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The Party of Organized Money
"The midterms have shattered spending records for a nonpresidential contest, providing a likely blueprint for the frenzy to come when the White House is up for grabs in two years."
So the Washington Post informed us on Tuesday. The exaggerated influence of corporate money in politics and government has always been a problem, but last January the Supreme Court threw open the floodgates, overturning all restrictions on corporate spending to influence election results. Its 5-4 ruling in the closely watched Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case advanced the spooky cause of "corporate personhood," giving Wall Street and the military-industrial complex the same free-speech rights as actual people, which means moneyed interests have a new way to game the system.
What we're witnessing in the United States, as democracy becomes an ever hollower shell, is the entrenchment of corporatocracy, which right now wraps itself in a Tea Party cloak, creating the illusion that it stands for something other than its own interests - and that voters are making some kind of reasoned statement to power, that the American little guy is speaking in a collective voice rather than being manipulated by outside forces via the enormous power of television advertising.
"The 5-4 decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission handed Republican strategists something they long sought, the ability to raise unlimited money from corporations," writes Dan Morain in The Sacramento Bee. Mostly this money, often from unknown sources operating in coy independence from the candidate that represents their interests, goes into negative advertising, whipping up the climate of fear and animosity that, far more than actual issues, characterizes American elections.
"These outside groups are basically the nameless, faceless assassins who come in at night to take out the opponents," the Washington Post article goes on to say, quoting political scientist Lawrence R. Jacobs. "The candidate and party money will no longer have to do the heavy lifting on the negative ads. It's being outsourced to these shadowy groups."
Nearly $300 million was spent by these outside groups in the 2010 election, according to the Center for Responsible Politics. And the biggest spenders were Republican/Tea Party-friendly entities such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, behind which lurks none other than Karl Rove, the nation's master election manipulator.
"Overall, for every $1 a liberal group has spent on (election advertising), a conservative group has spent $2, the Center's research shows," Megan R. Wilson writes at OpenSecrets.org.
In my naïveté, I keep believing in a textbook democracy of informed voters making serious decisions that reflect a reverence for the electoral process. To be enfranchised means to have a voice in our collective future. I still believe we have such a voice, but it is increasingly ill-served by the system that purports to protect it. Electronic voting has given us unverifiable election results and the Supreme Court has given organized money the right to dominate the political agenda like never before.
And corporate domination of what we talk about and what we don't talk about - e.g., the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their effect on our bleeding economy - is far too compliantly accommodated by the mainstream media, which serves up an issue-lite, post-modern democracy to the American public pumped up with fake, "Monday Night Football" excitement.
As I noted at the time of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in January: "The tendency of money and power is to concentrate. The big trick, from a human perspective, is to make sure our core values remain pre-eminent, that they are served by the ways in which we concentrate power. Democracy is the great mechanism for doing so, the hope of the world, or so we are told, but the wakeup message in this nakedly cynical ruling by the Roberts Court, with its slim (but sufficient) right-wing majority, is that the concept of democracy is mortally wounded."
This mortal wound is manifested not only in who wins and who loses, though this is part of it, but in the choices we see available to us as we cast our votes. The mediocre turnout that characterizes American elections reflects the fact that most people of voting age - even most registered voters - don't believe these choices matter much in their lives.
I believe this is because the party that never gets voted out of power is the party of organized money.
37 Comments so far
Show AllThe Republicans are not the only "party of destruction." Both corporate parties are pro-business, pro-war, anti-labor, anti-peace. They're both parties of organized money. In 2008 that was the Democrats. In 2010 it was the Republicans. To talk about both of them as though there's a difference is delusional.
Agree. So the Democrats lost this money round and they cry foul. Both parties are corrupted by the money and neither party is out to change the fundamentals; although once in a while they pass cosmetic legislation that tweaks the funding process. There is so much money to be raised that the parties are more interested in raising money and staying in power than legislating for the benefit of the public. The dragged out health care bill process was a bonanza for both parties and the public lost because the legislation turned out to be a give-away to insurance companies. When was the last time either party denounced how corrupt the money is making the legislative process?
