Looking back, it all seems so clear, that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. One of the few journalists who did see it coming -- Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post -- reported that "business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative arena." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. They funded think tanks that obligingly churned out study after study with results skewed to their ideology and interests. And their political allies in the conservative movement cleverly built alliances with the religious right -- Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition -- who zealously waged a cultural holy war that served to camouflage the gross economic assault on working people and the middle class.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also tried to warn us. He said President Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, eventually admitted the same thing. Senator Moynihan was long gone before the financial catastrophe on George W. Bush's watch. And David Stockman waited too long before he spoke out. Plus, not enough of us were listening to him.
The plutocrats who soaked up all the money now say the deficits require putting Social Security and other public services on the chopping block. You might think that Mr. Bush today would regret having invaded Iraq on false pretenses at a cost of more than a trillion dollars and counting, but no, just last week he said that his biggest regret was his failure to privatize Social Security. With over l00 Republicans of the House having signed a pledge to do just that when the new Congress convenes, Mr. Bush's vision may yet be realized. In fact, all of Washington now expects that it will. Fourteen of the 18 members of the new Deficit Commission are fiscal conservatives and have pledged to make sure that social security benefits are cut. As far as they're concerned, it's okay to borrow hundreds of billions to fund more tax cuts for the top 1%, but social security benefits must be cut -- to help pay for these obscene tax cuts for the super rich! And so it is that an unprecedented transfer of wealth from all the rest of us to the rich continues and expands.
In his book Neoconomy, Daniel Altman described a place without taxes or a social safety net, where rich and poor live in completely different financial worlds. "It's coming to America," he wrote. Most likely he would not have been surprised recently when firefighters in rural Tennessee would let a home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee.
More completely than ever, plutocracy buys off America's "democratic" system
On November 2nd, we witnessed the biggest commercial transaction in the history of American elections. Once again the plutocracy bought off the system. Nearly $4 billion was spent on the congressional races, including multi millions coming from independent tax-exempt organizations that can collect unlimited amounts without revealing the sources. The organization Public Citizen reports that just l0 groups are responsible for the bulk of the spending by independent groups: "A tiny number of organizations, relying on a tiny number of corporate and fat-cat contributors, are spending most of the money on the vicious attack ads dominating our airwaves." These are the words of Public Citizen's president, Robert Weissman. The Federal Election Commission says that two years ago, 97% of groups paying for election ads disclosed the names of their donors. This year it was only 32%.
Socrates again: To remember a thing, you must first name it. So let's name it: Slush funds. Donors are laundering their cash through front groups with high-falutin' names like American Crossroads, which is one of the two slush funds controlled by Karl Rove in his grand effort to revive the era of the robber barons. Laughably, Rove and the powerful Washington lobbyist who is his accomplice described the first organization as "grassroots" -- even though 97% of its initial contributions came from four billionaires.
Rove, other conservative groups, and the Chamber of Commerce have together created a "shadow party" or parallel government that is determined to be the real power in Washington, just like Rome's Opus Dei in Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code." In this shadow-party/parallel government, the plutocrats reign. We have reached what the new chairman of Common Cause and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the perfect storm that threatens American democracy. It consists of:
an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top;
a record amount of secret money, flooding into and thereby corrupting our democracy; and
a public that's becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that's raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get people back to work.
In short, democracy is being replaced by plutocracy. Right under our noses, while most of us sleep. That small fraction of one percent of us who now take from our system more than the bottom 120 million of us includes the top executives of giant corporations and those Wall Street hedge funds and private equity managers who constitute Citigroup's "plutonomy," and together they are buying our democracy and by that means are in the process changing it into a plutocracy all without most people even having a clue as to what is going on.
How could this happen? The answer is that early this year the five reactionary members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are "persons" with the right to "speak" during elections by funding ads like those now flooding the airwaves. But corporations are not people, you say; they are legal fictions, creatures of the state, born not of the womb, not of flesh and blood. They're not permitted to vote. They don't bear arms (except for the "nuclear bombs" they can now drop on a congressional race without anyone knowing where it came from.) Yet thanks to five activist conservative judges, corporations now have the privilege of "personhood" to "speak" -- and not in their own voice, mind you, but as ventriloquists, through hired puppets.
Does anyone really think that this Court's coup de grace against democracy is consistent with what the authors of the First Amendment had in mind?
You'll recall that soon after the Court's landmark decision, President Obama raised the matter during his State of the Union speech in January. He said the decision would unleash a torrent of corrupting corporate money into our political system. Sitting a few feet in front of the president, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, obviously in total denial, defiantly mouthed the words, "Not true."
Not true? Terry Forcht knows otherwise. He's the wealthy nursing home executive in Kentucky, one of whose establishments is being prosecuted by Attorney General Jack Conway for allegedly covering up sexual abuse. Conway is running for the Senate and Forcht was able to spend more than $l million to defeat him. Surprise, surprise, moneybags Forcht is the banker for one of Karl Rove's two slush funds, American Crossroads, which has spent nearly $30 million to defeat Democrats across the country.
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