On the Corrupting Influence of Money in Politics, Bernie Sanders Is Dead Right

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34528-on-the-corrupting-influence-of-money-in-politics-bernie-sanders-is-dead-right

Sunday, 24 January 2016 00:00 By Eliza A. Webb

With the Iowa caucus barely a week away, President Barack Obama is weighing in on the role of money in politics, a major platform of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Obama is seriously considering taking executive action to curb the flood of money into politics by requiring corporations to disclose their political contributions.

This puts him in stark agreement with Sanders, who, at the January 17 Democratic debate, argued that money in politics is the major reason Congress cannot enact change desired by the American people.

During the health-care discussion, Sanders said:

You know what it all comes down to? Do you know why we can't do what every other major country on earth is doing? It's because we have a campaign finance system that is corrupt, we have super PACs, we have the pharmaceutical industry pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign contributions and lobbying, and the private insurance companies as well.

Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders is absolutely right about this. Congress is inundated with money spent by very large corporations in return for political action designed to maximize corporate profits.

Pfizer, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, gave $2,217,066 in political campaign donations during the 2014 election cycle (the most recent year for which data is available), and $9,483,000 more in political lobbying. As of 2014, 40 members of Congress held stock in the pharmaceutical giant.

Congress also happens to be doing nothing to stop Pfizer from charging Americans some of the highest drug prices in the world.

Bristol-Myers Squibb is another pharmaceutical behemoth charging Americans inflated drug prices while funneling money to Congress. In 2014, the company spent $259,450 in campaign contributions, and $2,745,000 in lobbying. Twenty-five members of Congress hold stock in Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Another Big Pharma company, Johnson & Johnson, gave $757,788 in political campaign contributions in 2014, and spent $5,980,000 more in lobbying. Forty members of Congress hold stock in Johnson & Johnson.

While millions of Americans fight to afford their medications, 11 corporate leviathans (all of which donate to or lobby Congress) have wrested more than $711 billion in profits for their investors.

As members of Congress constitute some of those investors, the lax regulation that allows the American people to be extorted is actually good for the politicians in charge of representing the best interests of the people.

This throws into light the reason why, unlike any other body of legislators in the world, US federal lawmakers do not regulate or restrain massive pharmaceutical companies from engaging in predatory pricing practices.

You might say the US Congress is a bit compromised.

The same lucrative financial ties that exist between politicians and the "health-care" industry exist between politicians and for-profit prison companies, oil companies, gun companies, sugar companies, other big agribusiness and Wall Street's bankers, advisers, and hedge fund and private equity managers.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) recently fought for the protection of a billion-dollar tax loophole pushed by Wall Street investors, while super PACs with close ties to Reid have received upward of $1 million from Wall Street CEOs like TPG Capital cofounder David Bonderman.

Throughout their political careers, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota), Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have gotten over $3 million combined from the oil industry. Recently, these three legislators all supported the industry's (successful) fight to lift the 40-year ban on unlimited exports of US crude oil.

In 2007, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, now a Democratic presidential candidate, gave campaign speeches attacking a tax break for hedge fund and private equity executives, but did not put her name on Senate legislation to close the loophole. In 2006, Clinton received hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct campaign and super PAC contributions from individuals working for (and PACs representing) financial institutions such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Lehman Brothers.

As instance after instance shows, Congress does not, in fact, represent the people of the United States, but rich CEOs. On both sides of the aisle, campaign donations, super PACs and corporate lobbying have morphed this country into an oligarchy, controlled by the wealthy few.

As Sanders says, the issue is not that "the Republicans and Democrats hate each other. That's a mythology from the media."

The real problem, which Sanders has correctly identified, is that "Congress is owned by big money and refuses to do what the American people want them to do.”

Kochsuckers et al. say: “Voters Move Over, It’s Not Your Election!”

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.

by Bill Moyers, Michael Winship

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/23/money-men-say-voters-move-over-its-not-your-election

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.

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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.