How can politicians afford to work for us and keep their seats when they have to spend so much time raising money from special interests to run these damn 30-second television ads! Our system is truly broken. Emphasis mine.
This epic public contest between the broad public interest and a small but powerful special interest has taken place during a time when American democracy has grown sclerotic. The role of money in our politics has exploded to a dangerous level.
Our democratic conversation is now dominated by expensive 30-second television commercials, which consume two-thirds of the campaign budgets of candidates in both political parties. The only reliable source of such large sums of campaign cash is business lobbies. Most members of the House and Senate facing competitive election contests are forced to spend several hours each day asking special interests for money to finance their campaigns. Instead of participating in committee hearings, floor debates, and Burkean reflection on the impact of the questions being considered, they spend their time as supplicants. Though many struggle to resist the influence their donors intend to have on their decision-making process, all too frequently human nature takes its course.
Their constituents now spend an average of five hours per day watching television—which is, of course, why campaigns in both political parties spend most of their money on TV advertising. Viewers also absorb political messages from the same special interests that are wining and dining and contributing to their elected officials. The largest carbon polluters have, for the last 17 years, sought to manipulate public opinion with a massive and continuing propaganda campaign, using TV advertisements and all other forms of mass persuasion. It is a game plan spelled out in one of their internal documents, which was leaked to an enterprising reporter, that stated: “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” In other words, they have mimicked the strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, which undermined the scientific consensus linking the smoking of cigarettes with diseases of the lung and heart—successfully delaying appropriate health measures for almost 40 years after the landmark surgeon general’s report of 1964.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-crisis-comes-ashore?page=0,2
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