After the Wall St. Bailout: More Plutocracy, or the Rise of Net-Powered Politics?

Monday afternoon, I happened to turn the TV on just as the House of Representatives was voting on the $700 billion Bush-Paulson-Pelosi bailout bill. Watching the split-screen coverage of traders on the floor of the U.S. Stock Exchange as they stared, transfixed, waiting to see if the public, through its representatives in Washington, was going to save their skins, was exhilarating. And then, when the bill went down to defeat, and the market went back to plunging, I was thrilled.

Here's why: I'm tired of living in a de facto plutocracy. I also believe we are on the verge of a revolution in participation in government, powered by new technology that is making it possible for many more of us to connect together and have a meaningful voice in the process. The bailout bill, and the process by which it is being jammed through Congress, is an affront to those democratic values. We can do better. And the vote Monday showed, in nascent form, how the same forces that are eating away at the underpinnings of "broadcast politics," the capital-intensive way of electing a President whose demise we've been chronicling here at techPresident, are also starting to unsettle "business as usual" on Capitol Hill.

Several years ago, when I was at Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan group dedicated to establishing voluntary full public financing of election campaigns, I worked on a variety of projects aiming to illustrate all the ways that Big Money had commandeered democracy. One of them was a poster that we called, "State of the Union: Congress Meets Wall Street/How Big Corporate Campaign Contributors are Buying America...And What the Rest of Us Pay." The halls of Congress had become synonymous with the trading floor of Wall Street, we argued, and to drive the point home, here's the image we developed, working with a wonderful designer named Chris Foss.

To be honest, it's not an uplifting picture. The floor of the "people's House" shouldn't be equated with the trading floor of the Stock Exchange. But to many Americans, of all political stripes, that is what Congress has become: a place where votes are for sale to the highest bidder, where access is openly bought and sold, where Members are measured not by the substance of their ideas but by the size of their campaign war-chest, and where the biggest winners have been the best-connected, biggest-bankrolled interests of the financial sector.

This chart below, which I posted about last week, shows just how much money from the financial sector has come to dominate the financing of campaigns in the last ten years. (Press the play button and follow the biggest ball, which represents finance, as it balloons in size and shifts its giving to follow the party in power in Congress.)

So here's what in my view is the most important fact about Monday's vote in Congress: for one day, at least, democracy beat plutocracy. Or, as David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and author of Free Lunch: How The Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expenses (and Stick You with the Bill), put it, the vote "shows that Washington is not entirely in the service of the political donor class, by which I mean Wall Street and the corporations who rely on it for their financing. These campaign donors, a narrow slice of America, have lobbied and donated their way into a system that stacks the economic rules in their favor."

I can't prove this, but I think that the same rise in voter participation that we're seeing in the explosion of small donors to the presidential campaigns and in the explosion of networked bloggers watch-dogging the media may also be starting to hit Congress. Ordinary people want more of a say in the process, so they're starting to pool their money and their voices, and they've learned--thanks to the Internet--that they can have an impact, certainly on the presidential campaign of the last 18 months. (Zephyr Teachout credits the Howard Dean and Ron Paul decentralized campaigns as having taught many citizen activists that they had the power to influence the process, and I agree, though I would widen that circle to include supporters of many candidates, including Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and Huckabee.)

When the White House and Congress, two highly unpopular institutions at the moment, come along with a top-down, no-debate, no-transparency, save-the-fatcats bill and ask for its immediate passage, we shouldn't be surprised to see those same forces reflexively hit back. Or, as Markos Moulitsas, one of the exemplars of the new people-powered networked politics, just put it, "Back in my day, we didn't hand off 5% of our entire GDP to an unelected political appointee on the whims of the stock market."

What happens next? Well, we're in the interregnum now. An old way of doing things is dying, and the new one being born isn't quite in place yet. In all likelihood, Congress is going to solve the crisis of the moment by putting lipstick on its pig of a bill--that is, by adding an alluring set of "sweeteners" (our tax money directed to particular interests of particular Members, little of which will be related to the actual problems of the economy, but all of which is geared to these Members' actual fears of facing the voters). And the bill will pass.

