Day two of the Elena Kagan Supreme Court confirmation hearing saw an act of political soap-boxing by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who dedicated the bulk of his time to the left's griping over January's Citizens United decision. Some of his frustration is likely deserved -- a few responses to the ruling may have gone above and beyond the call of shrillness (further elucidation on that here). But nor was the content of Hatch's tirade without its flaws. His allusion to the decision's wide public support does not reflect polls taken in its aftermath. And as Constitutional Accountability Center founder Doug Kendall notes, the Utah Republican conveniently avoided a central argument of the case: whether corporations should enjoy the same equal rights as individuals to vote, run for office, and participate in electioneering.
Just as revealing as these outstanding blemishes though is what Hatch had to say about Utah small businesses and S Chapter corporations (small corporate-chartered entities that can have as few as one shareholder), which by his conjecture would lose free speech rights if corporate political speech were to be managed. On some issues it is expected that the business community will unite homogeneously around a common cause, such as on taxation. But bundling in small businesses and S Chapters with multinational corporations that comprise forceful "special interests*" largely ignores the way influence peddling works in American politics. When one looks to the most destructive and inane policies operative today, or to lobbying and electioneering efforts that effectively "drown out" the voice of the people, rarely is it disparate laundromat owners or lawn services that raise eyebrows.
Though Wall Street and health insurers have stolen the show this year, these are merely the latest installments in a long saga whereby the general public ultimately suffers from a concentrated industry's bloated gains. More often than not, the story is eventually told of how that industry made its own bed through policy-oriented efforts to avoid oversight and costly regulations, or to garner the largess of contracts and extravagant subsidies. For the past decade a famously egregious but hardly exceptional example of waste stemming from special interest influence is the U.S. sugar program, which pointlessly subsidizes the largest sugar producers at an estimated cost of $2 billion annually to American households. Equally concerning is the massive waste of taxpayer dollars due to an unseemly favoritism for wildly expensive defense contractors and foreign aid distributors prosecuting American adventures abroad. In fact, another salient example could be some public labor unions, which Hatch conveniently groups in with corporations as fellow influence peddlers (the implication being that equal opportunity institutional corruption is unproblematic).
Single-cause special interests in politics more resemble business cartels like OPEC than innocuous collections of freethinking but like-minded individuals. The distortive power of such highly concentrated funds on specific legislative causes cannot be overstated, and it is influence dispersed citizens and small business owners cannot match. In 1998, the year the sugar program began, it's estimated that the industry enjoyed a net gain of over $1 billion at a campaigning cost of only $2.8 million because its vast reserves of potential electioneering funds were leveraged into powerful campaign threats. Donating to a pliable candidate with the threat of funding his next opponent tenfold is common practice, and it turns $2,000 spent into $12,000 worth of influence gained. What's more, the ruling in Citizens United furnishes special interests with far more threat credibility than they previously had at their disposal because they may now run independent express advocacy ads.
This influence equally pervades all parties and campaigns, and it has a knack for building up those who are most susceptible. Very rarely do the policy victories attained partly or wholly through such means benefit anyone else. The sugar program has done nothing but reward a few large producers at the expense of billions of dollars to consumers. The regulatory breakdown in the financial sector and that sector's subsequent growth over the past two decades has resulted in a crash that leaves millions of homes underwater or in foreclosure and middle class incomes stagnant, to say nothing of the national debt to GDP ratio leaping up 30 percent. The influence of nationwide health insurers first ushered in significantly higher costs for care over time, and has now resulted in a reform bill that profoundly expands those very insurers' customer bases without challenging their status as legal monopolies.
Scenarios of this nature that benefit genuine small businesses and striving midsized S Corporations are simply nowhere to be found. Nor does the situation arise abruptly. Each is the foreseeable product of years of influence that is eternally trickling into the system widely unbeknown to the rest of us -- American workers and business owners who are busy holding a job, raising a family, pursuing an education, or just trying to stay out of the red (and wondering why sugar is always costing more and more). When politicians from both sides of the spectrum -- including Senator Hatch -- condemn waste, fraud and abuse in government, these are the types of surreally counterproductive policy scenarios of which they speak. So, it doesn't take much to see the irony in a politician simultaneously condemning waste in government while championing measures that further enable special interest participation in policy making.
* The definition I am using for "special interests" in this post is that used by the IMF's Marcos Chamon and Stockholm University's Ethan Kaplan. It states that: "Special interest groups care only about a particular policy, and do not care inherently about which candidate wins the election as long as their special interest policy is supported by the winner."
Related Readings:
Financial Reform Won't Alter Capitalism's Icarus Trajectory
The Capitalist Hagiography Has Little Room for Saints
Citizens United, the Roberts Court, and the Future of American Electioneering
Obama's State of the Union Falls Short on Correcting Citizens United
American Plutocracy: Corruption Is In the Eyes of the Beholder
Follow Stuart Whatley on Twitter: www.twitter.com/stuwhat84
Doug Kendall: Kagan Confirmation Hearing LiveBlog
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission - Wikipedia, the ...
Supreme Court Affirms a Ban on Soft Money
The Judiciary Committee's weird obsession with Citizens United
Will Elena Kagan Allow Books to be Banned?