When you add in the money Unions spent (money not counted in the figure Mr. Koehler
uses) its not a great difference in the money spent.
The point is how much money was spent by both. Almost 3 billion dollars. How many teachers could ewe hire, how many school books, etc with half that? Its simply disgusting.
mite, your anti-union commentary has grown tiresome. Why are you against democracy in the workplace?
To cite facts about union spending is not tiresome anti-union rhetoric. It is just correcting the record mangled by people who say the Citizens United decision opened the way for corporate spending and don't mention that unions are freed up as well. The mainstream media has been largely responsible for broadcasting that distortion.
Horace: How does it feel to live by spouting right wing talking points? Have you had your prune juice today?
Horace, I think you mean corporate mainstream media. Sure, unions are freed up to spend, but are you telling me you think unions have the same funds to spend as giant corporations? You should try selling that bs somewhere else. Mitymite is the only one buying it on this board.
Neither party has ever denounced the corruption that money has introduced into our legislative process!!! The reason - both parties are up to their eyeballs in it.
For this very reason, I SAT OUT THIS ELECTION AND DID NOT VOTE!!!
I refuse to participate any longer in the sham that we call a two-party "democratic" system!!! And I believe myself to be a "true" American!!
Frank,
What a shame, "I SAT OUT THIS ELECTION AND DID NOT VOTE!!!"
I know you're disgusted at the two party con job, and I share your outrage, but even if you don't vote for positions at the national or even state level, there area all kinds of reasons to vote the local candidates and issues.
Seems you've never heard the phrase "all politics are local". How sad.
Here in California we had proposition 19, the legalization of marijuana which lost by only 7 percent. I wonder what would have happened had good progressives not stayed away.
Anyways, give some thought to voting, if only at the local level. Peace, my friend.
Members of both parties are more concerned about campaign contributions than dealing with issues.
Hear, hear!!!!
Of course, the biggest spender in this campaign cycle by a wide marginwas the public employees union, The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which spent a total of $87.5 million on the elections after tapping into a $16 million emergency account to help fortify the Democrats' hold on Congress. According to The Wall Street Journal, that spending spree "has vaulted the public-sector union ahead of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and a flock of new Republican groups in campaign spending. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303339504575566481761790288.html#articleTabs_video
That's such an gross misrepresentation of reality that it amounts to a lie. The Chamber of Commerce alone reportedly spent nearly that amount ($75 million). Rove's little enterprise was in for something around $60 million, and these were just two of the hundreds of such Big Money-backed groups, nearly all of them supporting Republicans. They drowned out the union expenditures as if they weren't even there.
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Left Hook!
http://lefthooktheblog.blogspot.com/
In my state we had one initiative that was supported largely by unions (teachers unions and SEIU). The initiative was to tax households earning over $400,000 a year (1.2% of residents), and otherwise provide a tax cut for everybody else and for small businesses. The main aim of the initiative was to replace lost funding for education and healthcare caused by the "economic downturn", in reality by Wall Street banksters (ideologically defended by the WSJ). The initiative was defeated with vast sums of out of state corporate cash 65% to 35%. This initiative would have helped over 98% of the population of my state. If you are in the top 1%, you can reasonably say that you live in a democracy; for the other 99% - sorry.
Bid welcome to the harlots of New Babylon. They are lifeblood of big corporations. They are the voting majority of both houses of Congress.They are the new messiah of the military industrial complex. They have invaded our temples and universities. They breed like rabbits. They wave the U.S. Constitution and the banner of God for all to see, but in secret and in collusion they worship the golden calf.
Read "Freakonomics" take on money and election may suprise many of you.
Thank You Supreme court for making money freedom of speech.
To be hypothetical for a moment.
If the markets on which our entire economy is based - the same markets that provide the basis for the dominant political philosophies of the day e.g., neo-liberalism, efficient market theory, etc. - are nearing or at the level of complete fictionality then why should we entertain the notion that the political systems that are subordinate to these economics(Wolin's inverted totalinarianism)are any more "realistic"?
What am I saying?
