In this post I quote from a recent Onion article which is an appropriately cynical and satirical commentary on the U.S. legislative process.
The article requires no additional comment for people who understand the basic problems. Therefore, the commentary I provide is for friends, relatives, acquaintances and business associates who need a little education on American “democracy” as it has regressed to the current day – in other words, for about 90% of American adults.
A desire to gain influence in WashingtonThe article begins:
Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress. Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations… Weldon is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.
Most Americans don’t think of citizens of a “democracy” as having a need “to gain influence in Washington”. After all, the good majority of U.S. citizens have the right to vote for their representatives. But we have come to the point where the money of the rich so overwhelms the influence of the average American citizen that the need of average Americans for a “voice in the legislative process”, as this article suggests, is indeed of paramount importance.
If average Americans had much of a voice in the legislative process then how to explain the fact that
Congressional job approval has hovered between 20% and 30% during the majority of time between January 2009 and the present, and
between 20% and 50% for the vast majority of the 17-year period beginning in 1990? Why shouldn’t the citizens of a democracy be able to elect a Congress that at the very least they approve of more than they disapprove of?
Or look at some specific issues: For example, an overwhelming majority of Americans
support a public option for providing all Americans with health insurance. Even Republicans (71%) and conservatives (67%) support it by large majorities. Yet when it came time for Congress and the Obama administration to push for such a program, it was suddenly claimed that a public option was “off the table”. Instead we got the
Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 and the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which omitted the public option, allowed the health insurance industry to maintain control of health care in our country, and
mandated that most Americans purchase health care from the health insurance industry.
And why was BP allowed to be in charge of the cleanup of their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told BP to cease using a dispersant because it was
unnecessarily toxic and
because of the unknown effects on aquatic life. But in response,
BP said “NO” to EPA on switching dispersants and
flouted EPA’s order. And our government simply let them get away with it. One Congressman even
apologized to BP for our government attempting to interfere in their handling of the situation.
Lack of access to governmentWealthy corporations often have no trouble gaining all the access they want to the highest levels of government. The Onion article continues:
“The U.S. populace lacks the access to public officials required to further its legislative goals," a statement from the nation read in part. "Jack Weldon gives us that access. His daily presence in the Capitol will ensure the American people finally get a seat at the table," the statement continued. " … Weldon says he hopes to spin the American public as a group worth Congress' time.
Dick Cheney’s
secret energy task force, composed largely of oil corporation executives, was instrumental in producing oil
industry friendly legislation. Antonia Juhasz describes some other results of the task force’s deliberations in “
The Bush Agenda”
The first recommendation… followed by a graph showing Iraq oil output to the United States in 2000 – was to “make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy.” The second recommendation was for the United States to “support initiatives by Mid-East suppliers to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.”
The Obama administration has allowed the same sort of access to wealthy Wall Street bankers, regarding the development of its economic policies. The result of that has been the handling of the home mortgage crisis in a manner that was far more friendly to Wall Street bankers than to average American citizens. William Kuttner explains in his book, “
A Presidency in Peril – The Inside Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future”, how that worked out in Wall Street’s favor:
Several trillions in loans and loan guarantees for the banks, and a grudging $3 billion for the homeowners who had been the banks’ victims (resulting from Obama’s program). As a consequence of the administration’s half measures and failure to move boldly, the mortgage foreclosure crisis is continuing to drive millions of Americans from their homes, depress housing prices… and retard the recovery… Refinancing underwater retail mortgages is comparatively easy. It just requires political will.
I find the same principle operating at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where I work. The drug and medical device corporations that the FDA regulate have almost unlimited access to us. We agree to meet with them whenever they want, and we hold workshops for their organizations. In contrast, consumer advocate individuals and organizations are often viewed as nuisances to be avoided.
The role of bribery"If you have a problem, say, with America's atrocious treatment of its veterans, you can't just pick up a phone and call your local congressman," Weldon told reporters from his office on K Street Monday. "You need someone on the inside who understands how democracy works; someone who knows how to grease the wheels a little." The veteran D.C. power player admitted that his new client is at a disadvantage because it lacks the money and power of other groups.
Talking about veteran’s health, in 2005 and 2006, our Republican Congress
repeatedly blocked the passage of much needed veterans’ health care bills. U.S. military veterans and the organizations that represent them are not wealthy.
But the fact of the matter is that there are a great many wealthy American individuals and corporations who are rabidly against social programs that benefit the bulk of American citizens – programs such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, and even sometimes public fire departments. The reason for their rabid opposition is very simple. The more money put into public programs such as these, the less money and power is available for them – the wealthy.
So they make “campaign contributions” to political candidates who support their agenda at the expense of the American people. Unbelievably and outrageously, in a presumed democracy, such contributions, followed by the enactment of favorable legislation by the politicians who receive those contributions,
is legal!!! The only exception to the legality of these “campaign contributions” is when there is an explicit and provable agreement between the campaign contributor and the recipient of the contribution that the recipient will use his public office to favor the contributor. If one criticizes an implicit understanding of this sort as being akin to bribery, both the contributor and the recipient of the bribe routinely react with feigned outrage,
claiming the bribe as a form of speech, protected under our First Amendment. Bill Moyers comments on this hypocrisy in his book, “
Moyers on Democracy”:
We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we’d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn’t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A “campaign contribution”.
