Whether the internet can "fix" politics or not is a function of what exactly you think is wrong with politics. And as someone who has spent the past several years working in online activism, I would say that the problems in our political system are monumental and spin out from what I call the Cycle of Decay:
Not to be overly melodramatic, but at the moment, it's becoming more and more apparent that corporate America and political elites of both parties are locked in an embrace that threatens to scuttle the world economy, the environment and our system of representative democracy.
And we don't even have a language to talk about it. We measure every political debate along a right-left axis, with rhetoric left over from the culture wars of the 90s. But in doing so, we're firing past the true villains -- the Masters of the Universe who skillfully manipulate tribal prejudices to insure that it is their interests, and not those of the public, that are the ones always being served.
So how does this system work? Well, it starts with crony capitalism -- defined as "an economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between businesspeople and government officials."
And are they ever close. During the past decade the most hotly contested political battle in Washington DC has not been over gay rights or abortion or taxes or the war -- it's been the battle for PhRMA's money.
When George Bush and the White House Congress passed Medicare Part D, with the caveat that the government couldn't negotiate for pharmaceutical prices. Now how does a Congress obsessed with "fiscal responsibility" pass a law forcing the government to pay whatever price an industry want to charge them? And yet, we did.
So when the Democrats took back Congress in 2006, they made a big show of passing drug price negotiation, championed by Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. But since George Bush would never sign it, there was no danger of it actually passing.
And when Barack Obama could sign it, the Democrats cut a deal with the pharmaceutical companies that guaranteed there would be no prescription drug price negotiations -- in exchange for the low low price of $150 million in political advertising.
At the time, my blog FDL was engaged in an online campaign to provide competition and control health care costs by passing the public option -- something that 80% of the country, the President and a majority in both houses said they supported. But as I watched the debate on the Senate floor with my colleague Jon Walker, we shook our heads in dismay and realized the problem was much bigger than we'd ever imagined. It was clear that there was nobody on either side of the aisle who was willing to tell the truth and speak up for the people they were elected to represent, and that overwhelming popular support is not a factor in passing legislation.
The public never heard about the true struggle that drove the health care debate because the national media and the political dialog is incapable of much above the level of demagoguery. And in the end, the blogs that had been powerful independent voices during the Bush era became largely subsumed by partisan dynamics.
But the deal that drove $300 billion into PhRMA's coffers is not an isolated example. They are the rule, not the exception. And what do companies do when they know their profits are thus guaranteed?
That their markets are protected from competition?
That no matter what kind of a mess they make, they can just take those profits and plow a small fraction of them back into the political system, and lay their losses off on the taxpayers?
They take excessive risk, knowing they will never have to pick up the tab if things go wrong.
It inevitably leads to disaster.
The damages from the BP oil spill could easily go into the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet top BP executives felt free to take big gambles with safety and the environment because Congress had capped the liability of the oil companies at $75 million. There was no downside.
And so these companies become incentified by our political system to take risks -- risks with terrible consequences.
In 2008, the excessive risk-taking of Wall Street banks brought the entire world economy to the verge of collapse or so we were told. Congress moved with bipartisan swiftness unseen since the Terry Schaivo crisis to approve emergency bailout funds.
If I leave you with one thought today, I hope it is this: in 2009, the Center for Responsive Politics reported that banks who received TARP funds spent $77 million on lobbying and $37 million on federal campaign contributions.
Their return on investment was 258,449 percent.
We are rewarding failure with the funds they use to further bribe and contort our political system. We are pouring concrete into our problems. Small businesses may be building better mousetraps, but they can't bring them to market because the megacorps are gaming the system. The companies that could drive economic growth and create jobs are stifled as the incentive for competition and innovation is extinguished.
That is a problem that cannot be solved on either the right or the left alone, because both the Democrats and the Republicans play critical roles in perpetuating it.
During the health care debate, Republicans demagogued "socialism" to kill competition in form of the public option that the insurance companies didn't want. Then it was left to the Democrats to pass the insurance mandate to guarantee their market, strip out language that would make them subject to anti-trust laws, and guarantee profits by prohibiting prescription drug price negotiation or reimportation.
Likewise, the banks weren't crazy about paying into a fund that would absorb some of the costs should they find themselves in trouble again. And it came straight out when the GOP started screaming about it. But the banks wanted to make sure that if they DID get into trouble that the taxpayers would be there for them, so once again the Democrats were left to bat cleanup.
So basically, after screwing everything up royally, the banks were allowed to write the very legislation that was supposed to safeguard the system and rein them in.
Why do people allow their representatives to do these things? How is it that they return them to office again and again even in the face of this open criminality?
