Campaign Finance Reform

Campaign Finance Reform is bullshit!  If you disagree, give me a few minutes.

1. Everyone (well, political junkies!) knows that incumbency is the single most important factor in determining who will win most elections.  The people prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t.  Mostly because most people don’t spend a lot of time following political news, but at least they know the name of their incumbent.  In addition, Americans routinely trust Congress overall somewhere beneath bank robbers, while at the same time praising their own Congress person.  How can this be?  Americans are not typically rational creatures with a command of relevant facts, that’s how.
2. Big Money, which is what campaign finance reform is all about, rarely determines election outcomes.  How else explain the phenomenon of Big Money funding both sides of the debate, then finally going all-in with the candidate who appears to be winning?  So, money does not decide an election, it follows the election, obligating the winning candidate – the new law maker – to the source of the money.  So, it’s not really about helping a candidate to win, it’s about gaining access to writing laws that favor the source of the Big Money, like General Electric, or Apple.  Both of whom want special favors written into the tax code that they will be happy to pay for.  Mostly invisible things that Republicans and Democrats can agree on.
3. Elections that are blow-out affairs – like Bernie Sanders in Vermont and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) in New York’s 14th District – don’t rely on money to win.  Money will never beat them, and rarely tries.  Why?   Because their constituents know them, and they have earned their trust, and what more do you need?  Money is never a factor in blow-out elections.  In elections that are close, on the other hand, how can you pinpoint exactly what single factor determined the winner?  So, money becomes a simple-minded answer to the question: “why did I win or lose?”
4. In times of change, tidal forces will determine many races at a party level and be infinitely more important than money thrown at TV ads for individual candidates.
5. Campaign Finance Reform attracts Democrats more than Republicans.  Because Republicans seem more connected to Big Business and Super PACs.  But examine the underbelly of powerful Democrats in the Senate and the House at Opensecrets.org – Pelosi and Schumer – and see who backs them!  The same folks who back Republicans.  Big Money doesn’t care if we elect Republicans or Democrats, it only cares that they write the laws!  Do you think that Obamacare was written by Democrats?  My friend, if you believe that then I have a bridge I want to sell you.  Obamacare was written by the Health Insurance lobby and Big Pharma, not by Democrats.  Democrats – real Democrats – want something like Medicare for All.

"OK, but we know – don’t we – that money in politics is a corrupting thing, right?"

Yes, but not because it determines the results of any particular election.  Money wants access, money wants favors, money wants to rule.  And money does rule.

There is only a problem if you think you live in a democracy and that is important to you.  If living in a democracy is not important to you, you have wasted your time reading the first 500 words of this piece.  We think we live in a democracy because we get to vote, pretty much everyone has the right to vote.  But that is universal suffrage, not democracy.  The word democracy was borrowed from the ancient Greek and it means the people rule.  But We the People do not rule, Big Money rules.  And there is a stolen-from-the-Greek word for that too, and it is plutocracy, wealth rules.  Remember Pluto?  Not the adorable Disney dog, and not what used to be the 9th planet from the Sun, but the Greek god Pluto, god of the Underworld and of Wealth, and brother to King Zeus.

So, it’s not about Campaign Finance Reform, as that only makes it easier for a poor Democrat to win an election.  It is about who gets to rule, to write our laws.  The U.S. Constitution and its amendments do not mention the word corporation or any word like it at all.  Why not?  Because a corporation – or any business entity – in those days was what we would call a small business today.  The Revolutionary period pre-dates by decades the Industrial Revolution and factories and great concentrations of wealth.  It was only in the Gilded Age (1870 – 1900) that corporations finally convinced the Supreme Court that corporations were entitled to Constitutional Rights!  But corporations only began to really assert their political power from 1970 on.  Merely repealing the Citizens United decision is a Trojan Horse that Big Money won’t fight terribly hard to defeat.  Giving Congress the power to write campaign finance legislation is a toothless response, because – why would they? they are the beneficiaries of our plutocracy.

We need to defang corporations and Big Money in politics and governance.  Only natural persons (that’s you and me, friend) have Constitutional Rights; and money is not protected speech under the first amendment (because you and I would never be heard, unless you are Jeff Bezos).  We need a Constitutional amendment that says THAT.