Have you noticed that the majority doesn’t rule anymore?  No generation of Americans has been as thoroughly polled as this one, yet our government frequently ignores the will of the people and pursues some other agenda instead.

A majority of Americans, for instance, believes that there should be a safety net for the disadvantaged, yet the welfare system was all but dismantled under the Clinton administration, and President Bush is championing tax cuts that benefit the rich while cutting programs for the poor.  Likewise, most Americans want to protect the environment, yet the government pursues an energy policy that’s heavy on fossil fuels, light on renewable resources, and reluctant to provide incentives for conservation.  Most Americans don’t support violating the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty, either, yet the National Missile Defense system now seems like a foregone conclusion.

So what went wrong?  Isn’t this supposed to be “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people?”

What went wrong is that we’ve gotten democracy mixed up with capitalism.  In democracy, each person gets one vote.  In capitalism, each dollar is one vote; hence, people with more dollars get more votes.  That’s tolerable at the shopping mall, but not in the government.  A small but powerful minority of wealthy Americans is gradually buying itself more favors from the government, more advantages, more opportunities than other people can afford.  It is no accident that the gap between rich and poor is widening in this country.  The rich are using the government to play Robin Hood in reverse, and their most effective tool by far is the corporate campaign contribution.

It is certainly no secret that corporations are in business to make a profit, and a profit is what’s left over after a company has used some of its earnings to pay off all of its production costs. Everybody knows that one way a business can increase profits is by raising the selling price of its product.  That sometimes backfires, though, by causing consumers to buy less of the product.  So many businesses prefer instead to increase their profits by spending less money to make their product.  Let’s say, for example, that it costs General Motors $15,000 to make a car that it sells for $20,000.   If Ford can make a comparable car for $12,000 and still sell it for $20,000, Ford is a serious threat to GM.  For that reason, corporations compete with each other, not only over the prices they charge, but in terms of their production costs as well.

When corporations can pass off their production costs onto someone else, then, they do it.   We call this “externalizing” their costs.  This is bad for the economy in general and bad for consumers in particular, but it’s great for the corporations that can pull it off because it allows them to cut way down on those nasty expenditures that eat into their profits.  And here’s where the government comes in.  America’s biggest corporations have found that the government is the best place by far to try to externalize their costs.  Therefore, they've been tampering with our democratic processes so that they can have a bigger voice in politics than they’re supposed to.

Oil and gas corporations, for example, don’t want to have to pay the full cost of exploring for new oil fields.  Those darned things are hidden underground, after all, and are very hard to find.  So instead of paying the cost of exploration themselves, oil corporations like Exxon and Shell send lobbyists to Washington to convince lawmakers that it's best for the nation as a whole if the federal government pays the lion’s share of oil exploration costs.  That way, these lobbyists argue, the corporations can charge less for their product, and then American consumers can have inexpensive gas and be happy.  We should know better, of course.  After all, we're the ones paying for that oil subsidy.  The money we think we’re saving at the gas pump still gets pumped out of our wallets in the form of higher taxes that eventually go to Exxon anyway.

In a similar manner, lumber companies have lobbied Congress so that the U.S. Forest Service sells them the trees in our national forests at bargain basement prices.   That way, according to the timber lobbyists, American consumers can get inexpensive lumber products and be happy.  Timber lobbyists are so good at their jobs that they’ve even got the Forest Service using tax money to build logging roads for them.   In fact, the Forest Service has already built nearly 400,000 miles of roads through our national forests.  That’s eight times the total mileage of America’s entire interstate highway system, all built with our tax dollars just to cut expenses for rich lumber corporations like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific.  How’s that for externalizing costs? On average, the Forest Service sells timber to these corporations at the rate of about $2 per tree.  Yet it costs the Forest Service (and us) about $4 per tree to build the roads that make those trees accessible for harvesting.  The Wilderness Society estimates that the U.S. Forest Service runs at a loss of about $2 billion a year.

Another way to externalize costs is to get somebody else to clean up after you.  For years, mining corporations were the masters of this ploy.  They were permitted to tear apart the land and poison groundwater, then leave it to local taxpayers to try to repair the environmental damage.  Thanks to some new regulations, however, mining companies now have to put up bonds for cleanup, thereby internalizing one of the most expensive costs of mining.  Many other types of corporations, however, still dump their toxins into rivers and landfills rather than pay the cost of having that stuff safely contained and hauled away.  And we pay the price.

