Dollarocracy (13 page)

The entire process has made a mockery of the justice system. As retired U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor put it, “When you enter one of these courtrooms, the last thing you want to worry about is whether the judge is more accountable to a campaign contributor or an ideological group than to the law.”
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“Every litigant,” said the CAP's Billy Corriher, “is supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law. But this principle is less true with each passing judicial election.”
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Indeed, a new Justice at Stake survey finds that 76 percent of Americans believe campaign contributions have at least some impact on the decisions made by justices and judges in their courtrooms.
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So much for the integrity of the bench.

Of course, this is exactly as might be expected under Dollarocracy. And, notably, it is in the judicial competition that the promise of Dollarocracy is being realized for corporate donors—far more rapidly and far more clearly than in contests for top-of-the-ballot partisan posts or referendum votes. In a number of states, once the moneyed interests control the High Court, increasingly no one even makes a serious attempt to challenge their dominance. In Alabama in 2012, for instance, the Democrats fielded a candidate in only one of the five open Supreme Court races. Just the threat of money is sufficient to keep challengers at bay.
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Maybe this is how Dollarocracy solves the problem of too much money in elections: just stop having meaningful and competitive elections.

Arguably, the dominant meme among the pundits in the weeks following the 2012 election was that Big Money lost and Adelson was the biggest loser of them all. Along with his wife, the twelfth richest man in the world, and the seventh richest in the United States, poured tens of millions into helping Newt Gingrich get beat in the Republican primaries; then he poured tens of millions,
and tens of millions and tens of millions more, into helping Mitt Romney get beat in the November election. They spent tens of millions more, directly and indirectly, to influence U.S. House and Senate contests. Major publications and Web sites took a certain glee in noting, as
Politico
did in December 2012, that “Adelson's massive amounts of cash largely went toward supporting candidates who lost.”
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“Sheldon Adelson Had a Bad Night,” read the
Salon
headline on the morning after the November 6 election. But Adelson, media outlets noted with the fascination reserved for coverage of the emotional state of the rich and famous, did not seem all that upset. Perhaps because, while he might not have been winning high-profile races, he was winning contests for “causes close to Adelson's heart”—and his pocketbook.
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In Michigan, the heartland of the United Auto Workers union and a key base of strength for unions nationally, organized labor sought to protect collective bargaining rights with a constitutional amendment. Antiunion interest from across the country rushed in to defeat the referendum, knowing that its success might create a model for prounion ballot initiatives across the country. Adelson and his wife wrote some of the biggest checks, and they were not just “interested observers.” Just weeks before the Michigan vote, the Adelsons poured $2 million into the coffers of Protecting Michigan Taxpayers, one of several shadowy groups that flooded Michigan airwaves with ads that, literally, sought to suggest that collective bargaining guarantees would make it impossible to remove child molesters from schools.
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It was an antiunion fantasy, but Adelson has few passions to rival his antilabor stance. His Venetian hotel is the Las Vegas Strip's only hotel-casino that is not unionized. The billionaire says he started backing the Republican Party in the 1990s because it was more consistently antiunion. And union activists like Yvanna Cancela, the spokeswoman for the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas, know that. For all the speculation about Adelson's motivations for donating huge amounts of money in 2012, the casino king's disdain for organized labor still topped the list. “It is a shame that we have a political system that allows for one person to essentially buy elections,” said Cancela after the election. But wait . . . didn't all the headlines say Adelson lost?
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Well, he won in Michigan. The measure that would have provided a clear constitutional protection for collective bargaining rights was defeated.
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The
New York Times
headline two days after the election read, “In Michigan, a Setback for Unions.” It was also an opening for those “causes close to Adelson's heart.”
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Barely a month after the voting was done, the Michigan legislature passed so-called right-to-work legislation, the most virulent of all antilabor initiatives. In one week, basic protections for all workers were dramatically weakened and the ability of billionaires like Sheldon Adelson to rake in ever-greater profits with the prospect of paying lower wages and benefits to employees was increased.
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And crushing labor is a twofer, because as unions decline in power, so does their ability to pry the Democrats away from dollarcrat policies, not to mention win elections for them.

This is the best way to understand the role that Big Money plays in our politics in the emerging Dollarocracy. The Money Power may win or lose a race, even an election year. But its authority is not conveyed via an election result. Its authority comes from its permanent presence. The Money Power is constant and, ultimately, definitional. Its purpose is not just to prevail on a particular election day. Its purpose is to create a politics where temporary setbacks are just that: temporary. It is their permanence that gives the biggest spenders their power. Adelson knows this. Maybe 2012 wasn't all that great an election year for him. But it finished with a great big win on one of his most vital issues in a key state, and that win set the stage for new fights filled with promise for Adelson. After all, if the unions that played such a critical role in thwarting Adelson's ambitions in 2012 could be beaten down in Michigan, the heartland of the labor movement, how hard will it be to beat them down in Nevada, the heartland of Sheldon Adelson's empire? And if the ability of unions to function as effective political forces can be undermined in enough states, then Adelson's election year “investments” will go a whole lot further.