Sessions Equates Citizens United with Brown v. Board
Kennedy Retains His Pivotal Role
And here's another example at the door of the GOP:
A colleague of mine who lives in Louisiana sends me a clipping from his local independent newspaper which blows the whistle on Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, who I have pointed out in the past is a real piece of work, a ruthlessly ambitious fraud and fake. Dishonest to the core!
The local reporter notes that Governor Jindal told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2009, soon after President Obama's stimulus program was passed, that he would have VOTED AGAINST IT. In a television response to President Obama's congressional address a short time later, Governor Jindal characterized the Obama stimulus program as IRRESPONSIBLE.
BUT last year Governor "irresponsible" Jindal spent several weeks touring the state in quest of photo ops passing out to local government officials oversize state-prop checks BEARING HIS NAME. And, of course, conveniently (for him) failing to mention that the checks bearing his name were part of the bounty for the State of Louisiana from President Obama's stimulus program.
Want to know how Governor Jindal balanced his state's budget, in BOTH 2009 and 2010?
Here it is: Governor "irresponsible" Jindal balanced BOTH his 2009 and 2010 budgets using federal stimulus money to the tune of THREE BILLION DOLLARS.
And he and his Republican colleagues said nary a word about it. No word, no thanks to the American taxpayer, nothing. Shhhhh. Cover up.
I was impressed by one of your earlier pieces but this one is kind of lost in itself...what's your point?
We MUST get private money out of our election, until we do, all of our elections are a fraud.
We are cutting our own throats by not coming together on this and the corruption that is tearing our country apart is laughing at us all the way to the bank. Campaign Reform would heal the split of the American people that big money has encouraged in order to weaken us and keep us fighting with each other.
It is the fault of lying politicians, our media, and most of all our ignorant, stupid citizens whose line of thought is no longer than a bumper sticker.
Blaming this and that politician does no good. The blame lies ultimately on American citizens. We all want what is best for our country, we disagree on how to do this, but it matters less what WE think. The will of the senate is the will of the special interests.
NOTHING will change unless we the people change it. When we regain control of our representatives, THEN is the time to argue ideology.
Until EVERYONE starts talking and blogging and marching for Campaign Reform we are just spinning our wheels discussing anything that might challenge the special interests.
http://www.fairelectionsnow.org/volunteer/petition (FENA)
http://change-congress.org/
http://movetoamend.org/
http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/petition
But I'm not holding my breath.
Too many folks as "otherwise engaged".
And the TV folks are not about to even mention it. After all, tv is the biggest recipient of campaign cash under the present bloated system.
But I agree-- this will have to happen, media coverage or not. Maybe HuffPo and the internet could get coverage. The media are very controlled. Only real news is pbs and BBC.
A significant portion of the public that are eligible to vote sit out every election. This causes an imbalance of "true majority" in the system. This is due to the fact there are those willing to motivate enough people to the polls, and spend enough money to spread their agenda (true or false), to win an election. At the same time, they find ways to use that money to disenfranchise the very voters they seek to stall going to the polls. This can be claims of tax problems finding you, debt seekers finding you, jury duty, etc...not to mention closing polling stations in undesirable areas by finessing local statistics.
Oh, this new SCOTUS ruling was a doozy folks...it says everything about where our nation is headed. And each election, those who sit idle as their country slips away could have stopped it all by participating and exercising their right as the majority. Simply by voting.
Simple...yet astonishingly complex for the feeble minded to comprehend. Change their minds and you'll change the world! Muhahahaha!
ZF
Perhaps changes can be made around the fringes with alterations of laws regarding SEC filing or similar issues but my impression of the Roberts' court is that they would find any significant attempt to restrain corporations or moneyed interests on this issue as an unreasonable restraint of speech.
Simply not sure we can ever accomplish such an amendment when the influence of moneyed interests is so overwhelming in our system at present.
If Obama wanted to be a REALLY successful President, this is the issue he would undertake with vigor.
Or...one could infuse the Tea Party with the notion that this is the issue that "would take our country back" and they could rabble rouse for it over the objections of their GOP Masters.
The "Tea Party" could be very malleable, they don't really have a platform, just slogans...what would they care if the govt funded elections insured everyone, including them, a fair chance? hmmm
Does your S-Corporations supply WalMart?
If not, you too will be out of business soon.
Please make sure you send a thank you card to Senator Orrin Hatch after your business bankruptcy hearing, after your child's school closes and after your house burns down because the fire department was disbanded due to budget cuts from lack of revenue - because the WalMart and Home Depot demanded and received a 20-year tax abatement from your city council.
The local hardware store owner paid taxes into your community for 45 years before Home Depot showed up... now he's out of business, so are all the businesses that supplied and supported him.
That goes the same for the local lumber yard owner, the local supermarket owner, the local pharmacy owner, the local carpet and tile store owner, the local appliance store owner, the local yard chemical supply store owner, the local auto tire shop, the local...
". . .the industry enjoyed a net gain of over $1 billion at a campaigning cost of only $2.8 million because its vast reserves of potential electioneering funds were leveraged into powerful campaign threats."
A "campaigning" cost? Let's say it like it is and call it a bribe. Their bribe paid off for them. And I'm sure some of the "legislators" who made it happen for them now enjoy seats on the board or executive offices within.
I seriously wonder how these people will react when Americans finally get tired of taking the shaft in all this and just cease to fill the trough for these pigs.