Allowing companies to externalize their costs is very bad for the environment, and not just in terms of pollution.  By keeping prices artificially low, cost externalization encourages consumers to squander natural resources as if they were unlimited.  Look at it this way:  if the Weyerhaeuser Corporation (the self-proclaimed “Tree People”) had to pay the full cost of harvesting timber in our national forests, the company would have to pass that cost along to consumers in the form of higher prices.  Those prices would realistically represent the scarcity of the timber and the difficulty of bringing it to market.  Those higher prices would make consumers think twice about how much lumber we really need.  And that’s a good thing.  Some people might actually decide that they can live without that new deck after all.

All these forms of externalizing costs go under another, less glamorous, name:  corporate welfare.  And this is what corporations are after when they involve themselves in politics.  In order to externalize costs and seek other advantages, corporations make huge contributions to candidates and political parties.  They also send an army of highly paid professional influencers, lobbyists, to devote themselves full-time to getting a private audience with our lawmakers.  As of 1999, there were an astonishing 38 lobbyists for every member of Congress!  Just for fun, try setting up a meeting sometime with your senator or representative.  See how that goes.  Then ask yourself if you might have better luck if you had donated a few thousand bucks to his or her last election campaign, or if you could afford to pay someone to sit right outside his or her office door for 10 or 12 hours a day.

For many big corporations, campaign contributions are just another part of doing business, just another kind of investment.  And it’s an investment that pays off.   Economist David C. Korten writes: “…by investing $1.2 million in campaign contributions the Glaxo Smith Kline pharmaceutical corporation won a nineteen-month patent extension on the drug Zantac that was estimated to be worth $1 billion, a net return of 83,333 percent.  Eight million in campaign contributions preserved a logging road subsidy worth $458 million to the logging industry—a 5,725 percent return.  For a mere $5 million the broadcasting industry secured free digital TV licenses worth $70 billion for a 1,400,000 percent return on their investment.”

Interestingly, we have political bodies whose sole purpose is to watch over and regulate corporations to keep them out of such mischief.  But these regulatory commissions are nearly always headed by people who once worked in the very industries they’ve been chosen to regulate.  And when their term is up, they often go right back to work in the same industry they just regulated.  How’s that for letting the fox guard the hen house?  Think about it.  Can you name a single regulatory agency that has ever been headed by someone who came from a labor union, environmental organization, or a consumer protection group?  Wouldn’t that make more sense?  But no, they all come from Big Business.  We have former oil men “regulating” the oil industry, former broadcasters “overseeing” media mergers, and former timbermen “supervising” logging operations.  Why?  Because these guys are appointed to their positions by elected officials, and those elected officials owe their offices to big campaign contributors.

Shortly after their election, President Bush and V-P Cheney (both former oil men) put together a task force to examine the energy “crisis” and to propose a plan to solve it.  The task force came back with the not-so-surprising recommendation that we build 1300 power plants as quickly as possible.  Of the 63 people appointed to serve on this task force, 62 came from the oil, gas, and coal industries.

(From adbusters.org)

Let's look at it another way: Why is the government still subsidizing the oil and gas industries?  In general, government subsidies aren’t unusual, but they are typically granted to promising young industries that need a little help getting a foothold in the market, and the idea is that the subsidy will be withdrawn as soon as the business is up and running on its own.  The oil and gas industries, however, are hardly young.  What’s more, they enjoyed record profits last year.  That hardly qualifies them for favored treatment.  In fact, it should disqualify them.  So why do they get it?  Perhaps it’s because the top ten oil and gas corporations contributed $32,727,075 to the 2000 federal election races.

Hmmm.  How much did you give last year?  How much democracy can you afford?

Ever wonder why the FDA won’t require the labeling of genetically-modified foods even though angry Americans are demanding it?  Well, the top ten agribusiness giants contributed $3,939,487 to the 2000 campaign.  Did you contribute enough last year to have a say on this issue?  Probably not.  If you’re like most Americans, all you had was your one little vote.