One word: Tribalism.
If you won't vote for several billion dollars in no-bid contracts for Halliburton to overcharge for monogrammed towels for soldiers in Iraq who don't have sufficient body armor, you don't support the troops. If you don't support forcing Americans to pay 8% of their income to the insurance companies they hate, you obviously want Sarah Palin to be President. If you don't support the agenda of your "tribe," as determined by corporate money pouring through the coffers of validators in your respective interest groups, you're a homophobe. Or a moonbat. A bigot or a teabagger. A baby killer, a godless socialist, an ignorant redneck or a tree-hugging hippie freak.
Now all of those things might well be true. But it rarely has anything to do with the outcome, which is almost always the same: Halliburton (or Chevron or Pfizer or Monsanto) gets what they want because to oppose the ability of the party leadership to rob you blind means the other side might win, and nothing could be worse than that.
The online world has been able to force some accountability by challenging party authority on both sides, carving out notable populist victories that have toppled corporatist politicians who voted for the bank bailout.
And I have to say that of late, the right has done a better job of it than we on the left have, and they're scaring the daylights out of the Republican party.
But we're doing our best to catch up.
Online populists on both the left and the right are vilified in the media for bucking party authority and for supporting "extremists," as if those politicians who dub themselves "centrists" are anything other than radical corporate lackeys whose actions would have been considered criminal in another era.
But it's unclear whether anyone elected to replace them will be immune from the institutional pressures that lead to exactly the same pattern of behavior. Without serious systemic change, it is unlikely.
Politics online is largely siloed on opposite sides of the right-left cultural divide, and as such our websites are easily flooded by party operatives who frame the terms of the debate around advancing corporate interests. Thus we frequently redouble the limitations of the status quo rather than acting as an independent political force.
We did have one notable political success recently, in a hard fought battle to audit the federal reserve. Did you know that Congress can not audit the federal reserve? That JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon is on the board of the Fed, and he gets to know what goes on with the institution that prints our money, but the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee can't? A lot of people don't know that.
The bill to audit the fed was championed by Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Alan Grayson:
We worked hard to whip support from libertarian and progressive leaders on both sides of the aisle. Bruce Fein and Grover Norquist made cause with Richard Trumka and James Galbraith. Freedomworks, the National Taxpayers Union and the John Birch Society joined with the Campaign for America's future, US PIRG and Public Citizen. Conservative blog Red State, liberal blog Firedoglake and finance blogs like Zero Hedge and Naked Capitalism wrote about the subject diligently and raised the issue onto the radar of both parties.
We caught them in a pincer move:
And despite the fact that both the Fed and the Treasury lobbied against it, and Republican Senator Judd Gregg threatened to filibuster it as "dangerous populism," in the end it passed: 96-0.
It won't work in every instance. Right and left do have major substantive disagreements about social issues, as well as the appropriate role of government in our lives, that can't be papered over by wishful thinking.
But by making peer-to-peer connections that obviate the need for intercession of an elite media who intuitively serve the interests of the Masters of the Universe, the structure of the internet could potentially facilitate the trans-partisan alliance of outsiders capable of taking on insiders on discrete issues.
When corporate money is limited in its ability to influence political outcomes on one side, it simply achieves its objectives by flowing to the other side. And as long as the online world reinforces the tribalism that perpetuates the problems of partisan politics, the results will be the same. I do have hope. But in order to have any real, lasting impact, online activists are going to have to change both the language and the terms of the debates. None of us can win the battle against a heavily out-gunned corporate world by ourselves. We're going to have to extricate ourselves, and our political dialogue, from the tribalism and demagoguery that facilitates corporate hegemony.
Because until we do, we are simply putting new tools in the service of the old order. And we will continue to lose.
Follow Jane Hamsher on Twitter: www.twitter.com/janehamsher
Freaking!
ON!
I nearly did a standing ovation in front of my computer.
If the election of Barack Obama has taught us anything, it's that nothing will change until we get the flood of corporate money out of our political process.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM NOW!!!
Another aspect is that this tribalism is reflected in many issues and clouds clear thinking on a number of issues which all could work together as was done on the Fed audit bill. Illegal immigration is one such issue that progressives should look at apart from the corporate interests. This can cut across party lines and can do something to build a coalition in the future and win over those who should be fighting for their own interests.
Of course, the Republicans used this to go to extremes. When Dems moved to the center to work with Republicans, it drove the entire debate to the right. The debate has, I think wrongly, been defined as one unconcerned, political agenda against another one.