Below's a nice blog(scroll down) post detailing how 70% of all trades on the stock market are held for an AVERAGE of 11 seconds due to the dominance of high-frequency trading supercomputers using algorithms to trade stocks. Remember, that's an average. So, can we assume that 90% are held for 2 minutes?
What does this mean?
Yes, real people are still making real money but the important thing to notice is that the reporting and rhetoric concerning the markets has not changed.
Everyone still pretends that we as human beings and our decisions are the forces driving the markets when this is no longer the case.
Thus:
When some person on the news says that stocks closed up because investors were scared of inflation so they moved their money into this or that stock, in or out of the market - lies.
When CNBC tells you that investors are leaving transports because they see better deals in other market sectors - lies.
Everyone is really just commenting on the movements of computer algorithms and painting a story onto the screen much like watching Tetris and finding motive in what shapes fall.
Do they know this? Why should they? The movement of real people's money out of the market and the takeover by computers was - barring the occasional "flash" crash - seamless.
What does it mean?
Well, if people are willing to perpetuate a fraud on which our system of economy is based, a system that provides the very basis for our supposed philosophical bearings as a capitalistic nation then why would they hesitate to do the same in kind for our political institutions.
Hypothesis: Maybe our political institutions have been a fraud for a long time awaiting the day that the markets were able to "catch up" and attain the same level of fictionality?
This may sound all too conspiratorial however as Einstein showed us thought experiments can sometimes help us better understand our reality.
Blog about the nature of the stock market. There's much more info out there on this subject.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-10-29T08%3A40%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=20
Poly: A most excellent post.
For a while I've been posting about this same matter; however, you used excellent, easy to follow references to clearly drive your points home.
The election vote tallied through things like touch-stone screens that often malfunction; or otherwise through private companies that consider the vote count software their own business proprietary matter... suggests the same deception that runs the markets. Where you spoke of the quickness of trades, I believe the entire market of derivatives/swaps is equally falacious. Note that the persons fighting the foreclosures of their homes are faced with the phantom title owner issue, and it violates the established title-holder laws.
In parallel, the fact that most of what we call food is composed of industrial forms of filler, added to all sorts of preservatives and chemicals, means that the basics of nutrition have moved far away from anything that remotely qualifies as actual nourishment.
We are living in a phase of mass illusion, and it's affecting our economics, politics, lifestyles, and diets. To an extent, we are/become what we eat.
The media provides food for thought in the form of equally engineered falacies. There has never been a time when a society lived so thoroughly on the basis of illusion, deception, and self-delusion.
What I also notice is a more mundane version of Carlos Casteneda's "A Separate Reality." In my recent encounter with a local redneck electrician, he showed that he was utterly convinced that it was he, who was in the know about politics, as he railed on about our socialist president. With so many right-wing think tanks creating their own separate narrative, it's no accident that so many can and will think so wrongly. Plus they'll be utterly convinced of their own clear judgment!
Shakespeare noticed the instrumentation of that very thing back in his times when the call to war was sounded through the assorted tools deception deployed during that era.
When truth gets utterly scrambled into the faux equivalent, separating the wheat from the chaff becomes The Work that passes from generation to generation. Nothing like a Supreme Court making the task all the more tedious, if not next-to-impossible!
Good points, Sioux Rose. But note that it's fallacies, and fallacious, not "falacies" and "falacious". Two l's.
EPHRAIM: Thank you. I should have used spell check. You're right!
Great points that I think can be summed up by concluding that to be psychologically healthy in our present society is to be cognitively dissonant.
People must learn that the psychic pain they feel is a good pain as that means they are discerning elements of both "realities" and their brain is attempting to make sense of it all.
A generation of dissonants is what is needed.
However, I am reminded of the below quote and not enough stress can be laid on its concluding phrase.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” - Fitzgerald
POLY: I term it living in a state of paradox. What really hurts is when we feel distant from friends and loved ones because they so readily adapt to metrics we know to be false, if not deadly.
