The high price of voter apathy

Money in politics has a long and ignominious history.

Corruption by money of individual politicians, and of the legislative process as a whole, hit three peaks in the history of our nation: during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, the Roaring Twenties in the last century, and the years since 2010 when the Supreme Court struck down numerous campaign finance and good-government laws, throwing the doors open to corporate and billionaire cash with its Citizens United decision.

The Gilded Age excesses led to the Tillman Act of 1907, which made it a federal felony for a corporation to donate money or anything of value to a campaign for federal office. It was gutted by Citizens United.

The political corruption of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations led directly to the great crash of 1929, causing most corporations to pull back from the political arena until the 1970s, when Lewis Powell revived it with his infamous memo to billionaires and corporate CEOs.

After the Watergate investigations revealed Nixon’s bribery and other scandals, Congress passed numerous reforms of money in politics, although the Supreme Court struck down the most consequential of them; and as long as there’s a conservative majority of at least five votes on the Court, that’s unlikely to change.

Therefore, this is the situation today:

A billionaire oligarch, Rupert Murdoch, programs his very own television news network to promote the interests of the billionaire class with such effectiveness that average working people are repeating billionaire-helpful memes like “cut regulations,” “shrink government,” and “cut taxes”— policies that will cause more working people and their children to get sick and/or die; will transfer more money and power from we, the people, to a few oligarchs; and will lower working-class wages over time.113

A small group of billionaires have funneled so much money into our political sphere that “normal” Republicans like former US senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker point out that they couldn’t get elected in today’s environment because they’d face primary challengers funded by right-wing billionaires.

The corporate media (including online media), heavily influenced by the roughly $1 billion that the Koch network, Sheldon Adelson, the Mercers, etc., poured through their advertising coffers and into their profits in the last presidential election, won’t even mention in their “news” reporting that billionaire oligarchs are mainly calling the tunes in American politics, particularly in the GOP.

Former president Jimmy Carter pointed out on my radio show that the United States “is now an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery,” in part as a result of the right-wing Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.114

Nobody in corporate media—even on the “corporate left”—is willing to explicitly point out how billionaires and the companies that made them rich control and define the boundaries of “acceptable” political debate in our country.

Thus, there’s no honest discussion in American media of why the GOP denies climate change (to profit petro-billionaires), no discussion of the daily damage being done to our consumer and workplace protections, and no discussion of the horrors being inflicted on our public lands and environment by GOP appointees.

There’s not even a discussion of the major issue animating American politics just one century ago: corporate mergers and how they damage small business and small towns.

Although it’s been this way before in American history, it wasn’t within our lifetimes. The last time the morbidly rich had this much power in American politics was in the 1920s, when an orgy of tax cutting and deregulation of banking led to the Republican Great Depression.

Our nation now faces a massive crisis provoked by the loss of democratic representation for the majority of the American electorate. Neither party today does much of anything for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, as so clearly demonstrated by a 2014 study out of Princeton showing that the likelihood of legislation passing that represented the interests of that bottom 90 percent was equivalent, statistically, to white noise.

The predictable—and tragic for our republic—result is massive voter apathy and a loss of voter engagement.