This morning, the breathless surprise of the morning hosts of MSNBC apparently discovering the “fusion” between the Tech-bros and Washington political elites made me want to run a yellow pencil through my eye. Imagine the central fact of our political system advanced as a surprising event; as if no one had ever noticed that amassing and disbursing of money is the central feature of our entire political system. It was dispiriting. The Oligarchs have the money, social media and AI, and have been operating with impunity since the beginning, so why is it surprising that they have dedicated their fortunes and prestige to purchasing power from the general store in Washington?
Even more disheartening is the apparently agreed upon naiveté that the general public will refuse to notice that since the defeat of the Democrats (the Corporatist Party- favoring regulation and regularity) by the Oligarchs, what had once been a decorously guarded embarrassment, like discovering a lovable old uncle inappropriately fondling a young niece, is now openly flaunted everywhere by the Oligarch winners.
Money is the organizing principle of our politics. No one gains office or remains in office without it. The totals of political fund-raisers are celebrated news events like Super Bowl victories. Admission to the Democratic party now appears to require anaesthetizing parts of the brain transmitting how our system works and how Democrats prosper under it, whether in or out of power. The kindest most service-oriented candidates must supplicate the most successful, (and often the greediest) citizens, twisting themselves through hoops to secure enough donations to serve the people, without going so far on the public behalf that they lose access to the money required to stay in office. (The worst just open their suitcases for the cash.)
What I would like to discuss here, is the National pretense that we, the public, haven’t fully experienced this central fact as a metastatic rampage throughout the entire body politic, binding in a Gordian knot, everything from Fentanyl overdoses, to the failures of our public education, weapons of war shredding kindergarteners, homeless enclaves shitting on our city streets and creeks, to the election of Donald Trump. All these events, including the growing bitterness and division in our public life, are collateral damage of policies making money for one sector of our population at the expense of others and protected by the Supreme Court for that reason. At some point, honesty requires withholding the benefit of the doubt from people who always wind up in the winner’s circle.
These forces have been present in America from the jump, but we could arbitrarily start for today’s purpose—from the day the Supreme Court ruled that campaign contributions were “free speech.” From that moment on, every advantage was tipped to the owners of Capital. Their TV stations and newspapers were adjudged “equal” to our single vote, pamphlet or bullhorn. In case we surrendered credulity to believing that these august, best and brightest Justices didn’t understand what they were doing, they soon doubled their chips on black with the Citizens United decision, permitting unlimited anonymous money to drown our political landscape and remove all traces of who our political class might actually be indebted to. Remaining concentrated while they were ice-picking democracy, the Court also supported gerrymandering—allowing political operatives to jigger election districts and permanently occupy political office without the inconvenience of compromise.
The Roberts Court majority never blinked before emasculating the Voting Rights Act with the Shelby v. Holder decision, releasing Southern States from requiring Federal pre-clearance before altering any voting procedures and rules, imposed on them because of their extensive history of Jim Crow, and lynching—which was only made illegal in March of 2022 by the Emmett Till Anti Lynching Law, passed in 2022 a mere 67 years after the young teenager was tortured and murdered by two white men– Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. The Shelby v. Holder decision liberated the in-broad-daylight, wholesale voter suppression disguised as the pursuit of fraud, down below “the Mason-Dumbass line”—Texas songwriter James McMurtry’s terse judgement on the South’s “peculiar institution.”
The Supreme Court has been enshrined as the arbiter of what is and is not Constitutional by the Founding Fathers. “Rogue judges” that have the temerity to criticize Presidential actions of Donald Trump, were deliberately raised above the political fray, to protect and maintain our Constitutional Republic. One might think that such awesome, unelected power would require public integrity of the highest order. The ancient Chinese understood this, and the aphorism, “Don’t reach up and adjust your cap in a peach orchard; don’t stoop to tie your shoes in a melon patch”—address not only honesty, but the appearance of honesty. Our Supreme Court has exempted itself from the rules, norms and regulations controlling every other judge and justice of the Peace in the United States. Their moral drift has been more and more perceptible of late and growing legions now suspect the Court of being a covert and partisan stealth agent planted in the heart of our Democracy.
