Cashocracy

I am hearing and reading the same theme over and over again in the news. The latest was an article on Alternet about why we can’t buy new cars online. The summary was that auto dealers donate something like $66 million to political campaigns every year and politicians don’t want to offend them. This is no great shock to anyone.

Why is Medicaid forbidden to negotiate drug prices with the drug companies, costing the taxpayers billions? Well, the drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on campaign donations (through their executives) and lobbying.

Why haven’t the automobile fuel efficiency standards been raised since the Reagan administration? Well, the automobile and oil companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on campaign donations (through their executives) and lobbying.

Why has all the bailout money so far gone to help huge banks and their stockholders instead of ordinary people? Well…

I’ll make it simple, with a form. Why don’t we (Insert rational government policy here)? Because (Insert name of relevant industry) spends (Insert astronomical sum of money) a year on campaign donations and lobbying.

I’ve written about this before, but it deserves repeating. All out present efforts to reform government policy within the present electoral structure are essentially futile. I forgot who said it, but there is a saying that it is impossible to convince a man of something if his paycheck depends upon not being convinced. The vast majority of our elected representatives are utterly dependent upon thousand-dollar donations from millionaires to get reelected. We have a cashocracy.

This has a twofold effect. The more gross effect is intimidation. Business groups have used targeted donations to intimidate politicians who have misbehaved. (Meaning “acted in the general public interest”) The more insidious effect is what I call the money filter.

The Public Interest Research Group studied congressional primaries and issued a report called “The Wealth Primary.”  The basic conclusions were that, on average,

• Whichever candidate spent the most money in a primary won, 9 times out of 10.
• The high spending candidates outspent the number two spenders 3 to 1.
• Most of the money came in $500 to $1000 chunks from millionaires.

The upshot? If you have opinions that dismay, offend, or alarm millionaires, you have perhaps a 1 in 10 chance of success in a primary. In reality, the second and third place spenders also rely on those chunky millionaire donations, so consider your chances far worse than that. The tiny minority of wealthy donors acts as an unofficial and undemocratic nominating committee. The rest of us get to choose between their ideologically screened choices.

The answer is simple but difficult. We need to equalize political clout across the economic spectrum. In a previous essay I proposed that we limit political contributions to a days wages at minimum wage – about $50 today - and have the government multiple-match each donation at something like 5 to 1, making it $300. It would cost us about $2 billion a year, but the savings in reduced corporate handouts would save us over a hundred times that much. It would also get around Supreme Court decisions striking down what they considered unacceptably low limits on political contributions. The people at Freakonomics proposed what they call Patriot Dollars. Every registered voter would get a debit card charged with $50 per election cycle, payable only to officially registered candidates. It would be the only legal way to donate to a campaign, and would cost about the same as my proposal.

Either way, it comes down to this: Bill Gates and the guy who mows Bill Gates’ lawn would have the same financial clout in Washington.

The difficulty lies in using a group of officials dependent upon and filtered by the big money system to get rid of the big money system. It is going to take focus and single-issue voting. Whatever issue is our personal favorite, we will have to drop it temporarily in favor of electoral reform, with campaign finance reform at the top of the list. Whatever their level of filtration or corruption, our “representatives” in Washington require our votes to be there. If a majority of voters make our votes absolutely dependent on mandatory public campaign financing, they’ll have to listen. It’s going to take a movement on par with the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s, only beyond all the usual social divisions. Once we get an electoral system that listens to the majority rather than the tiny minority with money, then we can get back to debating each other over policy priorities.

I’m going to start by making a donation to Public Campaign, an organization dedicated to the principle of clean money elections. What about you?

Comments

[Stephen Miracle]

We'll never get campaign finance reform without first setting up Instant Runoff Voting. Instant runoff voting would enable 3rd party candidates to break the 2 party deadlock and then we might be able to realign how candidates are financed.