by Robert Reich
Who’s buying our democracy? Wall Street financiers, the Koch
brothers, and casino magnates Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.
And they’re doing much of it in secret.
It’s a perfect storm:
The greatest concentration of wealth in more than a century
— courtesy “trickle-down” economics, Reagan and Bush tax cuts, and the demise
of organized labor.
Combined with…
Unlimited political contributions — courtesy of
Republican-appointed Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy, in
one of the dumbest decisions in Supreme Court history, “Citizens United vs.
Federal Election Commission,” along with lower-court rulings that have expanded
it.
Complete secrecy about who’s contributing how much to whom —
courtesy of a loophole in the tax laws that allows so-called non-profit “social
welfare” organizations to accept the unlimited contributions for hard-hitting
political ads.
Put them all together and our democracy is being sold down
the drain.
With a more equitable and traditional distribution of wealth,
far more Americans would have a fair chance of influencing politics. As the
great jurist Louis Brandeis once said, “we can have a democracy or we can have
great wealth in the hands of a comparative few, but we cannot have both.”
Alternatively, inequality wouldn’t be as much of a problem
if we had strict laws limiting political spending or, at the very least,
disclosing who was contributing what.
But we have an almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and unlimited
political spending and secrecy.
I’m not letting Democrats off the hook. Democratic
candidates are still too dependent on Wall Street casino moguls and real casino
magnates (Steve Wynn has been a major contributor to Harry Reid, for example).
George Soros and a few others have poured big bucks into Democratic coffers. So
have a handful of trade unions.
But make no mistake. Compared to what the GOP is doing this
year, Democrats are conducting a high-school bake sale. The mega-selling of
American democracy is a Republican invention, and Romney and the GOP are its
major beneficiaries.
And the losers aren’t just Democrats. They’re the American
people.
You need to make a ruckus. Don’t fall into the seductive
trap of cynicism. That’s what the sellers of American democracy are counting
on. If you give up on our system of government, they win everything.
This coming Monday, for example, the Senate has scheduled a
cloture vote on the DISCLOSE ACT, which would at least require that outfits
like the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s “Crossroads GPS” disclose who’s
contributing what. Contact your senators, and have your friends and relatives
in other states — especially those with Republican senators (who have been
united in their opposition to disclosure) — contact theirs. If the DISCLOSE ACT
is voted down, hold accountable those senators (and, when and if it gets to the
House, those House members) who are selling out our democracy for the sake of
their own personal ambitions.
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