Third World America - Arianna Huffington [47]
And while the GOP’s decision to respond to the election of President Obama by transforming itself into the Party of No certainly gives that slice of conventional wisdom the surface patina of insight, dig a little deeper and you’ll discover the much uglier truth: Over the past thirty years, the two parties have actually become much more alike—both deeply in the pocket of the big-business masters who fill their campaign coffers.
American politics is indeed “broken”—but not because our leaders are at one another’s throats. It’s broken because the founding democratic principle of “one man, one vote” has been replaced by the arithmetic of special interest politics: Thousands of lobbyists plus billions of dollars equal access and influence out of the reach of ordinary Americans.
The consequences of this corporate takeover of our democracy couldn’t be more profound and far-reaching, affecting every aspect of our lives—from the cleanliness of the air we breathe and the water we drink to the safety of the food we eat, the medications we take, and the products we buy, to the stability of the economy that allows us to keep our jobs, afford our houses, and pursue our dreams.
All of these and more are being dictated by a system of government that determines its priorities in a bazaar of influence peddling.
There’s an old joke about a cop who comes upon a drunk crawling around under a streetlight. “What are you doing?” he asks.
“Looking for my keys,” the drunk answers.
“Where did you lose them?”
“Over there.”
“Well, why are you looking for them here?”
“Because the lighting is better.”
Do you ever find yourself wondering why laws that make no sense get passed while laws that would seem like no-brainers never make it out of committee? Why some issues get pushed to the front of the line, while others die from lack of attention? The answer is simple. Like the drunk following the light, politicians follow the money and the clamor of noisy special interest groups—leaving the interests of middle-class Americans, like so many car keys, forgotten and left behind.
Some people look at laws and ask, “Why?” or “Why not?” I look at laws and ask, “Who paid for them?”
THERE ARE NO LOBBYISTS FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM
Since 1964, the American National Election Studies at the University of Michigan has regularly asked voters whether they think the U.S. government is run “for the benefit of all” or “by a few big interests.”1 In the mid-1960s, only 29 percent thought “big interests” ran the nation.2 By the mid-1990s, that number had climbed to 76 percent. And in 2008, 80 percent of Americans surveyed told the Program on International Policy Attitudes that they believed government was controlled by “a few big interests looking out for themselves.”3
That shouldn’t be a surprise: Over the years there has been an explosion in the number of lobbyists in Washington and the money they spend. In 2009, more than 13,700 registered lobbyists spent a record $3.5 billion swaying government policy the special interests’ way, double the amount lobbyists spent as recently as 2002.4, 5
With 535 members of the Senate and the House, that means lobbyists in the halls of power outnumber our elected representatives almost 26 to 1. If we divide $3.5 billion evenly among the 535, it means each member of the legislative branch was at the receiving end of $6.5 million worth of special interest arm-twisting over the course of the year.
And that’s just the money corporate America is spending on lobbying. Millions more are given directly to politicians and the political parties. From 1974 to 2008 the average amount it took to run for reelection to the House went from $56,000 to more than $1.3 million.6, 7
For an example of how special interests took advantage of this inflated price tag, let’s look at the financial sector, which was front and center in the fund-raising explosion.8 Over the past two decades, it was the top contributor to political campaigns. According to Simon Johnson and James Kwak in their book, 13 Bankers, from 1998 to 2008 “the financial sector spent