But the process has been a huge shock to the networked public sphere, which is rapidly adapting to all the new realities exposed over the course of the last week. And, as Scott Heiferman of Meetup once said, "the genie of self-organization is out of the bottle." Critical masses of citizens are coming together around this bailout fight. They've swamped Congress's servers, not only with incoming email messages protesting the vote, but also in searching to get the actual text of the proposed legislation. They've swarmed all over metastasizing text of the draft bill (which now contains sections on wool modifications and wooden arrows) and are creating a new expectation, that Members actually read the full bill they are voting on, before they vote. They're networking together to draft better ideas into life (see Jon Pincus's effort on MixedInk here and David Sirota's efforts on OpenLeft here and here. And they're finding and elevatin a new array of economist-bloggers, who are filling an information vacuum left by the mainstream media's embrace of the basic assumptions of the Bush-Paulson-Pelosi approach to the crisis.

As these new social connections are made and spread, they will gain salience. Not enough to stop whatever bill is about to pass the Senate and presumably the House on Friday, but eventually, enough to alter the way business is done on Capitol Hill. We are watching and we are learning, and in the last few weeks of financial crisis many of us have discovered that the powers-that-be are just making it up as they go along and Emperor really doesn't have much to wear. I don't think we're going to return to the old status quo, where moneyed interests and well-connected lobbyists comfortably call the shots, any more than we're going back to the days when Big Donors, Big-Foot Journalists and Big Name Consultants decided who could be a serious candidate for President and what they would talk about and the rest of us just watched and waited until our moment to vote.

The stakes are too high, too many of us are watching and joining in, and we've learned that when we get connected, we can make a difference.

Comments

[veracity]

Points taken, Micah.... BUT! America HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PLUTOCRACY.

Democracy has always been a messy process. Part of that is the nature of human life. Some men get shipped off to HELLHOLES to die in WWII... while other men stay in America, make great money, & go to dances & clubs every Friday night. (The "War syndrome" is universally capriciousness and cruel.)

President Lincoln complained about the plague of financiers & war profiteers 1860s. President Truman became famous for his anti-profitteering Truman committee, which found hundreds of inflated prices & overbilled government contracts

Regarding America's current WHITEWASH for EIGHT YEARS of BushCo atrocities - WHY has the public TOLERATED SO MANY LIES & SO MUCH BULLYING??

I got the answer in the most unusual spot - a very young Chris Mathews on PBS airing American Presidents: Ronald Reagan.

Mathews explained that the AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS is a finicky, treacherous ally: IN BOOM TIMES, they have aspirations of being WEALTHY, so side with the upper classes, i.e. right-wing Rush Limbaugh & Bushonomics.

IT IS ONLY when THE ECONOMY is TRASHED, and shrinking, that the Middle Class becomes TERRIFIED of losing their safety net.... and start voting liberal!

A one-sentence comment by "Tweety" Mathews (who fills his own "upper class wannabe" comment to a "t") explains the past 15 years of American politics...

....even after 15 years, DEMOCRATIC LEADERS & CANDIDATES _STILL_ can NOT explain to voters that IT IS IN THEIR OWN BEST INTEREST to VOTE FOR OVERSIGHT & REGULATIONS

[RichardfromHB]

How does blogging affect votes, either in Congress or the public? Bloggers have to be able to take the additional step of action, not just 1's and 0's. Spreading the information that the bill is a money grab by the elites from the working class means little without action that is strategically designed to enhance public involvement. Rants change nothing. It's just inane when the bloggs suggest for example, to boycott one brand of gas station each day of the week. The community knows a bancrupt idea when it sees it. Why aren't bloggers calling for something creative to be heard? Everyone blow car horns during the House vote? I don't know, I'm not creative and still think the 1's and zero's are real neat.

[gavrielle]

This sounds lovely, but the truth is Sen. O. took our money promising he'd listen to the people and not the special interests. But instead of listening to us, and looking to the progressive economists for answers that do not reward Wall Street, he's following the rest of the Congressional sheep -- even knowing that the "rescue" bill isn't a rescue of anyone that counts. And the cost of it will, in fact, delay or derail everything he's promised to do in his administration -- much to the delight of the neocons, who will surely bring up these broken promises in a 2012 election. There are other, far better and less costly, solutions that O could be embracing and talking up. Why not blog about how to use this new found power base to pummel him on the lack of leadership he's showing? I am.

