Here’s a word you should add to your working vocabulary: plutocracy. It means rule by the rich and it’s exactly what the United States of America has just officially become. Unless something changes fast, future scholars will look back upon January 21, 2010 as the day democracy was murdered by the U.S. Supreme Court.
For those of you asleep at the wheel—most Americans, or the streets would have been filled with protesters—the U.S. Supreme Court by its usual 5-4 vote, (with right-wing plutocrats making up the majority) ruled unconstitutional a sixty-three-year-old law that restricted the amount of money that corporations, unions, and advocacy unions can spend on federal elections. That’s right; there is absolutely no limit now. If Fox News wants to spend a billion dollars to convince you that Sarah Palin is presidential timber instead an airheaded jerk, it can do so. And if you think that the electorate is smart enough to see through such obvious attempts to buy votes, you’ve spent way too much time in the sun smoking illegal substances.
As plutocrats generally do, the rightwing Supremes tried to cover their ruling with a blanket of benevolence. The first amendment protection of free speech, they claimed, extends to campaign spending. Besides, advocacy groups such as labor unions are also free from restraint so the ruling is fair to all concerned. Where to start with what’s wrong with this logic?
First, it makes mockery of the Bill of Rights, a document originally drawn to prevent the masses from being run over roughshod by elites, not the other way around. Under prevailing Orwellian Newspeak, the people are somehow or other served by entrusting the protection of free speech to those very elites. We saw yesterday the culmination of more than a century of bad rulings in which courts have misused the 14th amendment to define corporate enterprises as individuals. Great stuff, really; if an inanimate business shell is legally a person, flesh-and-blood plutocrats can fleece the populace in secret.
Second, the ruling rests upon a classic false premise, a lie so enormous that the mind boggles over the amorality of judges who can utter it with a straight face. One can only believe that the ruling is fair to all if one believes that every group has equal access to resources. It’s never been true that labor unions competed on an equal basis with Corporate America and it’s certainly not true today. A mere 14% of Americans belong to unions; by my math reckoning that gives CorpAm a nearly 4:1 outreach advantage. If we parse it further, we find that CorpAm has an even greater leg up in what this really all about: money. Big Labor is one of the biggest whoppers ever invented. The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in America, has total assets of around $83 million dollars. Impressive, yes? Chicken feed! J.P. Morgan Chase alone has assets of two trillion dollars. News Corporation, the entity that owns Fox, had assets of over $53 billion. That gives Fox a potential influence advantage that’s 638 times greater than that of the AFL-CIO.
Third, it’s a fantasy worthy of Lewis Carroll to think that any progressive group in America has access to influence that’s even marginally comparable to that of CorpAm. The richest 20% of Americans already own more than three-fourths of *everything*--stocks, bonds, property, money, services, and media outlets. Those in the bottom quarter have access to less than three percent of America’s wealth. Even if they could convince everyone else to join forces against the power of elites, they’re still at a 3:1 asset disadvantage. Big Labor? As I said, it’s a myth and an increasingly toothless one at that. The AFL-CIO can’t even convince its own rank and file how to vote let alone the rest of the nation. (And most of its constituent unions haven’t had an original idea since the 1930s, where many of them live psychically.)
Here’s what we’ll see unless Americans act now to stop this madness. You can kiss goodbye major parts of the Bill of Rights. Well-heeled rightwing heels will spend tens of millions to elect officials who will take away reproductive freedoms, the right to sue corporations, privacy rights, freedom of association, sexual preference protections, civil rights guarantees, affirmative action, banking regulation, and environmental laws. The only amendment that will be sacrosanct will be the second. Look also for major assaults on the few remaining public programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, and the postal service. I sincerely doubt that most anti-poverty programs will survive in useful form, or that Barack Obama will win a second term.
It may already be too late, but Americans need to rise up against plutocracy. Demand that your Congressional representatives, whatever party they may be, reestablish the limits just stricken by the courts. A usual first step would be a hard spending cap on how much can be spent in total during elections, an end-around maneuver of the court ruling. If the United States followed the path of other Western democracies, we could limit both spending and the campaign season. If a Congressional race was restricted to twelve weeks, for example, and no candidate could spend more than half a million dollars, the playing field would level and both candidates and voters would be forced to focus more on issues. This would create an influence balance between plutocrats and (small “d”) democrats.
Need more proof that matters are out of hand? It cost $1.6 billion to elect a president in 2008 and all we got out of it was an old crank losing to a guy whose oratory exceeds his ability. This is not a Democrat versus Republican issue; it's one that dtermines which people have a voice, all of them or just those with obscene wealth. Let’s make no mistake: democracy has one foot in the grave and the other is poised to step. We must act now or the plutocrats have won.
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