A recent article in
The Nation by Lawrence Lessig, titled “How to Get our Democracy Back – There Will Be No Change Until we Change Congress”, puts the blame for our current state of affairs squarely on the U.S. Congress. Actually, it’s not Congress per se that is the problem, but our system for electing our Congresspersons – which of course has brought us our current Congress. Of course, our broken system is also used to elect our President and myriad lesser public officials.
Lessig begins “
How to Get our Democracy Back” by talking about how presidential candidate Barack Obama emphasized our broken system during his presidential campaign but has thus far failed to carry through on the implied promises demanded by that rhetoric:
The passion that Obama inspired grew from the recognition that something fundamental had gone wrong in the way our government functions, and his commitment to reform it….
As he told us, both parties had allowed “lobbyists and campaign contributions to rig the system.” And “unless we’re willing to challenge that broken system…nothing else is going to change…”
This administration has not taken up that fight. Instead, it has stepped down from the high ground the president occupied on January 20, 2009, and played a political game no different from the one George W. Bush played, or Bill Clinton before him. Obama has accepted the power of the “defenders of the status quo” and simply negotiated with them.
Lessig then focuses on the U.S. Congress:
At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt… politically bankrupt… Consistently and increasingly over the past decade, faith in Congress has collapsed. Today it is at a record low… just
25 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job. A higher percentage of Americans likely supported the British Crown at the time of the Revolution than support our Congress today…
And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense: That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution “dependent on the People,” the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests… This is corruption.
Not the corruption of bribes or any other crime… Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy. I have to voice a slight disagreement with the part of the above excerpt that I put in italics. It is a disagreement of terminology, but I think it is important. Why say that this is not bribery? How can corporate donations to public officials, predictably followed by those public officials passing legislation that the corporate donors have made clear they favor (through highly paid lobbyists) not be bribery? What possible definition of bribery excludes that? I’ve discussed this issue in several previous posts, as
here,
here, and
here.
Anyhow, Lessig goes on to discuss the views of American citizens on this issue, explain how it works, and how it has become worse in recent years:
The vast majority of Americans believe money buys results in Congress (88 percent in a recent California poll)… The democracy is feigned. A feigned democracy breeds cynicism. Cynicism leads to disengagement. Disengagement leaves the fox guarding the henhouse. This corruption is not hidden. On the contrary, it is in plain sight, with its practices simply more and more brazen.
Consider, for example… Max Baucus, who has
gladly opened his campaign chest to $3.3 million in contributions from the healthcare and insurance industries since 2005, a time when he controlled healthcare in the Senate. Or Senators Lieberman, Bayh and Nelson, who took millions from insurance and healthcare interests and then opposed the popular public option for healthcare. Or any number of Blue Dog Democrats in the House who did the same… The list is endless; the practice open and notorious. Since the time of Rome, historians have taught that while corruption is a part of every society, the only truly dangerous corruption comes when the society has lost any sense of shame. Washington has lost its sense of shame… The money may have come in brown paper bags in earlier eras, but the politicians needed, and took, much less of it than they take through more formal channels today… And not surprisingly, as powerful interests from across the nation increasingly invest in purchasing public policy… wealth, and a certain class of people, shift to Washington.
Lessig notes that members of Congress pretend to be outraged by charges that they are susceptible to bribes… I mean, influenced to change their votes based on who gives them money. They acknowledge that the money buys “access”, but deny that this “access” helps to determine their actions in behalf of their public responsibilities.
Lessig proposes two responses to this denial of the obvious. First, he notes that even if it is true that the actions of Congress are not influenced by the corporate “campaign donations” they receive, accepting those campaign donation from corporations whose interests they support gives the
appearance of corruption. Secondly, Lessig asks how else can we explain the current degree of Congressional dysfunction:
If money really doesn’t affect results in Washington, then what could possibly explain the fundamental policy failures of our government over the past decades? The choice (made by Democrats and Republicans alike) to leave unchecked a huge and crucially vulnerable segment of our economy, which threw the economy over a cliff when it tanked (as independent analysts again and again predicted it would). Or the choice to leave unchecked the spread of greenhouse gases… Or… you fill in the blank. From the perspective of what the People want, or even the perspective of what the political parties say they want, the Fundraising Congress is misfiring in every dimension. That is either because Congress is filled with idiots or because Congress has a dependency on something other than principle or public policy sense (i.e. corporate money). In my view, Congress is not filled with idiots…
I have a third suggested (though simpler and less tactful) response to those who deny the problem: How stupid do you have to be to believe that Congressional action isn’t influenced by the corporate money they use to run their campaigns?
Healthcare “reform” as an exampleSince we are currently in the midst of a monumental Congressional effort to enact health care “reform”, it is worth while and instructive to consider how our broken system has affected this health care “reform”:
Healthcare reform is a perfect example. The bill the Fundraising Congress has produced is miles from the reform
that Obama promised (“Any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange…including a public option,” July 19, 2009). Like the stimulus package, like the
bank bailouts, it is larded with gifts to the most powerful fundraising interests – including a promise to drug companies to pay retail prices for wholesale purchases and a promise to the insurance companies to leave their effectively collusive and extraordinarily inefficient system of insurance intact – and provides (relative to the promises) little to the supposed intended beneficiaries of the law: the uninsured… The first step, we are told, was to sit down with representatives from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to work out a deal. But why, the student of Obama’s campaign might ask, were they the entities with whom to strike a deal? How many of the 69,498,516 votes received by Obama did they actually cast?