Certainly, there are unhelpful democrats, but I think that the partisan politics only look like a two-sided brawl between ideologues because that is the framing of the right. Not to sound like a party hack, but I think that we can lay the blame mostly at the feet of the republicans who, as a necessary part of their ideology, are devoted to business and markets. Our current situation is just a natural progression of a number of years of laissez faire economics in the information age.
Writings like this are helpful in pointing out how the overall picture works against the population, but I don't think that the sickness has been properly diagnosed.
Wrong.
Obama won the Democratic Primary, because he ran as a Dem.
He was elected as a Democrat.
He was elected to correct the disastrous Republican years where the Republicans ran the country into the ground.
At no time did he run or was he elected to work with Republicans.
To advance that nonsense is to be factually incorrect.
I'm not sure what campaign you experienced, but the man was all about creating a post partisan attitude and getting beyond the right and left to govern best, rather than from an ideological position. Unfortunately, he was rejected by the right after election.
This is why the stimulus and HCR included so many concessions that made them less effective.
Here is an interesting npr article for you.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92111942
"I`m not going to anticipate problems, I`m going to go in there with a spirit of bipartisanship."
Anyway, it does not really matter why he was elected in the context of this discussion. Even if you were not mistaken about the election and he promised not to reach out to Republicans, he did so, and the Republicans still rejected him, and I still think the article fails to make its point about the fight between D and R being something of a side show.
Bipartisanship may be necessary or preferable when tackling these problems, but the blame is almost completely on the right when bipartisanship is impossible.
Right.
"The thing the elites fear most is a viable third party and at this point I think it's the only way out of this mess."
Wrong.
Right diagnosis, wrong prescription
The right prescription is for the "peasants" to rise up and work collectively together against the wealthy "overseers," irrespective of party, which is Jane's point, I believe.
“In the risk vs. return world we live in, taking risks with potentially catastrophic outcomes will continue to occur because those taking the risks only assume the upside return side of the risk and do not assume the downside, catastrophic failure side of the risk. What gambler wouldn't take a risk that was potentially catastrophic if he knew he was only assuming the upside return side of the risk? Would WS and the big banks taken the risks they did if they thought they would have to assume the downside catastrophic failure side of the risk? Would BP drill a well in 5000 ft. of water knowing they would be SOLELY responsible for assuming the downside, catastrophic failure side of the risk? I'm not saying taking risks (venture capital investment, etc) shouldn't be rewarded, I'm saying that they should also assume the downside, failure side of the risk as well. Maybe we should add TPCTR, too-potentially-catastrophic-to-risk to the TBTF list of acronyms? Any high-stakes gambler in Vegas knows only a fool takes potentially catastrophic risks, regardless of the potential return. "Unprecedented" will continue unabated until we set a precedent of: those that take the risk, assume both the upside return and also assume the downside, catastrophic failure side of the risk as well. Why not use BP to "set the precedent?"†LOL.......way ahead of ya Jane.
I'd say the internet has had an impact on politics.
The internet has created some problems while fixing others at the same time.
But I believe politics has benefited immensely overall.
The debate is now 24/7 and no stones go unturned and anyone with a library card or enough money to rent an hour at an internet cafe can rant and rave to their hearts delight.
Everyone's voice can be heard, regardless of the integrity of the content.
Before the internet, a political voice was only heard by the priviledged class.
I believe that the internet has done wonders for politics.
The Regulator of base there numeric boundaries with time it takes the sun to effectuate Earth & soil to bring in the next crop of food: contingency declination of either 2 for 1 or 0 for 1 across all the actions back & forth each day through work and meandering. Their basis calculated by marks of exchange from percentile to aggregate, covariant for yesterday and tomorrow with depletion and consumption forecasting rate forecasting apophasis, deferment, allotment between one, zero add etcetera!
Bits and pieces are moved and shaped (slated) there with like and beside DEBT: Daily: stored energy/living inertia between volatrility (vectors) and all the arc tines to all the lines of value that can be measured. (commerce)(top-to-bottom-sector-to-sector .) :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRYJbaxwJ20
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/silent_weapons_quiet_wars.htm
Here's another debate that needs to be changed: Immigration.
How about a publicity campaign called: "What's Going On In Mexico?"
How often do you hear reporters ask that question when discussing immigration? Most often it stops at discussion about drugs and borders, but it's WAY more than that.
Focusing on foreign policy (durg wars) AND international trade policy (NAFTA).
This should branch out into a discussion about the conditions of working people internationally.
Can not assume that the majority of Americans even realize it's a multi-national.
Overtime, the terms of the debate will change. So much of the current debate about issues is cloaked in the language of the 60s culture wars.
Now about that "Deficit Commission"...that's already a flawed term to accept.
It should be challenged as the "Increased Military Spending and Corporate Subsidy" commission.