Amitai Etzioni suggests we’re on the wrong track if we want to stop corruption in government. Look at the convictions of Mr. Perp and Ms. Perp in Virginia.[icopyright one button toolbar]
“The conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen on several corruption charges,” Etzione writes, “reveals yet again that Americans are more troubled by elected officials who pocket personal gifts than by those who accept large campaign contributions, sometimes from the same special interests.”
It’s not that the McDonnells didn’t cross the line. They were way over the line. But they aren’t exemplars of the mind-blowing corruption bribery we should worry about a whole lot more than we do. The more zeros added to the take, the less real these exchanges seem. Damn that guy who got his trip to Vegas! But the sums of money poured into campaign chests? These add up to amounts that we have to spend a minute on just to comprehend?
In the end, it’s all too vast and too far away from our daily experience. Vegas? Sure. But $3oo,ooo,ooo? From brothers who have billions? Some get it. But many more of us just find ourselves counting zeros, scratching our heads, and shrugging. Only later do we figure out that each dollar puts “our” representative farther away from and less attentive to voters.
The public can readily visualize an elected official doing special favors for someone who pays for designer clothing and accessories, a Rolex watch, and even his daughter’s wedding. They get even more enraged if someone gets a free trip of Vegas or a week at a choice golf course. (Such junkets are now labeled “educational” trips, because while Congress piously tightened ethics rules on junkets in 2007, some lobbyists deftly redefined themselves to evade the restrictions).
The public is much less troubled, I regret to report, by boatloads of cash called campaign contributions delivered by special interests to members of Congress and other elected officials, which are much more harmful to the public interest and U.S. Treasury than personal gifts. What did businessman Jonnie Williams get for his gifts to the McDonnells? The governor promoted Williams’s dietary supplement and encouraged a state university to conduct research on it. Now compare this to the power of campaign contributions. For example, the vitamin-supplement industry has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Senators Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, and Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat. The pair has helped keep the FDA from regulating these supplements to ensure that they be safe and effective. …Etzione,Atlantic
Maybe we-the-people need to ante up for one of those signboards in Times Square showing the amounts hauled in for one midterm election period — from whom and for whom. Just show it on TV once or twice day as the amounts tick upward. We may not take in totals, but we would register the speed with which vast sums of money exchange hands in order build the most corporate-controlled Congress we could possibly achieve.
It’s not that we shouldn’t punish the McDonnells for accepting “gifts.” It’s that we should pay way more attention, as Etzione says, to the many elected officials who “all but sell pieces of legislation for campaign contributions.”
Right now, we’re in the situation of not having even have a Supreme Court to take our case. Our case will be decided by Merck and AT&T and Exxon Mobil.
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As Etzione says, above, we are far too untroubled by the issue of campaign contributions coming from the wealthiest among us. If we asked ourselves, “Do I want David Koch and his brother to have up to 300,000,000 votes to my one vote?” I bet we’d say no, no way. But what are we doing to stop them?
David Cole (in a review of Zephyr Teachout’s “Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United”) looks at where we are today, and it becomes clear that unless you and I rush in to rescue our freedoms, they will disappear. In fact, as Cole points out, we are already disengaged as a people. We sigh and say, “They’re all dirty. Nothing we can do.”
Today, one one-thousandth of the American electorate is responsible for 25 percent of campaign funding. Members of Congress spend 30–70 percent of their time raising money for their next campaign. No one doubts that politicians are more responsive to the one one-thousandth than to the 99.99 percent. According to a study by Demus and US PIRG, SuperPACs in the 2012 election raised $505 million, about $200 million more than the presidential candidates combined, from only 159 donors. A single group funded by Charles and David Koch, Americans for Prosperity, spent $122 million during the 2012 campaign.
At one point, it was thought that unions served as, in John Kenneth Galbraith’s term, a “countervailing power” to big business. Indeed, the restrictions on corporate spending that were struck down in Citizens United applied equally to corporations and labor unions. Today, however, private concentrations of wealth are virtually unprecedented, while the labor movement’s power has markedly eroded. In total, the Koch brothers’ political network spent more than $400 million during the 2012 campaign, more than double the total spent by the top ten labor unions combined. Countervailing power has been outgunned by private wealth.
These facts erode trust in our democracy. In 1964, 29 percent of voters believed that government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” By 2013, that view had become a landslide, with 79 percent feeling that way. In 2006, 59 percent of Americans were convinced that corruption in government was widespread; by 2013, that number had jumped to 79 percent. In June and July of this year, more than 77 percent of respondents disapproved of Congress, and only 12 percent approved.
Montesquieu and Madison worried that as citizens grow increasingly skeptical that government is serving the public good, they will be less likely to act as public-regarding citizens and more likely to engage in selfish, short-sighted behavior. Yet that is an increasingly accurate picture of American politics today. [emphasis added]
The Supreme Court has based its “Citizens United” decision on a false reading of history. In fact, the founders anticipated the threats of corruption — corruption that “poses very real risks to a functioning democracy, risks that were foreseen at the founding, and that have preoccupied politicians, statesmen, and jurists for the entire course of our nation’s history.”
Today’s Court has sought to deny those concerns through a definitional strategy that cannot be squared either with that history or with the actual effects of money on our politics. … Only when the Court begins to grapple with the full extent of the dangers of corruption will its campaign finance jurisprudence truly reflect the competing values at stake. ...DavidCole,NYRB
I think Cole misses the bullseye in one respect: he takes far too sunny and forgiving a view of the Court. I think we know — and it has been acknowledged — that the far right (which is overly represented on this Court) has the disengagement of “the people” from their own government and power is a primary goal. Let the few decide! We know better! The people are given too much freedom, too much of a say in how the country is run!
Whether it’s people vs. police, or people vs. banks, or people vs. any corporation, or people vs. tradition, the people’s rights need to be curbed.
No wonder we’re disengaged! But I don’t think we should sit back and see what happens next…!