My best friend just related a story. Her granddaughter asked if she could please take 3 napkins home from a little restaurant. My friend told me that the girl's mother is so frugal that she barely buys the child necessities. She said it broke her heart; and that she felt the little girl would grow up to find it very difficult to give, or surrender to generous impulses from her heart.
Later I thought about this; and wondered if on some evolutionary scale of wisdom, if the pathologically, fiscally-conservative mother was not preparing this offspring (if unknowingly) for likely times of scarcity ahead?
I see my own children spend money like water. They think I am living by fear and predicting tough times they don't believe will ever arrive. My wealthy sister thinks the stock market/economy will JUST come back; that any low is just another one of the bubble-burst-to-balance "natural" business cycles. No matter to her that the industrial base of the nation is gone, that cheap oil deposits are vanishing, and that other nations are forming powerful trade blocks because they're fed up with the US acting as armed "officer of the peace" to the world.
When I witness the naive degree of credulity still at work, I understand how it was that the last of the Easter island natives (portrayed in Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse") managed to take down the last tree without recognizing what that meant in the way of erasing any probable future.
Although one cannot prove that Atlantis ever existed, I regard what I've read on that topic as a wise, cautionary tale. How was it possible for people endowed with advanced technology to not realize their own imminent demise? Furthermore, did they not believe it, and therefore do nothing to stop it? Citizens of our nation in my view now behave like the Atlanteans, good Germans, AND Easter Islanders all combined! That sure makes it tough to connect when one can see what's going on, feels unable to stop the madness, nor are they believed. I empathize with Cassandra, from myth. The ones waking up from the madness today are being cast as THE crazies for speaking out, or not going along with "the program." Small matter that said program = an international death sentence, or suicide pact operating in slow motion. In this nexus, what passes for sanity is dubious at best!
Sioux Rose: Very glad that you're back! Are you keeping up with Bill Moyers's cogent analyses? He gave a very stimulating talk @ Boston University the other day. You can find it at numerous places on the web.
The larger mass always has the larger inertia, so it's harder to put it in motion. It would take a lot more change than we would tolerate to alter that situation, so I think we're stuck with it.
Polycarpe, perhaps we should turn over the regulating of wall street to the Nevada gamng commission? If its nothing but a casino shouldn't we at least treat it that way.
Sure, but people will say that it has always been a game of risk. This is but an offshoot observation that can be easily dismissed much like the accusation that our political system is a choreographed "kabuki" dance. There is too much plausible deniablity much like Democrats chronic "failures" to ever get anything done for the people e.g., filibuster, not enough votes, etc etc.
That's why this issue with the markets is different, I believe. Here we have "proof" that what everyone is commenting on and treating as real is not necessarily the case anymore. It is a tell if you will.
With that in mind, I truly think that the more important point is the media superstructure continues as if nothing has changed, that the markets function exactly as we have been brought up to believe they operate even though we know this is not the case.
Jim Cramer continues to play the huckster even though with his experience he must know that markets have fundamentally changed. CNBC, Fox Business Channel, etc etc, continue with 24/7/365 analysis with no mention of these new underlying realities.
Also, remember that somebody owns the supercomputers that move the markets.
Multiple questions and observations arise.
Who exactly owns all of these computers?
How long has the majority of activity on these exchanges been based on HFT algorithms? 2years? 5 years? When did it start?
Have all the major players in the markets just decided to keep on making money even though the atmosphere they are operating in has gone virtual or nearly virtual?
This is all pretty new stuff and there are many, many angles that I hope people will start discussing even if some of them lead to dead ends.
We've been told explicitly for the last 30 years that we are supposed to derive everything this country stands for from the markets.
If these markets are fictional - and there may be indications that is where we are or are heading - what does that mean for all of us as Americans?
Again, at the below link a blogger who seems to have a very good handle on this stuff details that HFT is manipulating bond markets, futures markets, commodities markets and currency markets as well.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-10-29T08%3A40%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=2...
how soon before the corporate-congress gets rid of net neutrality and sites like this go away
??
