Today, you’re going to hear a great deal of outrage from Democrats about the vote last night by Senate Republicans against S. 3369, the DISCLOSE Act. Some degree of this outrage is justified. The DISCLOSE Act would have required organizations spending more than ten thousand dollars on independent expenditures to benefit a campaign for federal office to disclose the identities of people and organizations donating more than ten thousand dollars to their accounts.
There are some details of the legislation that you won’t hear Democrats talking about, however. One is the fact that the legislation wouldn’t have required political advertisements paid for by independent expenditures to identify the wealthy donors who paid for them. Something else the Democrats will like to keep quiet about is that the DISCLOSE Act wouldn’t have taken effect until the current election is over anyway.
That’s particularly convenient for Sheldon Whitehouse, the primary sponsor of the legislation. He’s up for re-election this year. Whitehouse has taken $4,418,544 in direct campaign contributions, but how much more will be spent on independent expenditures to benefit his re-election campaign?
I’m not writing this to provide help to Whitehouse’s main opponent in this year’s election, Republican Barry Hinckley. Hinckley is a well-connected businessman who wants the elected government to “get out of the way” of big corporations, and proposes changing taxes so that wealthy Americans lift a smaller share of the collective national burden.
The point is that both the Democrats and the Republicans are chin deep in corporate money. Go to the Federal Election Commission search form for independent expenditures and search for information about Super PAC spending on U.S. Senate races so far, and you’ll get 1,692 pages of data.
What can you do, in the face of this immense amount of secretive spending? Refuse to be bought. Don’t get information about the candidates running for Congress where you live from the sources that the big money donors want you to use. Turn off the television, and ignore the campaign mailers that will arrive in your mailbox. Go and do some independent research into the candidates yourself. If American voters are intelligent and active citizens, the big money won’t matter.
Oh, come on – how in the world can you make such a naive last statement? Of course it’s going to matter. If everyone of the candidates is in it to enrich themselves then we’re going to get “paid for” politicians and legislation that the “highest bidders” write! If this government is going to work for the people once again (doubtful) – we’ll have to get corporations out of it completely. This means no PACs, no lobbyists, term limits and campaign finance reform that makes all elections PUBLIC and publicly funded.
(Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?) Otherwise, another great journalistic piece Peregrin. Thanks for uncovering just how bad it is and pointing us all to the information source. Great job!
I can make the statement because it’s true.
If American voters weren’t so lazy as to depend upon big money sources of political information, the money spent in political elections wouldn’t matter. The money is corrupting, but only because the American people have become corrupt themselves, too sloppy in their citizenship to research their own representatives independently, which is easy to do in this age of online information.
The big money sources are only able to dictate the terms of legislation because they’re able to drive the terms of the political debate on television and through online marketing methods that are so crass that any intelligent voter can spot them from a mile away.
The real problem is that American voters aren’t politically intelligent, and so they can’t spot these clumsy marketing methods. We raise politically ignorant, unsavvy young citizens, and it’s the fault of us adults, who believe it’s more important to help our kids practice swinging a baseball bat than it is to talk to them about what’s going on in Congress.
Naive? I don’t know about that. Idealistic? Yes.
Democracy requires us to be idealistic to work. It breaks down when people drop out of the process and stop trying, either because they’ve been taught that politics is “boring”, or because they’ve decided to become cynical.
Here at Irregular Times, we try to share some information about what’s going on in politics. We don’t do it in a way that merely mimics what any political party says in its centralized communications efforts.
That means that the message is nuanced, as it is in this article, which doesn’t take the easy tack of saying that the DISCLOSE Act was a wonderful bill. It’s more complicated than that.
But, yes, we encourage our readers to take responsibility for themselves, as citizens of the United States of America. We do believe that American citizens can overcome the corrupting influence of corporate lobbyists and political action committees.
I don’t think anyone who writes for Irregular Times believes that it will be easy to do so. It’s worth remembering, however, that “big money” gets its “big money” through the individual decisions of the American people. If ExxonMobil has lots of money to throw around to corrupt the political process, it’s because the American people burn a lot of gasoline.
We’ll identify the corrupting role that the “big money” corporations and organizations play in the process, sure. We will also call upon individual Americans to do their bit to bring “big money” down to size.
We are the problem. We have the power to make a solution.
Call me naive for not giving up on that, Tom, if you like. I prefer to think of it as persistence.