How they can do it

If you are watching national politics at all, you must have said to yourself at some point, “How can they do that? How in hell can they say those things and do those things and vote for that ridiculous legislation?” (Whatever that ridiculous legislation happens to be.) I’d like to take a moment to put it in perspective.

The primary thing to understand is that these people in Washington are not causes; they are symptoms. We humans like to think in terms of personalities and stories, with clear cut heroes and villains making decisions and duking it out. I think of politicians more like those Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, following their simple programs. These politicians of ours don’t show up in D.C. as blank slates, of course. They grew up in some particular place, learned about life in some particular way, and for some reason got interested in being in politics. They showed up with established worldviews. And they were chosen.

I’m not saying chosen in some metaphysical way. I mean that they passed through a series of tests. They had to be socially adept enough in some way to get people to believe in them, and they had to be extroverted enough (or motivated enough to fake extroversion) to deal with campaigning. They had to have a set of beliefs conventional enough to fit easily into one of the two party hierarchies. The real test, however, the test-du-la-test, is their money appeal. Let me restate the two most important facts about American politics:

1)      Whoever spends the most money in a congressional primary wins, 9 times out of 10.

2)      80% of that money comes in big chunks from millionaires and billionaires.

Ergo, those politicians who have worldviews and policy ideas that annoy the wealthy have a small chance of even competing in a primary election. Considering that the #2 and #3 spenders probably need those $1,000 checks to compete, I’d put the chances of your average millionaire-offending candidate at about 1%. There you have Senator Bernie Sanders.

Really, the whole congressional process is as predictable as bad TV drama. For any policy area, figure out what would either throw money at the symbiotic corporate/millionaire organisms or allow them to retain more of what they already have.

Taxes? Reduce income tax rates on the top 1%, lower capital gains taxes, lower inheritance taxes, don’t pursue millionaire and corporate tax cheats when they offshore their income, and shunt the burden on to regressive local property and sales taxes.

Foreign policy? Court oil despots, then loan money to them so they can buy weapons systems from our military suppliers. If one of them starts to get independent ideas, expend a few hundred billion whacking him. Nothing says “I care” like a million dollar cruise missile. Sell weapons to anybody whose financial interests match our own at the moment. Respond to international crises in the most expensive way possible.

You can fill in the blanks on labor, the environment, banking, or what have you.

The beauty part is that bribery is unnecessary. Ok, so some senators and reps get junkets, maybe discounted rent or house renovations. But that guy with the cash in his freezer, that surprised me. Why risk prosecution for bribery when 99% of the members showed up agreeing with you anyway? Why give directly when you can launder it nicely through the party of your choice? And why take money when you have a nice six-figure consulting job waiting for you when you retire? A tidy little band of millionaires picked these people for their moola-friendly attitudes. It’s like running a casino. Sure, some lucky stiff will walk off with a few thousand here and there, but that just encourages the other rubes to keep coming back. They’re the house, for chrissakes; the odds are always on their side.

Despite the cynicism and political calculation in Washington, never forget that most of these stooges actually think that supply side economics works. They think that bankers know how to run a prosperous economy and that markets can actually be unregulated. They think that expanding the Gross Domestic Product is more important than choosing how it is spent. They believe a whole bag of pixie dust that just happens to benefit the 1% of Americans who own 40% of the country. That’s why the 1% filled out those $1,000 ballots and handed them to these guys instead of reality-based candidates.

Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent piece in Salon on why Obama’s apparent ineptitude in negotiating with the GOP is actually political shrewdness. It’s just shrewdness for a political purpose, not a social one. He’s cruising down the groove that will get him reelected – give up enough to diffuse right wing opposition, placate the clueless center with homilies about the middle class, and stay just close enough to the right-shifted center so that the left doesn’t primary him. For those of you who are disappointed by this, remember that during his presidential campaign Obama was hailed as an amazing fundraiser. An amazing fundraiser from whom? Review the two most important facts, above.

As long as those two facts hold true, bank CEOs will commit securities fraud with impunity, oil companies will cheat the government on their royalty payments, and drug companies will double their prices on us. Our pseudo-elected pseudo-representatives will allow it because of a mixture of true belief and realpolitik. If any of them waver from the path they will find themselves underfunded and facing a primary challenge. Someone with a firmer adherence to the necessary beliefs will replace them. That’s how they can do it.

Comments

[Doug Riley]

The Founding Fathers were pretty prescient. In the Constitution, they designed a system that would keep several of the more predictable abuses and rackets in check.

In the Bill of Rights, on the other hand, they failed to predict how "rights" designed to protect the weak could be perverted. They made it easier than it might otherwise have been for the courts to revive certain such rackets.

The Founders simply left out a right of privacy. The Supreme Court took a run at inventing one by pretending that such a right lurked in the "penumbras" of the other Articles -- but whom are we kidding?

The right of free speech has been tortured into unrecognizability by the courts. We now have such absurdities as the "political-money-equals-protected-speech" doctrine. This, of course, is the principle behind the bribery-in-fact that the Minor Heretic describes.

The right of private property similarly has been twisted like a bonsai tree until it protects the right to defile the land (every landowner is constitutionally guaranteed a rate of return) in ways that outlive the defilers by centuries.

The sanctimonious coddling of religious institutions was just the sort of bad idea that comes of trying to please everybody. One would have thought that a bunch of intellectuals of very recent European extraction would have known better.

In the present state of division of the country, it's probably not practical to hold another consitutional convention expecting to accomplish anything. In fact, though, the old social contract badly needs a face-lift.