Me thinks the selection process will be the only "peaceful"stimulation a horny economy will get this year(sic).The Fed will pick up the tab at Treasury(because no one else will).Slowing the monetising of deficits and interest on the debt by propping up a crashing Dollar is not a real stimulus.This economy needs to get laid,not a quick screwing.
Who will be the next Mccain/ Feingold's ?Will someone in the Demopublican corporate party pick up the banner of campaign finance reform and publicly financed elections ? Or, is democracy still a forgotten Utopian dream now that the Pandora's box of blank checks has now been opened?
The Green party has a good election reform platform.
$ 4,000,000,000.00 Man!
peace
"enormous power of television advertising"
Thats only the skin, the most visible manifestation. The body of this wholesale restructuring of the American brain is rightwing media, people like Rush Limbaugh and Faux News. If you've ever lived in rural America, these meme's were always out there. Farmers would get leaflets from fellow Farmers, and the leaflets suggested that urban folks and minorities were out to get them, and could they come to the meeting next Wednesday to hear people talk about it, etc, etc.
Those were often outright lies. But the more 'mainstream' these rightwing messages are taken, the less obvious they are. People like Faux News are specialists in half-truths and head-fakes. Everyone knows its not 'we report, you decide', its 'we herd, you get herded'. For example, while Faux News was shouting at the top of its head about a mosque near Ground Zero, what was not being said? What was not being said was real news, not all of which is sympathetic to conservatives. The mosque story fits in nicely with Obama's being a Muslim who wants Sharia Law. OK, that last bit is a lie. But if someone is building a Mosque near Ground Zero, its a lie that sure feels true. In this way, without ever lying, Faux lends credibility to the lie. Now, the right can't get Obama's islamic conversion out of its head, which means that something that actually MEANS something can't get in there. What exactly did ACORN do to that prostitute? It doesn't matter, Faux was richeously indignant anyway. Faux reported the story as it heard it: it didn't matter if it was true, it FELT true, to the sheep. So the lie gets 100 times more exposure than the truth.
A few days ago, two reporters at the Heritage Foundation reported their investigation into the costs of Obama's renewed regulations: $26 billion a year. This piece had no mention that these regulations have benefits, that might include a prevention of the inflation and popping of an $8 trillion housing bubble. Hence, you can't say these reporters lied. But the truth is, you can't cross the street without doing a cost/benefit analysis in your head. People do these automatically, even people who don't undertand was such an analysis is. What is the value of a cost/benefit analysis that lists only costs? Worse than useless, thats what! Its literally less valuable for making a decision, than no information at all. In this small piece, we see the entire rightwing disinformation campaign writ large: Tell the truth, but not the whole truth, and not the significant truth. Especially, focus on truths that make outright lies seem more plausible. Let the lies circulate where they always have, in the shadows. Just lend credibility to them with your half-truths. Cherry-pick the universe of truth to herd the sheep over the cliff, of its own 'free will'.
I seem to recall that Barack Obama shattered all records in fundraising to win the Democratic Presidential nomination and I do not recall a lot of voices expressing their concern as to the influence of money on Politics then.
Indeed Obama was lauded for his "Ability to raise funds for his Progressive Agenda"
I don't believe campaign advertising does much more than reaffirm beliefs in people who already had them planted there by mainstream media. It does get out the vote, of course. But, people are being planted with half-truths and outright lies, and the media is conspiring to keep other truths from the people (like, what war really looks like to civilians caught up in it), and the effect of this propaganda is a 'center-right' nation that was ready to take a leap of 'left' faith after the disastrous Bush presidency. Obama didn't get Obama elected, Bush did.
and how does the average voter get his information about the candidates? In 30 second sound bites embedded among commercial messages. These ads do more to lie, misinform, play to prejudice, than to enlighten or inform. 30 seconds is all you get. You wouldn't want more time because a momentary intrusion of the voter's life is all he could tolerate. He doesn't read, he doesn't deliberate, his resentments and prejudices determine how he will vote and the ads do little more than trigger these irrational sentiments.
What would happen if the tv "owned by the people", say by Constitutional Amendment, was FORBIDDEN to run fallacious ads, especially political "sound bites"?