The Money Connection
Luc Nadeau

The money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its rule by preying upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is concentrated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
          - Abraham Lincoln

In the 1996 elections President Bill Clinton was accused of selling access to the White House to fundraisers. Roger Tamraz, an oilman who donated $300,000 in hopes of getting a White House meeting with Clinton, said in a congressional hearing on the matter, “I’m just playing by your rules,” and of his contributions to both parties, “This is a bit more than a vote.” Almost a quarter of the top fundraisers in Clinton’s 1996 campaign were given ambassadorships. 

After the 2000 election, a disturbing number of George W. Bush’s Pioneers (people who raised over $100,000 for his campaign) were rewarded with ambassadorships and at least one cabinet position. Bush also filled dozens of posts, from the Secretary of the Interior to the Assistant Secretary for Mine Safety and Health, with former managers or lobbyists from industries that they would now be regulating. Sadly, these foxes guarding our henhouses are all too common. Take Billy Tauzin, former Representative (R-La.), who received hundreds of thousands of dollars from health professionals and drug makers in his last election campaign. He was the principal author of the new Medicare drug law, which was heavily favored by health professionals and drug makers. Now he has taken a job as president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (the chief lobby for brand-name drug companies), at which he will make about $2 million per year.

I think now the entire election process, including the nomination of candidates, is predicated to a major degree on how much money they can raise.
            - Jimmy Carter 

In federal congressional elections in 2002, the candidate with the most money won 94% of the races; in the three congressional elections leading up to 2002, 98% of incumbents were reelected. Billions of dollars were raised and spent in the 2004 elections. Politicians must spend a significant amount of their time raising money for themselves and their parties. And much of the money they raise comes from lobbyists working on behalf of corporations, labor unions, and other interest groups. In 2002, according to the Center for Public Integrity, there was an average of 48 lobbyists spending $3 million on each federal legislator. Political Action Committees (PACs) – which represent groups that want to make donations to political campaigns – have increased their number substantially in the past three decades, as well as the amount of money they contribute to campaigns. Many PACs give money to candidates on both sides of the aisle, covering their interests no matter who gets elected. And it isn’t just altruism that drives all these special interest groups to support our politicians – money buys access. Many of our politicians strategize with lobbyists, and invite industry executives to help formulate policy. What about the rest of us? Money talks, and the American public walks. 

A series of regulations has been enacted to try and counteract the effect of money in politics, but these laws have been subverted time and again. The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 was severely weakened by a Supreme Court Decision (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976) that equated money with free speech (incidentally, most of the Supreme Court justices are millionaires themselves), and has been rendered ineffectual through loopholes and lax enforcement from the Federal Election Commission (FEC). In fact, the 2004 FEC chairman, Bradley A. Smith, is a staunch advocate of doing away with all campaign finance reform. (In a 1998 USA Today editorial, after stating that large contributors have no influence on politics, Smith followed with this illogic: “…large contributors usually are offset by equally well-financed interests that contribute to a different group of candidates.” Doesn’t this mean they do have influence?). The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (also known as McCain/Feingold) banned soft money giving to the national parties, but it has also suffered from intentionally poor implementation and toothless enforcement by the FEC. So, just as the rich can afford to buy more stock in a company, the rich can afford to buy more of a voice in our government. Why is spending money to buy politicians protected as free speech? According to this logic, Bill Gates' lone voice is as important as the chorus of voices of the 100 million Americans (40% of the U.S. population) whose combined income is equal to his.

If you’re wasting all your time raising money and formulating policy that benefits special interests, how do you get people to vote for you? One way is to try your damnedest not to tell the people what you stand for. Project Vote Smart notes that, in the past eight years, there has been a 20% decline in candidates who are willing to answer questions on the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT), which measures a candidate’s willingness to disclose his or her stances on issues to the voting public. One candidate said of the NPAT, “It is our job to win, not to educate.” 

Sadly, most Americans don’t see the pernicious connection between money and the legislation that affects their daily lives. Bob is a hypothetical housepainter in Alabama. He’s prone to asthma, which gets worse with increased air pollution. As Bob’s recurring asthma gets worse, will he make the connection between that and President Bush’s Clear Skies Initiative (lobbied for by the power industry, but not yet passed, this bill would actually weaken the Clean Air Act and, according to one analysis using the EPA's methods, result in the premature deaths of 100,000 more people from now to 2020 and cost $34 billion in lost work, hospitalizations, and deaths – but hey, the power companies would save $3.5 billion)? Bob takes prescription drugs to help alleviate the symptoms from his asthma, but he has to pay exorbitant fees for these medications. Does he realize he’s paying such high fees because of the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying of people like Billy Tauzin to pass the Medicare drug law? Bob decides he can’t afford the medication, but after a severe asthma attack he’s hospitalized, and is no longer able to paint. Now, with enormous debt from medications and hospitalization, and no way to pay it off because he can’t paint, Bob’s only option is to file for bankruptcy. But he can’t file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and will be forced to repay all his debts. Will he see the connection between this and the bankruptcy bill that the credit card industry has been fighting for since 1997, pouring millions of dollars into the effort via campaign contributions (over $24 million from 2000-2004) and lobbying (over $14 million in 2000 alone)? Or will Bob just go ahead and vote for Richard Shelby (R – Ala.) again, the man who received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the credit card industry, then co-sponsored the bankruptcy bill, then made sure that any proposed amendments to the bill to make the credit card companies more accountable for their role in engineering people’s debt were quashed? Assuming Bob makes it to old age, will he see the connection between his reduced social security checks and privatized social security (lobbied for intensely by Wall Street, as the financial institutions stand to gain billions of dollars through investor fees)? Maybe Bob will make the connection, but not through anything he sees in the mainstream media – who have spent millions of dollars to allow even greater consolidation of their stranglehold on our airwaves, so they can feed us their regurgitations of the official story. 

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said of himself and his fellow politicians, “we are the defenders of a campaign finance system that is nothing less than an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.” Like a virus, money in politics evolves, always trying to insinuate itself into our political system. But, like McCain and Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), there are scrupulous politicians working for campaign finance reform – raising money all the time isn’t easy, and it takes time away from their real job: legislating. One such politician was Alan Simpson (R-Wy.), who said of the state of campaign finance, “it is called ‘whoring.’ So I said, ‘that is enough for me.’ I would get rid of PACs, I would get rid of soft money, and I would get rid of the whole works.” 

In the meantime, it is our responsibility to make the connection between money and politics. Otherwise, we can’t complain if politicians like Tauzin and Shelby laugh all the way to the bank with the words of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn playing in their heads: 

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?