Throw Them All Out!

The anti-incumbent mood in this country is mounting, just as exceptionally-well funded Congressional Super Political Action Committees are flooding the market with their messages, looking for the willing and compliant candidates to support, in an election year that will break all records for campaign money spent. Billionaires and ultra-conservative corporations, still blessed under Citizens United with the ability to spend anonymous cash with very few strings, are letting Republican candidates know that if they toe the line on raising any taxes and fight for a deregulation in every corner from Clean Air to Wall Street trading practices, they will be blessed by these denizens of cash. And with the massive use of such Super PACs, Republican candidates who tout other principles can be viewed as out-of-step with this pervasive message. But well-connected candidates, Democrat or Republican, are playing this game… even though they have to skirt the edge of a rule that prohibits direct control and cooperation between PAC and candidate (the latter are still regulated).

“Several new super PACs have sprung up in recent months with the explicit aim of helping a particular lawmaker, including Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.). There are also super PACs that have formed to oppose the reelections of Sens. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.)... Former Minnesota senator Norm Coleman (R) has launched the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, which will focus on preserving the Republican majority in the House. A former top aide to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) launched a super PAC in October called YG Action Fund, named for Cantor’s “Young Guns” conservative recruitment effort... Brett G. Kappel, a campaign-finance lawyer at Arent Fox, said the emerging system is rife for abuse because the FEC rarely seeks to enforce rules prohibiting coordination between candidates and independent groups.” Washington Post, November 30^th.

The willingness to appease “funders with messages” in order to benefit from the funding is a pretty nasty “how much will you pay for my vote” seeming conflict of interest, but given the massive cost of seeking office – particularly in elections for House seats that run for only two years – anyone who thinks “pay-for-play” is illegal and enforced is living on another planet. If you track the expenditure of money on political campaigns by big corporations and America’s richest people, your graph comparison will pretty much parallel the increase in wealth attributed to this top segment of our population. They have bought special treatment and are clearly enjoying its fruits.

Obviously, conflicts of interest are nothing new on Capitol Hill. Try another one on for size: As a piece that ran on CBS’ 60 Minutes on November 13^th pointed out with examples of stock purchases by sitting members of Congress, while people are not permitted to trade stocks on non-public, inside information under federal statutes, Congress currently has a huge loophole through which armored cars carrying vats of cash can drive through: “Classic insider trading usually involves senior company officials who use their inside knowledge about their firms to benefit themselves financially. It is prohibited by law. No law explicitly prevents members of Congress from profiting on information they pick up in briefings about companies, industries or the economy...

“The potential conflicts posed by lawmakers’ investments have received growing media coverage in recent years, in articles in The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic magazine. [Peter] Schweizer [author of the recent book, Throw Them All Out, and a Hoover Institution fellow] said he decided to focus on congressional stock trades after reading a Post article in December 2010 about how Armed Services Committee members are allowed to own stock in major defense companies, even though they require presidential appointees to divest in any company that does at least $25,000 in business with the Pentagon.” Washington Post. Prominent Democrats Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi stand accused of engaging in this practice in addition to a number of Republican Congressional members.

With the public mood dark and nasty, Congress seems to have realized that they need to clean up their own act, and suddenly bills that would ban this Congressional insider practice are gathering momentum. While she had been totally ignored for months, “[Representative Louise] Slaughter [D-NY, now] has 127 co-sponsors, up from the nine she had on Nov. 12, the day before ‘60 Minutes’ aired a piece highlighting investments that congressional leaders made in companies while legislative efforts were underway that may have affected stock values... Indiana University law professor Donna M. Nagy, an expert in securities law, [believes] congressional ‘insider information’ would be treated as property of the United States. Prosecutors could make a fraud case against lawmakers who ‘secretly misappropriated government property for their own personal benefit,’” she said.” The Post.

It’s no surprise that the purported home of free-wheeling capitalism would base who wins or loses in most national campaigns all-too-often on the candidate with the biggest war chest, and today, that war chest doesn’t even have to be generated by candidates soliciting direct campaign contributions. Super PACs are waiting in the wings. I am beginning to think that we can solve our deficit issues and become a vastly less hypocritical nation if we simply put public office out to the highest bidders and use the cash to reduce the deficit directly!

To make matters worse, we are addicted to military spending, and it reaches into so many Congressional districts that depend on the fact that the US spends between 44-47% of the world’s total military budget. Military manufacturers know how to apply local political pressure (and spend lots of money) in an election. “Much if not most, of today’s financial imbalance stems from America’s addition to military spending, which ‘has warped virtually every aspect of national life, with consequences that are quite radical in their cumulative effect on the economy, as well as on the vast machinery of official secrecy, on the country’s sense of itself, and on the very nature of national government… Almost no one alive today has a mature, firsthand memory of a country that used to be very different – that was not a superpower…committed to JFK’s vow to ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty’; …that did not shroud the workings of its government in secrecy; that did not use ends-justify-the-means logic to erode rights and liberties; that did not undertake protracted wars on the president’s say-so; that had not forgotten how to invest in urgent needs at home; that did not trumpet its greatness even as its shortcomings became more obvious.’ Sadly, in the America which has evolved over roughly the last fifty years, Washington DC bureaucracy, ‘with its bottomless pot of military contracts and homeland-security consultancies… its long arms and trillions of dollars in spending reaching out to every congressional district in the country… has warped almost every aspect of society, split the country into two classes, and deflected attention from urgent problems.’” [VANITY FAIR – Jan 12] as cited in the Duitch Consulting Group, Bulletin for December 18^th.

Given our proclivity to reward spending money with public office, here’s a thought that could apply equally to the United States: “In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon asked China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, for his assessment of the French Revolution, 183 years after the revolution’s conclusion. Zhou’s response: “It is too early to say.’” FastCompany.com, December 1^st. What would Lincoln do?

I’m Peter Dekom, and wouldn’t it be nice to live in a country, as I am sure our founding fathers intended, that is truly representative of the people – er “human” people?