United States of Mammon

In an election cycle when Ayn Rand's philosophy became fashionably chic, it's time to take a long, hard look at the structures and systems of politics.  In a season when billionaires organize foundations, institutes, think-tanks, and SuperPacs around remaking society to be more profitable to their mercantile interests, it's time to catch our breath and think about how we believe we should conduct political campaigns and elections.

And in either case, it will not take long to find the elephant in the room, the swollen sore thumb on the hand, the gaping sinkhole in the city square.  It's called Citizens United.  It's a decision handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States, striking down provisions of the McCain-Feingold legislation that aimed to regulate campaign finance.

Anyone concerned about the plutocratic momentum of US politics realized right away how awful this decision would be for politics.  On the other hand, it could also be called the "subsidies for professional political campaign workers" decision, in that it opened the floodgates of money for anyone who could successfully claim to be a political hack.

As is often the case, some of the most insightful reporting and commentary on current social topics finds its way into the radio program This American Life.  One outstanding episode looks at the role money plays in elections and politics, specifically addressing Citizens United: "Take the Money and Run for Office."  Momentum has been building over the past year to draft a constitutional amendment that would reverse the devastating legal doctrine passed down in Citizens United.

I first started hearing about organized efforts to amend the constitution on a podcast from Planet Money, a blog on the economy over at NPR, which does lots of reporting in cooperation with Morning Addition, All Things Considered, and This American Life.  The episode was titled "A Former Lobbyist Tells All," and it is an interview with Jimmy Williams, former lobbyist for the National Association of Realtors, describing aspects of the money rush for elective office.  Williams is now dedicated to reversing Citizens United through passage of a constitutional amendment.  You can listen to many other Planet Money episodes on money in politics at their site.

Williams's campaign has coalesced with others to form United Republic, with its campaign called Get Money Out!  He tells of many others working on this effort.  Numerous Senators and Representatives have put forth bills to amend the constitution.  There are other coalitions of groups working on this project, such as Amend 2012 (affiliated with Common Cause), Free Speech for People (led by several new media type organizers), and Move to Amend (a broad coalition of the progressive left).

For those of you who can remember your civics classes, you will recall that one way to amend the US Constitution is for three-quarters of the states to demand it.  So far eleven states have taken official action.  California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Hawaii, Vermont, Rhode Island, Maryland, New Mexico, and Massachusetts have adopted legislation or written letters of petition to Congress calling for a constitutional amendment.  On Tuesday, Colorado and Montana voters overwhelmingly approved ballot initiatives calling for constitutional amendments.

I've talked generally about what is at stake here, focusing more on the problem and the current organizing work that is going on.  I don't want to give a technical treatise in legalese, but let me hit what I see as the key issues.  First, the doctrine that a corporation is a person has been stretched to idiotic proportions as the courts are applying the constitutionally defined rights of citizens to corporations.  The distinction between a corporation and a human being in relation to the constitution must be clarified.  Second, the doctrine that money is speech has also been allowed to expand beyond logic and steamroll the egalitarian notion that each person should have a voice in public discourse.  Campaign finance limits are a way of letting all citizens, regardless of their wealth, have a proportional measure of freedom to speak out.  Unlimited spending means some have the capacity to drown out the rest.  It takes us back to an old line from Charles Reade (usually misattributed to Dickens): "Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all--as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens."

To close out the post, let me offer a letter to the editor I wrote in response to a call for action from Free Speech for People.

To the Editors:

Election day has passed, and for many of us it is a relief.  The money spent on electioneering and advertising set new records at all levels of office.  Amounts that would have been inconceivable a few years ago have poured into the election committees, PACs, and SuperPACs.  The massive infusion of dollars from a few wealthy people was made possible by the Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United.  That decision jumbled a few principles of US Constitutional Law and came up with a ludicrous and dangerous conclusion:  if corporations are persons, and if money is speech, and if persons have freedom of speech, and if corporations have lots of money, then corporations and anyone else with money should be free to spend and say as much as they want, true or not, to influence an election.

The decision swept away decades of legal tradition which distinguished between the personhood of human beings and the personhood of corporations in important ways.  It swept away decades of legal tradition which aimed to protect the one person-one vote principle of equality, not only in the voting booth, but also in the use of money to influence an election.  The result of Citizens United on subsequent elections has been to favor plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) rather than democracy (rule by the people).  The battle for truly democratic rather than plutocratic elections is one that bipartisan efforts of John McCain (Rep) and Russ Feingold (Dem) had fought for many years, only to see their hard word overthrown.  94% of elections are won by the candidate who spends the most money.  That's not an election, that's an auction. 

For those of us who prize democracy and long to see it flourish, the best sign of hope on election day came from propositions passed in two Western states.  In Colorado and Montana, voters overwhelmingly approved, with more than 70% of their votes, to call for an amendment to the US Constitution that overturns Citizens United, that knows the difference between a human being with rights and a corporation, and that authorizes governing bodies from federal and state levels to protect equality in election contributions.  These two initiatives join the nine previous states which have passed laws calling for this kind of constitutional amendment.

Now that so much money has been spent to influence the election, we can be sure that the people who wrote the checks will be looking for ways they can cash in on their investments, whether their candidates won or lost this time.  The rest of us need to be busy working for the end of this debacle known as Citizens United.  Thirteen bills for constitutional amendments are already introduced in Congress.  We need to act to save our voices in democracy now.