[Ahoon]

When bush/paulson requested 700 billion with no oversight, they absolutely knew that it had no chance of happening...they knew they could scare the cowardly dem.s into a stampede...and that is exactly what happened...and now the dem.s are tied to a position that most americans don't support, and that is doomed to failure...they will have earned every bit of contempt hurled their way...these people are fools,without a smidgen of street sense.

[DuPageDem]

Great post. But how long before the corporate class catches on to what's happening, and strangles the free and open Web the same way they did to newspapers, radio and TV? Not long, I'm afraid.

[my3bucks]

Hey why weren't we told the bailout money is for FOREIGN bad debt? It won't fix Wall St. OR Main St.!!

Only one brave Rep. from CA rings the warning bell - read and act now:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/10/rep-brad-sherman-on-bailing-out-foreign.html

[All in All]

Scary Picture, of The State of the Union!

Here's the actual link to the bigger size Picture of it:

http://www.publicampaign.org/images/700pixels.jpg

If You use the other link in the Article it will bring You to a page that has a link to the Picture, however when
I pressed on that link it took Me to a Page Not Found Page....So I had to do some searching to find the actual Picture Myself, which is supplied above (in This (My) post.

[strick9]

I agree with your post, but may I add, this is why we must always be vigilant to the efforts to privatize the Internet. Net neutrality is most important to regain control of our government. There are few other sources of truth in our country today. Cable, dish network, and direct TV control broadcast media in America. Access is even controlled to c-span, public TV, link, and free speech TV by these corporations. If you don't subscribe even these signals are scrambled, and subscriber’s access is limited to the network, pay per view and their local area. If were not very careful the Internet will suffer the same fate.

[jeskiley]

I agree with you 100% about the technology part. Ten or so years in myself, and raising a batch of eager learners whose lives, although only 10 years old and under, are interwoven with so much techonosavvy, I'm only recently deciding what to make of it. The state of the matter is, our governments and our community, thanks to the call to participate so intimately in this election (and adjacent world affairs), are raising the bar higher than we ever have before, fueled by the confidence in our networking systems.

[UNCLEJOE]

This Bailout is the last chance for the Bush Fed Banks to make the big haul before Bush leaves office that will place the American tax payers forever trying to pay off (now pay attention) the Interest on the $700 Billion Loan the Federal Reserve will LOAN us with interest (stay with me) to pay them BACK the same $700 Billion that they created out of thin air, green paper and ink and hutzpah for the bailout they orchestrated under Greenspan's SubPrime home loans IN 2005. And they will screw us without a kiss or a contra-septic.

Are we going to let them enslave us and our progeny forever paying accumulating compound interest on the absolutely transparent grand Bailout scam?

[my3bucks]

It's even worse than that - the money will go overseas!!

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/10/rep-brad-sherman-on-bailing-out-foreign.html

[certainot]

the talk radio monopoly with its 1000 stations blasts GOP coordinated uncontested repetition to 60 MIL americans all day. and it doesn't require reading. it's right there in the car or at work. the internet is politically progressive because it is still relatively free and democratic. america would be too. but as long as progressives ignore the GOP's invisible medium they will continue to struggle uphill. the GOP very seldom does anything major that isn't coordinated with limbaugh and co. with the monopoly they know they can always have it both ways. and now they are convincing many tens of millions that the dems and obama are responsible for the economy, merely because they can lie all day long immune from correction or challenge because they seldom take real calls and progressives cant listen to them without getting a headache. the internet is an important part of bringing back democracy but we wouldn't have lost it in the first place if progressives hadn't ignored the talk radio monopoly. attwater /rove may have been the architects but talk radio does the heavy lifting.

[Glenn1441]

Spot on my friend. As repulsive a pill the bailout bill is to swallow, there is no turning back now. A revolution is indeed in the works, gaining speed at an every quickening pace -- I'd say at the same pace as... technology.

[plebeianswillrevolt]

It is pretty easy to look into the crystal ball and see a bankruptcy in America's future. This lipstick staunches the bleeding, just enough to facilitate China and Saudi Arabia's orderly withdrawal of surplus dollars from their accounts and you know they total in the trillions. So, if you are planning to go broke and default anyway, the usual pattern is to borrow and charge all you can until the day before you finally call the lawyers.

Great poster btw!