Corruption in the Republic

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted August 22, 2005.

How could one not be appalled by the porcine politics that passes for American Democracy these days? Each bill that slithers its way through this Congress soaks us more brazenly than the last.

In an economy where wages barely outpace inflation, the influence industry is booming; the number of creepy-crawlies on K Street has more than doubled in five and a half short years under the Bush Administration.

We all have our favorite exhibit of pernicious looting posing as public policy. Mine is a local phenomenon: the mega-bucks tax-payer financed sports stadium swindle. It's a perennial favorite -- some well-connected billionaire who makes the right contributions at City Hall and the Governor's mansion and is on the right cocktail circuit manages to convince a city full of hard-working Americans that they've got to buy him a new stadium. The pitch is always the same: the sweaty exertions of 'roid-raging pro athletes will bring prestige and prosperity and, most of all, jobs, jobs, jobs! As supporters of San Francisco's 3Com park pitched it: "Build the Stadium -- Create the Jobs!"

It's basically an old-fashioned grift on an enormous scale. Almost a decade ago, economists Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist undertook a study sponsored by the Brookings Institution that's considered a public-policy classic. They found that stadiums cost cities tens of million dollars of dollars in subsidies per year. Contrary to supporters' claims, "Sports facilities attract neither tourists nor new industry":

A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues. Regardless of whether the unit of analysis is a local neighborhood, a city, or an entire metropolitan area, the economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimus.

But despite the debunking of the economic rationale (in subsequent studies as well) we keep falling for it. And our cities' fat cats -- the D.C. power-broker lawyer, the Cleveland shipping magnate, the computer direct-sales gazillionaire -- get fatter and our happy local politicians sit in the owner's box and moon for the cameras; mom and dad complain about the $8 dollar beers and $5 dollar hotdogs and never think twice about the $184 dollar chunk of concrete that they paid for even if they never once go to the park.

There is no ideological stake in objecting to such outrages. Corporate socialism isn't conservatism, it just proves that there's no public participation keeping our "leaders" honest. The only way government builds stadium after stadium for a select circle of rich guys is if they're the ones doing the governing.

It's the same at every level, most visibly in D.C. Last month Molly Ivins wrote that we're "pigging out on pork", and Paul Krugman lamented that what passes for governance these days is little more than "machine politics at work, favors granted in return for favors received."

Ivins and Krugman look at a particularly corrupt administration but fail to see the ungovernable beast behind it, the hot blood of tax dollars coursing through its veins. The problem isn't that you can go to OpenSecrets.org and find out who owns your representative and how much they paid for him or her, it's that there has to be an OpenSecrets.org in the first place.

But while it's easy to gripe, it's harder for us to recognize the fact that the sorry state of affairs in government today is truly a monster of our own creation. I have seen Dr. Frankenstein and he is us.

We've built a country -- the nation founded as a bold experiment in self-governance -- into a glorious monument to apathy, a beacon of democratic neglect so far removed from the ideals we hold dear as to be completely unrecognizable.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, a hero of the Revolution and member of the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson wrote of the role citizens played in keeping the government's nose to the grindstone: "If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves."

Jefferson and his fellow Framers understood that we'd lose control of our government the further distanced from its workings we became, and the less we believed in our capacity to govern ourselves.

Joshua Holland is a fair-trade activist, a freelance writer and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer blog.

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