And why is health care in this country dictated, not by doctors or patients, but by insurance corporations?  Why do we allow transnational corporations to run sweatshops and to devastate the environment?  How is it that we have promoted mega-mergers in the telecommunications industry so that now only five media conglomerates enjoy a friendly little oligopoly?  The answer is always the same: lobbyists and campaign contributions.  The American people did not vote for these conditions.

One of the first bills passed in Congress in 2001 made it much more difficult for individual American citizens to declare bankruptcy, despite the fact that our current laws make it very easy for corporations to declare bankruptcy.)  Given the tenuous condition of our economy at that time, it’s unthinkable that a majority of Americans would have supported a law making it harder for people in financial distress to declare bankruptcy, but a coalition of mega-rich financial institutions managed to override the public will.  Credit and finance companies contributed more that $9 million to the 2000 federal election campaigns, nearly 70% of which went to Republicans.  George Bush himself received over $400,000 from the credit industry.  In fact, the largest single contribution received by the Bush election team, $240,000, came from none other than MBNA America Bank, the nation’s largest credit card company.  So is it any wonder that the bankruptcy bill passed?

According to the U.S. Federal Elections Commission, it now costs about $700,000 to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and about $4,000,000 to win a seat in the Senate.  Imagine that.  Think about the implications.  Last year, George W. Bush paid $186,000,000 for the presidency!  Here in American we like to say that anyone can grow up to be president, but that hardly seems realistic at these prices.  Money makes our politics a lot like any other kind of shopping: Only those who can afford the good stuff actually get the good stuff.

And we're not saying that this is a conspiracy, either.  It’s much worse than that.  If it were a conspiracy, we could identify the conspirators and bring them to justice.  But what we’re up against here is simply a harmony of interests—a lot of money and power all pushing in the same general direction, all supporting basically the same agenda in which corporations and their leaders have more say than anybody else.

Tragically, neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties have any interest in changing this situation.  They may be at odds with each other on nearly every other issue in politics, but on this they are of one mind. They each derive their power from corporate contributions.  Yes, there was a time, long ago, when the parties derived their power from the voters, but voters don’t cough up money like big corporations do, so times have changed.  You, the American voter, have pretty much been dismissed.  The parties don’t need you anymore.  Their corporate contributors give them everything necessary to maintain the status quo.  Therefore, it will take massive citizen action to drive Big Money out of our government.

You may have noticed that a handful of Democrats and even one or two Republicans do claim to favor strong measures to reform our campaign finance laws, but don’t be too optimistic about that.   Those folks are few in number, and most of them are just talking the talk in order to placate their constituents.  When push comes to shove, they quietly tack weakening amendments onto serious finance reform bills or find clever ways to kill them before they come to a vote.  You may recall that the version of the McCain-Feingold bill that finally made it out of the Senate was considerably weaker than the original bill.   And it took nothing short of the timely Enron collapse to force the House of Representatives to finally shake loose its own version of a bill on campaign finance reform.

If campaign finance reform ever really comes to pass, it would open the door for other parties, like the Green Party or the Reform Party, to become serious contenders in our elections.  Nobody in the Democratic or Republican parties wants to see that happen, and they will gladly team up to prevent it.  Naturally, corporations are eager to help the two parties maintain their power.  Toward that end, a number of corporations split their campaign contributions in almost equal amounts between the two major parties.

What all this means is that we have traded away democracy for a corporate theocracy, a system of government in which corporate CEOs and their primary investors are the high priests and the rest of us are just drones.  More and more we are in the hands of a small but powerful group of behind-the-scenes policy makers who still let us cast our insignificant votes while they grant themselves privileges through their inside connections.  They decide which candidates will get to run in each election.  They decide which issues will be brought up for public discussion.  Our job is not to think about it too much.  Our job is just to consume a lot of goods, watch a lot of television, and pretend like we’re active citizens every now and then by arguing at the dinner table about school prayer or by complaining to a radio talk show host about flag burning.

If you want to do something meaningful in the name of democracy—if you want to make elections count for something again—then support campaign finance reform with everything you’ve got.  Here are some organizations that are fighting the good fight.  Please consider joining one or two.  At the very least, read what they have to say and sign a few of their petitions.