Dr. Mikael Broadway

Pay to Play: Health Lobbies Buy Their Access

"This is not a democracy. It's an auction." Those are the words of a bumper sticker we stuck on a car I used to own. The obscene amount of money that are spent to elect and influence government officials keeps growing because it works. Money keeps buying access. If you might have money to give, then candidates and incumbents want to talk with you. If you already gave money, they want to keep the relationship for next time. And savvy lobbyists know what kinds of assistance and treatment specific legislators want. They also know how to sway the direction of corporate news and the TV-watching and talk show-listening public. In U. S. politics, money makes the world go 'round.

Michael Winship of truthout reports that enormous amounts of money have been spent on lobbying against health care reform in the second quarter of 2009: over $133 million in three months from insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital corporations alone. This does not include spending by other organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and political action groups which is also on a grand scale.

According to community organizing, there are two kinds of power: organized money and organized people. Theodore Lowi, in The End of Liberalism, wrote that organized money had managed to dominate U. S. politics so heavily that we now operate by a de facto new constitution. Representative government flows from powerfully organized lobbies. Theologian John Howard Yoder warned Christians not to be fooled by the rhetoric of democracy, the rule of the people, when the U. S. polity is better described as a plutocracy, the rule of the wealthy.

There is faint hope in that community organizing has experienced a renaissance in the past quarter century. But grassroots movements still have most of their influence at the local level, and occasionally at the state level. There are ambitions for more national power from grassroots groups, but for now the organized money is in the lead.

I'm going to keep on asking folks to demand that Congress listen to the people and get us a universal health care plan that cuts costs and promotes preventive care. We may be a voice crying in the wilderness, but the voices of Isaiah and John both made a difference when they stood up for the truth.

Bailout 1: Mary Nelson and Job Losses

Mary Nelson, a leader I admire greatly, wrote the following about the current Wall Street mess on the Sojourners God's Politics blog.

In Money We Trust
by Mary Nelson 09-23-2008

The Wall Street debacle reminds me of the fall of Babylon … of the excesses of greed over the common good and the little folks (like the ones in my low-income community) getting the short stick both before, during, and after. A recent article talked about how, in the last few years, the fear of the risks of getting discovered and regulated were overcome by sheer greed. Greed over fear. Clearly, this is a time for sackcloth and ashes for some. It strikes me as sheer nonsense that our money has “In God We Trust” clearly printed on it. It is more appropriate to say, “In Money We Trust.” Our misplaced spending priorities mean $12 billion a month on war in Iraq and Afghanistan, propping up big corporations without capping their personal profits, but neglecting poor people without homes, health insurance, and quality public education.

But we all have gone haywire in this atmosphere of excessive greed, thinking we could get rich or richer, making risky choices and spending far more than we need to get what we want. Buying and spending was promoted after 9/11 to help get the country going again: “Go out and buy,” the president said. In our community financial education classes, we help people understand the difference between needs and wants. Our officials and a lot more of us need to understand and act on the difference between needs and wants as well.

Mary Nelson is president emeritus of Bethel New Life, a faith-based community development corporation on the west side of Chicago. She is also a board member of Sojourners.

What were the risks people took? Analysts on the radio today said that if something does not ease the financial crisis, lines of credit will dry up, meaning many small and medium sized businesses, and some large ones, will not be able to make payroll. Average folks will start losing their jobs. Large corporations will not be able to get quick loans to keep their operations going, and plants could shut down. We already know that the big companies are almost through raiding the pension funds and health care promises they made to workers. The ones who are hurt the most are not the ones playing games with the millions and billions. A person who loses ten out of twenty million is not nearly so bad off as someone who loses her only livelihood in a bi-weekly or monthly paycheck.

Money buys attention. The evidence has been overwhelming lately.

For instance, I saw a magazine cover in the grocery store with a picture of an actress who is nearly my age of 49. The teaser line on the cover asked why she never ages. Any of us who aren't intentionally suspending reality to think about that question can already give the answer. She probably spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on personal coaches, physicians who mess with her skin and her subcutaneous adipose tissue, tailors and designers who adjust her clothing to cover or enhance her figure, and make-up artists and photographers who can hide the signs of age. With all this investment, her promoters and the publishers of the magazine collaborate to pretend that she has a gift, a discipline, and a cleverness to seem forever young.

A second example has been in the letters to the editor of the Durham Herald-Sun. I have never seen such a well-coordinated campaign of letter placement in our local paper. Well crafted letters which cover the key talking points and stay on message appear over and over, defending the three lacrosse players who were alleged to have committed sexual assault. Apparently the evidence is less convincing now than several months ago, and the charges of rape have been dropped. What amazes me is the way that the letter writers let their attack on the rape charges ooze over into saying that nothing wrong happened the night of that party. I am not fond of conspiracy theories. But never before have so many self-righteous people from all fifty states given so much attention to writing almost the same letter to our small local paper. There has to be something at work behind this, and I'm not blaming the Holy Spirit. Money can organize letter writers, too.

They pretend that it is easy to discern the truth among the "he said, she said" nature of sexual assault cases. They try to live in a pristine moment apart from the history of rapes swept under the rug and differential application of the laws according to gender and race. Even a young woman who grew up in my neighborhood has joined in the attacks on anyone who was critical of the lacrosse team, especially certain Duke professors and administrators.

Some professors seized the opportunity to speak about the ongoing presumption of privilege among many white Duke students who resist and resent their associations with blacks. It is real. I speak with black students at Duke often enough to know that although they have been 0fficially admitted to the school they seldom find the path to mutuality across racial lines, opportunities, understanding, or respect. But many propagandists are hard at work to hide all this for the sake of buying an untarnished future for the accused.