Consider: It has been widely reported that Chief Justice John Robert’s wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, is a powerful attorney with an MA from Brown and her Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center. She is a woman reputed to have earned over $10 Million dollars in commissions. She is also a prestigious recruiter for firms like Major, Lindsay, and Africa, and works as a managing partner at another prestigious Washington law firm. These public reports also include data that she regularly introduces clients with cases before the court to her husband, the Chief Justice. Whether Clarence Thomas and his billionaire patrons chaperone such meetings, or Justice Alito triumphantly salutes the banner of the Jan.6 insurrection at his home, is unknown. However, according to Fix the Court.com, Justices, for numerous reasons, recused themselves 180 times in the last term. That’s a lot of absent Justices. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Breyer and Alito forfeited their “duty to sit” 31 times in order to hold on to relatively minor investments in companies with cases before the court. To me, that seems like eating the peach and stealing the melon, but what do I know?
If we can face the fact that the Supreme court has reinvented itself as protector of great fortunes and Conservative principles, and if we can stare directly into the uncomfortable harsh glare that our political system, recruits, selects, supports, and reinforces men and women of great ambition, (and often greed), we’re approaching clarity. If we can track how the system steers the ambition of those who are not i wealthy, to supplicate those who are, we are beginning to clarify our understanding of how our political system actually works.
Over the period of time that America’s right wing, neoliberals, and home-grown Fascists have undermined and reversed Roosevelt’s New Deal, billionaire and corporate money has colonized the halls of political power like mold. The Congress has gradually morphed into a wholly owned subsidiary of Capital, an inevitable evolution once we understand how enormous the returns-on-investment are. A $25,000 contribution that convinces a legislator to extend a patent for another 17 years or allows logging roads into a previously roadless area, is worth billions of dollars. Members of Congress’ investments so out-perform the market (because they have early knowledge of valuable information) that ETF’s (Exchange Traded Funds) like Subversive Capital actually mimic the trading of Legislators to the advantage of their clients. Might this not be taken as seriously as a bad mammogram or PSA score on a blood-test?
Since the near-total economic collapse of 2008, based on ‘liars loans’ and fraudulently evaluated tranches of mortgages (for which not a single C-suite executive paid a personal fine or went to jail), “the little people,” (meaning the ‘unconnected’ rest of us) have been spectacular failures at protecting Government programs and policies once considered essential. Foreign aid, environmental standards, pledges to defend Ukraine, Medicare, Social Security and Food stamp budgets, reasonably priced daycare, and healthcare, caps on insulin—have been swept away by a publicly Nazi sympathizing, unelected apartheid-era South African with a gadget-talent, as if the American population was simply the audience for his performance art before the President he paid for.
A major contribution to this state of affairs is quite clear. There is NO public analysis about how money actually functions in our elections. There would appear to be a taboo about ever discussing the issue on any of our television news networks—all currently leased by the corporate sector since Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine, and Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunication Act allowing 50 media corporations to gobble one another until only 3 mega-corps remained. We should be thankful for the one hour a day Democracy Now is allowed on PBS to offer us information unvetted by the corporate sector. This transfer of the public’s airwaves occurred without a whimper from a population struggling to keep up and distracted by consumption, the internet, cellphones and social media’s sexy dancing, cute animals, rude speech and conspiracy theories.
Not a single hour of the once-public’s airtime on NBCBSABC has ever been wrested from the sponsor’s hold of 28 minutes per hour of ads. There is no in-depth analysis of this core problem of money’s leaching all authority from the system, which by now has disenfranchised and harmed the majority of our citizens: murdering them with overdoses and firearms, junk food, salaries which do not support them, too expensive medicine and childcare, and— coming soon—renewed pollution, consequences of the Nazi-loving tinker Trump allowed to fire regulators, inspector generals and enforcers of regulations across the board, crippling our politics and reducing the majority of the citizens to the status of victims of their own government.