Maybe that's why Sheldon Adelson was smiling when he jetted into Washington a few weeks after the 2012 election in which he was supposedly the biggest loser. Adelson met with congressional leaders and power players. He was startlingly blunt about why the doors opened for him. “Mr. Adelson, 79 years old, said he has many friends in Washington,” wrote the
Wall Street Journal
, which quoted the billionaire as saying, “but the reasons aren't my good looks and charm. It's my ‘pocket personality.'” He was, explained the
Journal
, “referring to his donations.” And Adelson had a message for those who might have thought he was rethinking his political investment strategies:
“Mr. Adelson's 2012 donations were double what he spent in 2008, and looking ahead, he said, he was ready to again ‘double' his donations,” reported the
Journal
. “‘I'll spend that much and more,' he said in his first extensive post-election interview. ‘Let's cut any ambiguity.'”
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It's cut.

Big donors like Sheldon Adelson were just getting started in 2012. And for every showman like Adelson, there are hundreds of other billionaires, centimillionaires, and CEOs waiting in the wings who prefer anonymity but, like Adelson, demand results. With the institutions, professionals, and PACs they bankroll, they will be back. With more money. And better strategies. “Independent groups have cemented their status as permanent fixtures in the political firmament,” noted the
Los Angeles Times
. “The center of the strategic universe has shifted from parties to the PACs,” said former George W. Bush strategist Mark McKinnon in the same
LA Times
article.
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In fact, they never left. Issue advertising is projected to hit $2 billion in 2013, almost double the figure for 2009.
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The megafunders and their PACs are already chomping at the bit about the 2014 election, as it is a midterm with a much lower turnout, especially among traditionally antidollarcrat voters. “A lot of these groups may have much better impact on the money spent on the House and Senate,” just as they did when they dominated the 2010 election, said Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation.
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“Once seasonal affairs, campaigns from the presidential race down to the House contests are becoming longer and more intense,” said Confessore, “driven by deep-pocketed donors eager to see incumbents pummeled throughout the political cycle.”
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In short, thanks to Big Money, says Elizabeth Wilner, “we are in the era of the permanent campaign.”
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The “investors” bankrolling permanent campaigns don't worry about silly notions like “throwing good money after bad.” For them, political investments come from the petty-cash drawer. What does $150 million mean to Adelson, a man with a net worth of $20.5 billion?
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If Sheldon Adelson donated $10 million to political campaigns
every single day
from January 1, 2013, until Election Day, November 1, 2016, he would wake up on November 2, 2016, with a net worth of $6.6 billion and still be among the 50 or 60 richest people
in the United States. Hell, Adelson could spend $150 million on politics—his epic contribution total for 2011–2012—every single day for four months and still be a billionaire twice over and one of the 250 wealthiest persons in America. The Koch brothers could spend $150 million on political campaigns
every single day for a full year
, and each of them would still remain among the 120 richest Americans.
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Their heirs and their heirs' heirs and on and on would still have lives of unimaginable leisure. But that won't happen, because if Adelson and the Koch brothers spend money, it will have the effect of increasing their net worths; that is the whole point. This is the problem with how so much of the media covered the explosion of campaign spending in 2012. There was the assumption, writ large across the reporting, that millionaires and billionaires were desperately spending their fortunes down in order to “buy” an election. That's silly. A David Koch, a Dick DeVos, a Sheldon Adelson does not spend until it hurts on politics. They're making investments, not high-end consumer purchases, and those investments are small in the scheme of things.

They are smaller still for what big banks or insurance or agribusiness or energy interests can get on their relatively small “investments”; hence the risk is well worth it. For decades, scholars have posited that campaign spending by big business and the wealthy was actually quite low in view of the immense returns they could gain by writing laws, tax codes, and regulations and having access to the government trough.
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Now corporations and the billionaires who own them have been set free. They have no romantic illusions about politics. When they write checks, they are putting their money into a business enterprise, run increasingly by a money-and-media election complex that they are perfecting. Adelson admitted as much after the election when he acknowledged that he was in favor of “socialized medicine,” abortion rights, stem-cell research, and the welcoming of immigrants to America. “Look, I'm basically a social liberal,” explained the billionaire, as he ticked off the list of issues on which he disagreed with the party and the candidates he lavishly funded in 2012. Yet the billionaire dismissed any suggestion that he might be in the wrong party. He is, he said, a political pragmatist. “Look, nobody agrees with 100 percent of their planks,” he remarked of the GOP platform. What he's interested in, what so many big donors are interested in, is a politics that serves their business interests. And they can buy it.

Like other members of the American 1 percent who have over the past fifty years seen their personal wealth grow to 288 times the personal wealth of the median American household, simply maintaining the status quo is a pretty good deal. And for the superrich, there's even more at stake. In Adelson's case, there was, as
Politico
noted, the matter of “self-defense”: “Adelson's Las Vegas Sands Corp. is being scrutinized by federal investigators looking into possible money-laundering in Vegas, and possible violation of bribery laws by the company's ventures in China, including four casinos in the gambling mecca of Macau. (Amazingly, 90 percent of the corporation's revenue is now from Asia, including properties in Macau and Singapore.)” But there was also the potential for enormous personal gain. An analysis by Seth Hanlon, the director of fiscal reform for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, estimated that Adelson stood “to receive a potential tax cut from the Romney tax agenda of more than $2 billion—an exponential return on a $100 million investment.”
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And he was hardly alone. As former labor secretary Robert Reich noted:

           
If and when they eventually win, these billionaires will clean up. Their taxes will plummet, many laws constraining their profits (such as environmental laws preventing the Koch brothers from more depredations, and the anti-bribery Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that Adelson is being investigated for violating) will disappear, and what's left of labor unions will no longer intrude on their bottom lines.