One might also ask
how much money did the Obama campaign receive from them.
Incipient fascismThom Hartmann, in his book “
Threshold – The Crisis of Western Culture”, is less cautious about the wording he uses to describe the problem. Noting the increasingly close collaboration between our elected government with wealthy and powerful corporations, he says:
We have reached the point in the United States where corporatism has nearly triumphed over democracy. If events continue on their current trajectory, the ability of our government to respond to the needs and desires of humans – things like fresh water, clean air, uncontaminated food, independent local media, secure retirement, and accessible medical care – may vanish forever, effectively ending the world’s second experiment with democracy. We will have gone too far down Mussolini’s road, and most likely will encounter similar consequences, elements of which we have already experienced: a militarized police state, a government unresponsive to its citizens and obsessed with secrecy, a ruling elite drawn from the senior ranks of the nation’s largest corporations, and war.
Americans should be reminded that we fought World War II largely in order to prevent Fascism from dominating the world.
Summarizing the problemReferring to our failing democracy, Lessig says:
Its central player has been captured. Corrupted. Controlled by an economy of influence disconnected from the democracy, Congress has developed a dependency foreign to the framers’ design. Corporate campaign spending, now
liberated by the Supreme Court, will only make that dependency worse – “A dependence” not, as
the Federalist Papers celebrated it, “on the People”, but a dependency upon interests that have conspired to produce a world in which policy gets sold…
No one… should accept it. No president, Republican or Democratic, who doesn’t change this system could possibly hope for any substantive reform…There will be no change in fundamental aspects of the existing economy, however inefficient, from healthcare to energy to food production, until this political economy is changed… In a single line: there will be no change until we change Congress… As John Edwards used to say, there’s all the difference in the world between a lawyer making an argument to a jury and a lawyer handing out $100 bills to the jurors…
Our government is,
as Paul Krugman put it, “ominously dysfunctional” just at a time when the world desperately needs at least competence. Global warming, pandemic disease, a crashing world economy: these are not problems we can leave to a litter of distracted souls. We are at one of those rare but critical moments when a nation must remake itself, to restore its government to its high ideals and to the potential of its people…
Nobody thinks that any good solutions will come easy. Lessig recognizes in his article that we are unlikely to see reforms from our current Congress, notwithstanding the current huge Democratic majorities in Congress. He proposes three ideas:
First is citizen-funded elections, aimed at removing Congressional dependence on corporate money for their campaigns. Lessig points to legislation currently pending in Congress, the
Fair Elections Now Act, as a good example of this. Secondly, he proposes banning members of Congress from becoming lobbyists or from having other close corporate ties for seven years after leaving Congress. But given the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Citizens United v. FEC, Lessig believes that a Constitutional amendment may be required. Noting that neither our current Congress nor any other Congress in the near future is likely to move in that direction, he notes that “The framers left open a path to amendment that doesn’t require the approval of Congress – a convention, which must be convened if two-thirds of the states apply for it…”
I would add two things to that mix: 1) Making bribery of public officials… I mean, corporate campaign contributions to public officials illegal, and; 2) impeaching members of the U.S. Supreme Court (all 5 of them, including the three who
elected George W. Bush President of the United States) whose actions are clearly and obviously designed not to uphold our Constitution, but rather to promote corporate interests.
David Swanson has an excellent discussion of this issue in his book, “
Daybreak – Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union”, in a chapter titled “Spreading Democracy to Washington DC”, especially in a section titled “Clean Campaign Financing”. Here are some highlights:
If we could eliminate the media expenses, we could afford to provide public financing that candidates would accept. So, rather than just trying to eliminate dirty revenue, we need to focus as well on eliminating dirty expenditures… And there’s no reason we can’t do it, since we already own the airwaves and give them away to the media companies…
Any system in which campaigns are largely determined by the spending of money is going to forever find loopholes to squeeze more money through… We need free media and public financing, but ultimately we need something else as well. We need to ban private financing of public elections. The Supreme Court’s definition of money as speech in
Buckley v. Valeo must ultimately be overturned (Swanson’s book was published before the more recent USSC outrage noted above).
Thom Hartmann focuses more generally on our incipient fascism:
Our government – elected by human citizen voters – can shake off the past thirty years of exploding corporatism and throw the corporate agents and buyers of influence out of the hallowed halls of Congress. We can restore the stolen human rights to humans, and keep corporate activity constrained… The path to doing this is straightforward, and being taken now across America… Once again in America, we must do what Jefferson always hoped we would: “the people being the only safe depository of power, should exercise in person every function which their qualifications enable them to exercise…” We must seize the moment to take back the power, for our children and our children’s children.
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