Dollarocracy (3 page)

In this book we examine the forces—billionaires, corporations, the politicians who do their bidding, and the media conglomerates that facilitate the abuse—that have sapped elections of their meaning and of their democratic potential. “The Money Power,” as Roosevelt and his contemporaries termed the collaboration that imposed the will of wealth on our politics, achieves its ends by flooding the electoral system with an unprecedented tidal wave of unaccountable money. The money makes a mockery of political equality in the voting booth, and the determination of media companies to cash in on that mockery—when they should instead be exposing and opposing it—completes a vicious circle.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon, as we note in the historical chapters of this book. But it is an accelerating phenomenon. The U.S. Supreme
Court's 2010
Citizens United
decision allowing unlimited corporate campaign spending confirmed the court-ordered diminution of democratic processes that over four decades has renewed the political privileges of the elites. “The day before
Citizens United
was decided,” Lawrence Lessig wrote, “our democracy was already broken.
Citizens United
may have shot the body, but the body was already cold.”
²

Economic elites are now exercising those privileges with an abandon not seen since the era of the robber barons that Roosevelt decried. To enhance the influence of their money, billionaires, corporations, and their political pawns began in the run-up to the 2012 election to aggressively advance policies designed to limit the voting rights of those Americans who are most disinclined to sanction these elites' continued dominance of the political process. They are grasping for total power, and if they did not succeed in choking off the avenues of dissent in 2012, they will surely return—with increased determination and more insidious tactics—in 2014 and 2016 and beyond. “There's been almost a shameless quality to it,” says former U.S. senator Russ Feingold of the pressure on politicians to raise and spend exponentially more money since the
Citizens United
decision. “It has grossly altered our system of government. We don't have the kind of elections that most of us grew up seeing.”
³

The moneyed interests are confident, even in the face of temporary setbacks, that they will be able to continue their initiative because they are well served by the rapid decline of the news media as a checking and balancing force on our politics. Our dominant media institutions do an absolutely dreadful job of drawing citizens into public life, especially elections. The owners of media corporations have made their pact with the new order. For the most part, they do not challenge it, as the crusading editors and publishers of another age did. Rather, advertising departments position media outlets to reap windfall profits through the broadcasting of invariably inane and crudely negative political campaign advertising, which is the lingua franca of American electioneering in the twenty-first century. The corporate media are the immediate financial beneficiaries of our increasingly absurd election system—and the primary barriers to its reform. To talk about the crisis of money in politics without addressing the mess that the media have made of things is the equivalent of talking about the deliberate fire without discussing the arsonist.

We term the combine that has emerged the “money-and-media election complex.” It has become so vast and so powerful that it can best be understood as an entity unto itself. This complex is built on a set of commercial and institutional relationships involving wealthy donors, giant corporations, lobbyists, consultants, politicians, spinmeisters, corporate media, coin-operated “think tanks,” inside-the-beltway pundits, and now super-PACs. These relationships are eviscerating democratic elections and benefit by that evisceration. The complex has tremendous gravitational power, which increases the degree of difficulty for those wishing to participate in elections outside its paradigm. The complex embraces and encourages a politics defined by wealthy funders, corporate media, and the preservation of a new status quo; it is the modern-day reflection of the arrangements that served the robber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the days and weeks following the 2012 election, the winning side predictably announced that the problem of money in politics was overrated because, after all, this side won. Imagining that all was well because the darkest possible scenarios did not immediately play out, the
Christian Science Monitor
declared, “Despite concerns that huge amounts of money spent by political action committees would skew the results, many candidates backed by large PAC-financed advertising campaigns did not win their races. Money was less influential than expected. Voters thought for themselves.”
⁴
So there you have it. Or maybe not.

While Republicans and their allied super-PACs did spend billions to defeat President Barack Obama and the Democrats, it is not as if the Democrats failed to return fire with fire. As the
New York Times
concluded, “The president and his allies appear to have matched or exceeded Mr. Romney and his allies in the number of advertisements that aired.” As the dust cleared after the election, it became obvious that the Democrats were very much part of the system, with their own dependence upon big money in countless areas. “The president's re-election does not presage a repudiation of the deregulated campaign financing unleashed by the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision,” political correspondent Nicholas Confessore of the
Times
wrote. “Instead his victory most likely reinforced the practice.”
⁵

This is the truth of 2012: money beat money.

To believe otherwise is naïve, just as it is naïve in the extreme to imagine that the money-and-media election complex ground to some kind of halt in November 2012. To the contrary, it has not yet built up to full force. That's a daunting prospect, but it is also good news. Before it becomes the status quo, we may have an opportunity to intervene. But for that to happen, we must understand how we got to this point, how this system operates, what the consequences are, where it appears to be heading, and what Americans can and must do to get their nation back on the democratic grid. That is the purpose of this book.

