Dollarocracy

John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney “Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America” Nation Books, 2013, 284 pp. plus 38 pgs of notes

The U.S. traditional media (think Newspapers & Television) have been desperate to find a dependable revenue source.  And it appears the unending election races have become that source. As Nichols and McChesney note, the candidates in 2012 spent $2.3 billion in that presidential race plus several hundreds of millions prior to the primary conventions; there are 30 countries with an annual GDP smaller than that figure.    If all 2012 elections, including the presidential, are included it comes to a $10 billion election--almost double what was spent in 2008 and ten times what was spent a generation ago, even allowing for inflation.  These vast funds influencing elections have transformed our democracy to a dollarocracy. Welcome to the land of one dollar, one vote and good-by to one person one vote.  This is not a left vs. right contest; it is a top vs. bottom contest.

As the authors point out, this dollarocracy story actually goes back to the first half of the nineteenth century, which resulted in the 1907 Tillman Act finally making it unlawful for any national bank or corporation….to make a money contribution in connection with any election to any political office.  The election process then remained relatively stable until the 1976, Buckley v Valeo case which “asserted the fantasy that money is speech.”   We finally landed in Disneyland in 2010 with the Citizens United ruling allowing unlimited corporate contributions.

And it gets worse: loose media laws now allow partisan political commentary and negative ads to be presented as news; there is very little balanced and informed political news and comment to be found.

My Notes:

Pg. 3:  The corporate media are the immediate financial beneficiaries of our increasingly absurd election system—and the primary barriers to its reform.  To talk about the crisis of money in politics without addressing the mess that the media have made of things is the equivalent of talking about the deliberate fire without discussing the arsonist.

Pg. 4:  We term the combine that has emerged the ‘money-and-media election complex.’  It has become so vast and so powerful that it can best be understood as an entity unto itself.  This complex is built on a set of commercial and institutional relationships involving wealthy donors, giant corporations, lobbyists, consultants, politicians, spinmeisters, corporate media, and now super-PACs.  These relationships are eviscerating democratic elections and benefit by that evisceration.  The complex embraces and encourages a politics defined by wealthy funders, corporate media, and the preservation of a new status quo; it is the modern-day reflection of the arrangements that served the robber barons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Pg. 5:  The immediate effect of the money-and-media election complex is to encourage election campaigns, like those in 2012, that do not even begin to address the societal pathologies afflicting the people of the United States.  The trillion dollars spent annually on militarism and war is off-limits to public review and debate.  Likewise, the corporate control of the economy and the corporate domination of government itself get barely a nod.  Stagnation, gaping economic inequality, growing poverty, and collapsing infrastructure and social services are accorded noting more than the market-tested drivel candidates say to get votes.  The drug war, which had created a prison-industrial complex so vast that the U.S. has a greater percentage of its population imprisoned than any other nation in history, is not to be mentioned—except when obviously engaged and concerned citizens force the issue onto the ballot via the initiative process.

Pg. 79:  In the early 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists; that quickly changed and by 2012 the figure had grown to the 50 percent range.  Annual incomes for these post congressional jobs generally start at mid six figures and are not infrequently seven figures. (It is doubtful that members would jeopardize employment prospects when voting on bills.)

Pg. 104: By 1972 the total amount spent on television political advertising for all races—from the presidency and House and Senate to governorships, mayoralties, state legislatures, referendums, initiatives, and city councils, had increased threefold from 1960 to reach $37 million.  That would amount to approximately $200 million in 2012 dollars, so when we factor in inflation, the 1972 election spent around 3 percent of what was spent on TV political ads in the 2012 election cycle.

Pg. 132:  In many other democracies, where commercial broadcasting plays a smaller role and public broadcasting is relatively large, paid TV political advertising plays little or no role in the campaign process.  There is no great commercial lobby that greatly profits by ever-increasing amounts of TV political ad spending.  However, in the U.S. the public airwaves where free speech should reign have become private enclosures to which access must be bought.

Pg. 133:  Even by the early 1990s, TV advertising only accounted for 2 percent of local TV station revenues, and a decade later TV political advertising was between 5 and 8 percent of total local station TV ad revenues.  In 2012, political advertising accounted for around 20 percent of TV station revenues.  Political advertising has become a staple of the commercial broadcasting industry and the indispensable basis for its profitability.  (It is certainly not serving a watch-dog function and biting the hand that feeds it.)

Pg. 170:  TV news, or professional news in general does not tell us what to think—however, it sets the agenda, and by omission what not to think about.  For instance, if the news does not cover the effects of poverty this is not then seen as an important issue. It is also cheaper to focus on crime news.  By 1994, 39 percent of Americans regarded crime as the nation’s most pressing problem, compared to only 8 percent a decade earlier.  Yet the crime rate throughout this period was in decline.

Pg. 210:  Newt Gingrich was blunt when he told media owners in 1995 that they needed to crack the whip on their newsrooms and have the news support the corporation’s politics.  “Get your children to behave,” he demanded in a private meeting with media CEOs.  It was disturbing to the right that the media gave coverage to policy positions on issues such as unions, public education, civil rights, progressive taxation, social security, and the environment.

Pg. 219:  Conservative media actively campaign against any proposal that might renew actual journalism.  They oppose all policy measures to address the journalism crisis, from increasing postal subsidies, enhancing public media, or breaking up monopoly media firms to create more competition.  The status quo is just fine.

Pg. 230:  Traditional TV-style advertising may not work online, but with the development of “cookies,” which allowed marketers to surreptitiously track and collect previously unimaginable and unprecedented amounts of data on individual Internet users, a new form of targeted advertising emerged.  The world is in the midst of a fundamental reformation of advertising.

Pg. 243:  Writer Jeffrey Rosen tested the effects of cookies during the 2012 campaign when he cleared the cookies off his computer and launched two distinct identities on two different browsers: one identity clearly Democratic where he visited liberal sites and the opposite on the other Republican site.  Then he returned to his favorite Web sites and found he got completely different political advertising on the sites he visited depending upon which browser he was using.  And the political ads would follow him wherever he went around the Web.

Pg. 260:  Every major reform period in American history, with the exception of the Jacksonian era, has been accompanied by numerous amendments to the Constitution,  If the problems faced at this point I the American journey are going to be solved, history suggests constitutional amendments will be a significant part of the process. 

Pg. 271:  Following is a reform agenda based on the premise that underpins the whole of this book:

*full public financing of elections

*a well-funded public broadcasting system

*subsidies to preserve print journalism where it is viable and to promote the development of “new media” journalism sufficiently substantial to fill the void created by the collapse of reporting by so-called old media.

Pg. 274:  Short campaigns are common in democracies around the world, including Britain (on average, twenty-two days), Ireland (twenty-three days), Australia (twenty-seven days), and Denmark (twenty-eight days).  For the most part, countries with short election seasons have higher voter turnout and much less costly campaigns.  How about Japan: twelve days.  The permanent character of American campaigning leads increasingly to voter burnout.

Pg. 279:  Globally, there are just eleven democracies that do not guarantee the right to vote in their constitutions, the U.S. is one of them.  While there are amendments to the U.S. Constitution that prohibit discrimination based on race (15^th), sex (19^th) and age (26^th), no affirmative right to vote exists. 

Addenda:

Adding to the problem outlined above is the newly issued April 2014 Supreme  Court’s McCutcheon v. FEC decision.  The question revolved around the word “corruption” as Congress has the power to regulate campaign contributions only if it is doing so to regulate “corruption.” So the central question raised by McCutcheon was: Is a law limiting aggregate contributions a law designed to limit “corruption?”  The Court in another partisan 5-4 decision answered, “NOPE”.