There are steps we could have taken (and could still take) as a Nation to weaken the cash-cow browsing its way through the China shop of our culture and legal system. Full Federal Funding of elections might help. Every candidate receiving the same amount, and ALL private money barred from lobbyists and corporations. [Corporations should not be allowed to contribute to public elections, because their legal mandate is to ensure profits for their share-holders, not the general public. Their employees can contribute, why should they be allowed to alter public policy to benefit only their investors? What about the Supreme Court? We should declare as a Nation that we will listen to them after they accept the same transparency, candor and laws we and all other judges are held to.
Universal or Mandatory voting (Australia does this) so that the overwhelming number of voters diminish the power of well-funded radical minorities, like those amplified by Billionaire conservatives like the Koch Brothers, Richard Scaife, Joseph Coors, and their bully foot-soldier Christian Nationalists, and the vaunted DeVos Family, still doing their best to capture the public school system for private profit.
Republicans have made themselves powerful by cooperating and networking with people who mostly agree with them. They’re not fussy. Anyone more concerned with property rights than civil rights, and solipsistic enough to consider their unlimited personal freedom the highest purpose of government, is OK. They agree on messaging and have dedicated billions to constructing networks, churches, schools, publications and cooperative endeavors seeking to capture the lion’s share of available public money and influence they feel is their due.
Democrats have weakened themselves by ice-picking any defectors from the Party’s current purity tests, [which now includes most moderately conservative American voters.] Democrats could be vowing to protect everyone’s Civil Liberties, rather than marching to war behind banners for trans athletes (certainly deserving of protection) but currently identifying at about .06% of the population. Democracy is a numbers game, and Democrats have failed to produce numbers by collating and adding Balkanized minorities populations, while leaving the rest of the spoils intact for their own wealthy and Corporate donors. Where were Democrats during the 16 years Federal wages have been frozen at $7.25 an hour, (placing full time employees smack in the center of the government’s definition of poverty. This is legal in America.
Virtue signaling will not create new housing, livable salaries, a more equitable economy, a fair tax structure or stop gerrymandering and voter suppression. There are many good people in America perhaps shy of too vividly imaging the sex lives of some communities, but who otherwise are neither prejudiced nor punitive. They could wholeheartedly support personal liberty and Civil rights struggles without embarrassment, if the Democrats did not continue to vividly remind them of issues, they might choose to camouflage with decorum. (I once asked my late, great friend, Bill Cook, Executive Director of the California Arts Council, if he’d ever “come out’ to his parents. His answer was instructive: “My parents never discussed their sex lives with me.”) Sometime live-and-let-live does not always require explicit candor
The spoils of these Right-wing strategies are swelling the table at the same time more and more chairs are being removed. Might it not be almost too late to begin demanding serious dialogues from our news providers and politicians, about strategies to protect our country and culture from being further overwhelmed and exploited by the power of concentrated wealth and a flagrantly corrupt Supreme Court majority? Are we not overdue for public discussion of what changes and adjustments must occur to keep more oil in the ground, diminish cattle herds, jet travel, stupid rocket-rides for billionaires, and personal driving, to discuss how to fairly balance the costs, of change. How will we alter our agricultural practices (which are the root of climate change) to nourishing the soil instead of flooding ruined soil with chemicals to produce crops. We have to be able to do this without making Fall guys and victims of many fellow citizens who did little wrong but take advantage of opportunities at a different time. Now, however, the Planet itself is raising its voice in warning that we have to change behavior if we hope to maintain residence here. Anyone over sixty who does not admit that, has basically given up and intends to retire with minimum inconvenience and all their toys, and pass the buck onto the next generation.
I would convert to Christianity if Elon Musk and his technocrats all abandoned Earth, (the only planet in our solar system on which we can run naked) to colonize Mars. Good bloody riddance. A pox on his tinker’s imagination. The space program has always been a disguised abandon-Earth metaphysic on behalf of those who have hastened its ruin with extractive economies. If these are National issues, we need to all bear the burdens of their costs and deliberations. When might we expect serious discussion from the poll-followers we refer to as “leaders,” to begin?