before George W. Bush took us into the disastrous wars of imperialism we are fighting still; before Barack Obama granted sub rosa pardons to criminal Wall Street executives and shoveled billions of taxpayer dollars back into their banks; before Citizens United; before William and David Koch took up seriously the financing of political campaigns [i] , and before the crypto-facism of the Trump Administration.
Five decades of body blows. The Green New Deal has much to repair and recover.
The Green New Deal is a project of the Sunrise Movement. Addressing climate change as the umbrella issue, it is a comprehensive unyielding demand for justice- social, racial, environmental, political, and economic justice.
Full-spectrum justice is absent when a government favors the rich and the corporate. The Green New Deal stands opposed to this: the fossil fuel corporations, for starters, will be forced to yield to the well being of all the American people. Other industries, too: the healthcare and banking sectors impose great injustices today, and so does the exorbitant cost of higher education. So does a racially-biased criminal justice system poisoned with profit seeking. So does the Department of Defense, squandering half the discretionary budget. And so forth.
The Green New Deal was introduced as House Resolution 109 on February 7, 2019, by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and 90 co-sponsors, and later in the Senate as Resolution 59 by Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, with 11 co-sponsors.
It is a call to a revolution already simmering in the country. Street demonstrations nationwide clamor for justice in many forms; an American replica of YellowVests emerges; a bill for universal healthcare is introduced with wide support; the social media are alive with messages of resistance; and HR 1 sails through the House, vastly expanding voting rights. [ii] Green New Deal cosponsors represent more than half the states of the union, and six in the Senate are presidential candidates for 2020: Senators Sanders, Gillibrand, Harris, Warren, Booker, and Klobuchar.
Every member of the U.S. Congress today, and every aspirant, is handicapped by an intractable obstacle, the exorbitant expense of election campaigning-now in the millions. They are virtually forced to rely on the One Percenters, the most able and willing sources of so much money.
The self-serving policy preferences of the One Percenters are never obscure and rarely compromised: legislation is no longer crafted primarily to serve the public interest, but to create, enhance, or protect the welfare of its richest and corporate citizens. We live in a shattered democracy.
Those who watch and care see oligarchy: governance by and for the few. Former President Jimmy Carter was interviewed by Thom Hartman:
HARTMANN: Our Supreme Court has now said, "unlimited money in politics." It seems like a violation of principles of democracy. " Your thoughts on that?
CARTER: It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we've just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election's over. " The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. [iii]
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