The immediate effect of the money-and-media election complex is to encourage election campaigns, like those in 2012, that do not even begin to address the societal pathologies afflicting the people of the United States. The trillion dollars spent annually on militarism and war is off-limits to public review and debate. Likewise, the corporate control of the economy and the corporate domination of government itself get barely a nod. Stagnation, gaping economic inequality, growing poverty, and collapsing infrastructure and social services—major issues all—are accorded nothing more than the market-tested drivel candidates say to get votes. The existential threats posed by climate change and nuclear weaponry are virtually off-limits as campaign-season issues; whole debates that are supposed to go to the heart of domestic and global concerns pass by without mention of them. The drug war, which has created a prison-industrial complex so vast that the United States has a greater percentage of its population imprisoned than any other nation in history, is not to be mentioned—except when obviously engaged and concerned citizens force the issue onto the ballot via the initiative process.

The United States, like much of the world, is in a period of crisis, not unlike the 1930s or the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt and Robert M. La Follette. But now the stakes are higher. Mainstream politics, following elections, seems increasingly irrelevant to addressing these grave, even existential, challenges. As a result, they are untended and grow more severe. Something has to give; this can't go on forever, or even very much longer. It is in all our interests that these problems be addressed by democratic governance and sooner rather than later. The alternative is an ugly picture, one that is entirely unnecessary.

As the subsequent chapters will demonstrate, widespread popular disillusionment with contemporary elections and the political system is anything
but irrational. The type of society we have is far better understood as a Dollarocracy than as a democracy. We have a system that is now defined more by one dollar, one vote than by one person, one vote. We live in a society where a small number of fabulously wealthy individuals and giant corporations control most of the dollars—and by extension have most of the political power. They buy election results that give them control over the government, and they hire lobbyists to fine-tune that control so that the distribution of wealth and income continually skews to their advantage. This is not a mystery. Polling shows that more than 60 percent of Americans understand that the nation's economic structure is “out of balance” and that it favors a “very small portion of the rich” over everyone else.
⁶
And they despair that political structures are so skewed and corrupted that nothing will change this circumstance. As political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters characterized American governance circa 2012, “Democracy appears chronically dysfunctional when it comes to policies that impinge on the rich.”
⁷

To be clear, elections are not entirely worthless—especially on the handful of issues where the wealthy do not necessarily have a horse in the race. Popular forces can prevail, even against increasing odds, and we admire and respect numerous politicians who enter and occasionally succeed in the electoral arena. Elections will remain among the main playing fields for politics in the visible future. Our argument is simply that the degree of difficulty that citizens confront when they seek to use the election process to effectively control government policies is vastly higher than it has been in memory. And it will only get worse unless Americans do something about it. A difficult truth lurks not far in the future: if our elections get appreciably more corrupt, extending the trajectory they were already on in 2012, the use of the term “democracy” to describe the United States will be inaccurate in even the weakest sense of the term. The point, then, is not to abandon elections, but to make them viable and credible.

To do that, however, we all must recognize that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is right when he describes the
Citizens United
ruling as ushering in the completion of “a hostile takeover of our government” by corporations and billionaires. “We are now in a free fall toward old-fashioned oligarchy; noxious, thieving and tyrannical,” he writes. “America, the world's premier template for democracy and a robust middle class, is now listing toward oligarchy and corporate
kleptocracy. America today is looking more and more like a colonial economy, with a system increasingly tilted toward enriching the wealthy 1 percent and serving the mercantile needs of multinational corporations with little allegiance to our country.”
⁸

We are not interested in promoting cynicism; we believe it is possible to change the world for the better. And we believe there is a way out of the current crisis: in a reform moment focused on the bold new voting rights movement that we outline in
Chapter 9
. But we do no one any favors by sugarcoating the reality around us. Our optimism in the midst of the wreckage we describe in this book is fueled by our recognition that the forces of reform have the numbers on their side. If America were to hold truly fair elections where the preponderance of Americans vote, where there is credible journalism, we are certain there would be progressive results. The dollarcrats get that too, which is why they battle so hard to see that fair elections with credible journalism never come to pass. It is why they are not satisfied with overwhelming financial advantages and media that are sympathetic to their demands on society. They seek to restrict the franchise and rig election laws in a manner than can only be described as obscene.
⁹
All the once-common rhetoric about the importance of expanding the rate of voter participation to join the rest of the civilized world has been shelved by the dollarcrats. They know that their policies and their privileges could never survive democracy.

Our motivation in writing this book is to encourage Americans to demand the electoral democracy they deserve and require. We take as our foundational premise the understanding of the franchise explained in 1957 by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. when he wrote, “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind—it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact—I can only submit to the edict of others.”
¹⁰
King was merely restating the longstanding American democratic tradition. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “They who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes.”
¹¹
In the twenty-first century, it is offensive to us that many Americans do not believe that they firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote—either because they encounter barriers to their participation or because they believe their vote has been rendered meaningless by the overwhelming
influence of the Money Power. It is our faith that the vast majority of our fellow citizens take similar offense, and this faith tells us that radical reform is possible.

In order to address the crisis of elections in the United States, this book chronicles the rise and functioning of the money-and-media election complex as a cornerstone of Dollarocracy.

In
Chapter 1
we take a longer look at the nature of Dollarocracy in the contemporary United States. Americans enjoy what is at best a “weak” democracy. But the problems confronting the nation today are not new with regard to governance, particularly the democratizing of elections. This chapter traces this important and mostly overlooked history.