Let’s call it what it is: a bribe.
Thus it is absolutely true that, as the Onion article points out, “His new client (the American people) is at a disadvantage because it lacks the money and power of other groups.” As former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
David Souter has said, our current system “functions for the benefit of donors whose object is to place candidates under obligation …”
Political advantageThe Onion article then comes to the bottom line summary of our system of political bribery: the political advantage of receiving vast sums of money in return for favorable legislation:
"The goal is to make it seem politically advantageous for legislators to keep the American people in mind when making laws," Weldon said. "Lawmakers are going to ask me, 'Why should I care about the American people? What's in it for me?' And it will be up to me and my team to find some reason why they should consider putting poverty and medical care for children on the legislative docket."
The ugly and outrageous truth is that corporate interests could not elect their candidates to office in the face of an accurate assessment of their performance and agenda by the American people. Their agenda is anti-people, and very few Americans would vote for it if they understood what it is. But corporate politicians use the corporate “campaign contributions” that they receive from their owners to conceal that agenda.
With the availability of mass media, money is needed for the dissemination of information. Although a class war has always existed to some extent in our country, that class war has now reached its greatest intensity since the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century, as manifested by a
widening income gap between the poor and middle class on the one hand, versus the ultra wealthy on the other hand. With that income gap, 1 percent of the wealthiest individuals in our country possess 38% of our country’s wealth, and therefore have a highly disproportionate amount of political clout.
The result is that virtually all Republican congresspersons and a great many Democratic ones as well have opted to do everything they can to make their wealthiest constituents happy with them, at the expense of everyone else, with the firm knowledge that the voters they lose by doing that will be more than made up for by the disinformation that will be paid for by their wealthiest constituents. And this of course creates a vicious positive feedback cycle in which the powerful use the wealth and power they gain through their bribery of politicians to continue to bribe them in order to gain ever more wealth and power. There is no good reason why this kind of thing should be legal in a presumably free country.
If cash donated to their political campaigns is not enough to carry them through to victory, and if election fraud doesn’t happen to play a significant role in their state, the corporate media serves as the ace in the hole for Republicans. This is one more example of the role of money in politics, since those who own and control the corporate media are uniformly wealthy, and since it was their money to begin with that led to the legislation that enabled the corporate media to become what it is today – Reagan’s veto of Democratic legislation to enforce the
Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which together allowed the consolidation of our news media to the point where today it is controlled by a very small number of extremely wealthy individuals.
Marginalizing the American people with insulting rhetoricIf all the above wasn’t bad enough, the American people are also marginalized through gratuitous insults meant to put them in their place and make their demands for equality of opportunity seem unreasonable. The Onion article also comments on this:
"To be honest," Weldon added, "the American people have always been perceived as a little naïve when it comes to their representative government. But having me on their side sends a clear message that they're finally serious and want to play ball." According to Washington heavyweights, hiring Weldon is an immediate game changer and should force politicians to take citizens' concerns seriously for the first time in decades. Moreover, sources said, Weldon will be able to help lawmakers see the American people as more than just a low-priority fringe group.
This brings to mind the recent comments of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who
said of the so-called “professional left” that they “will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not a reality”.
There is no way to interpret that statement other than that the White House Press Secretary is trying to score political points with right wingers by marginalizing the left. The statement is insulting of the American people on so many counts. In the first place, the vast majority of Americans who criticize the Obama administration from the left cannot be accurately characterized as
professional left. They don’t make these criticisms for money. They do it because they want to see their country live up to its ideals of providing every American citizen the opportunity to make a fulfilling life for herself or himself.
Presumably the derogatory reference to Canadian health care is meant to refer to the fact that many Americans were upset by the Obama administration’s pushing of a health care reform bill that did NOT include an option for Americans to purchase
public rather than private health insurance. Gibbs makes no mention of the fact that Obama campaigned for president in 2008 in part on a pledge to provide such a public option, as a check against the well known excesses of the private insurance industry. Nor does he mention that
life expectancy is greater in Canada, while medical care is far more expensive in the U.S. I have news for you, Mr. Gibbs. It’s not just the “professional left” who would like greater life expectancy at less cost. Virtually all Americans would like that.
And with regard to Gibbs’ reference to the “professional left” not being satisfied until the Pentagon is eliminated – that is one of the stupidest straw man arguments I’ve ever heard. Almost nobody is advocating elimination of the Pentagon. Rather, most leftists – and most Americans in general – would like to see a much more restrained military budget
which would not involve us in wars and occupations of previously sovereign nations for no good reason.
“I’d actually never heard of this group”The article ends with a quote from U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor that accurately sums up the views of so many of our elected officials towards the American people, though it’s unlikely that any public official would ever say such a thing if he knew he was being recorded and quoted:
“Before today, I'd actually never heard of this group (the American people)," Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) told reporters. "But if Jack says they're worth my time, I'll take a look and see if maybe there are some areas where our interests overlap.”
“But I'm not making any promises," he added. "I'm a very busy man."
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