Money Men Say, Voters Move
Over, It’s Not Your Election!
Appalled at the chaotic GOP
presidential race and the ascendancy of Trump and Cruz, those with the gold
want to rule.
David Brooks is a worried man.
Like many establishment
Republicans, the conservative columnist for The New York Times sees the
barbarians pouring through the gates and fears for both his party and the
republic. Hail, Trump! Hail, Cruz! It’s enough to send a sober centrist dashing
through the Forum in search of a cudgel.
There was Brooks on a recent
edition of the PBS NewsHour, his angst spilling out across the airwaves
like fog from a nightmare: “I wish we had gray men in suits,” he told Judy
Woodruff, conjuring in some nostalgia-minded the courtly cabal of well-heeled
businessmen who drafted war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president as a
Republican.
“We don’t have that,” Brooks
continued. “But the donor class could do something.”
Ah, yes. The donor class!
Those deep pockets flung open even wider by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United
decision just six years ago, permitting the richest of the rich to pour even
more of their fortunes into control of our electoral process. Brooks was saying
openly what many of them are thinking privately: Only we can save the party
from the megalomania of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and protect our precious
status quo.
How best to do this? Brooks
suggested that panicked “state legislators who are Republicans, congressmen,
senators, local committeemen” should join with the donors “so they don’t send
the party into suicide.” Makes sense — many of those very same folks already
are deep in hock to the donors, their contributions often laundered via
entities with high-falutin’ names – ALEC,
for one, the American Legislative Exchange Council that lends a helping
corporate hand to legislators eager to write favorable laws, provide tax
breaks, dismember public employee unions and privatize government services.
Game’s over, voters: The
oligarchs will decide this election.
As Brooks’ vision of a coup
unfolded, the donors and their allies would handpick their candidate,
“winnowing the field.” He reiterated his NewsHour lamentations with a New York
Times column headlined “Time
for a Republican Conspiracy!”
So let’s get this straight:
One of the most prominent of Republican elites in the country, who has even
been touted as President Obama’s “favorite pundit” (we’re
not making this up!), is calling on the donor class to rescue the party
from the rabble. Game’s over, voters: The oligarchs will decide this election.
For that’s what they are: a
small, unbelievably wealthy group of the powerful and privileged who already
have a tighter grip on our nation, its government, politics and economy than
the rapacious robber barons of our first Gilded Age. Brooks and like-minded
elites believe they must be trusted to do the right thing. Let them be the
Deciderers.
Count billionaire Charles Koch
among them. He recently told
Stephen Foley of the Financial Times that he was “disappointed” by the current
crop of Republican presidential candidates and especially critical of Trump and
Cruz. “It is hard for me to get a high level of enthusiasm,” he said, “because
the things I’m passionate about and I think this country urgently needs aren’t
being addressed.”
Koch said that he and his
well-oiled machine had given each of the candidates a list of issues it wants
addressed but “it doesn’t seem to faze them much. You’d think we could have
more influence.” In other words, if you’re going to spend $900 million on this
election, as Koch and his cronies plan to do, shouldn’t you get what you paid
for?
Yes, we know: money can’t
always buy an election. If it could, Mitt Romney would just be finishing his first
term as president. Or Jeb! Bush, whose super PAC runneth over with $100
million in cash, would be leading the pack. So far he’s not even been able
to get his silver foot on the first rung of the ladder.
But to the oligarchs,
bankrolling an election campaign isn’t all that it’s about. They contribute now
for the day when the electioneering is over and the governing resumes. That’s
when their investment really begins to pay off.
In the words of the veteran
Washington insider Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center for Budget and
Policy Priorities and former chief economic advisor to Joe Biden, “There’s this
notion that the wealthy use their money to buy politicians; more accurately,
it’s that they can buy policy.” Environmental policy, for example, when it
comes to energy moguls like the Kochs. And tax policy.
Especially tax policy.
Bernstein was quoted in one of
the most important stories of 2015 – an investigation
by The New York Times into how tax policy gets written. Unfortunately, this
complex but essential report appeared between Christmas and New Year’s and
failed to get the attention it deserves.
Here’s the heart of it.
With inequality at its highest
levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government
should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest
Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus
for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the ‘income defense industry,’
consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and
anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers,
virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means…
Operating largely out of
public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in
private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used
their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax
them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to
only several thousand Americans.
That “private tax system”
couldn’t have happened without compliant politicians elected to office by
generous support from the donor class. As the right-wing billionaire Richard
Mellon Scaife put it: “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?”
Sam Pizzigati knows how it
happens. He’s been watching the process for years from his perch as editor of
the monthly newsletter Too Much!
Reminding us in a recent report that “America’s 20 richest people — a group
that could fit nicely in a Gulfstream luxury private jet — now own more wealth
than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152
million people,” Pizzigati concludes that one reason these and other of
America’s rich have amassed such large fortunes is that “the federal tax rate
on income in the top tax bracket has sunk sharply over recent decades.”
So here’s the real value of
all that campaign cash and lobbying largesse: underwriting a willingness among
legislators and government officials to bend the rules, slip in the necessary
loopholes and look the other way when it comes time for the rich to hide their
fortunes.
This is the status quo to
which the donors cling so tightly and clutch their pearls at the prospect of
losing. But now, with Trump seemingly ascendant, some of those who might have
been relied on to support a donor revolt are betraying Brooks’ call for a coup,
weakening in their resolve and beginning to think that maybe the short-fingered
vulgarian isn’t such a bad idea. Despite his populist brayings, they hope, he
might well be brought into their alliance.
Which brings to mind a line
from the movie version of the musical Cabaret. In pre-Third Reich Germany, the
decadent Baron Maximilian von Heune is talking with the British writer Brian
Roberts, explaining why the elite have allowed this Hitler fellow to get a
jackboot in the door. “The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans, but they do
serve a purpose,” he says. “Let them get rid of the Communists. Later we’ll be
able to control them.”
We all know how well that
turned out.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Journalist Bill Moyers is the
managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com.
His previous shows on PBS included NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal.
Over the past three decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is
the author of many books, including Bill
Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Moyers
on Democracy, and Bill
Moyers: On Faith & Reason.He was one of the organizers of the Peace
Corps, a special assistant for Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior
correspondent for CBS News and a producer of many groundbreaking series on
public television. He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys, nine Peabodys, three
George Polk awards and is the author of three best-selling books.
Michael Winship, senior
writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America-East, was
senior writer for Moyers & Company
and Bill Moyers’ Journal and is senior writer of BillMoyers.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment