We, the People, call Mark Green to testify on “Selling Out. How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation, and Betrays Our Democracy”
Green: The cost of the money chase: the money chase discourages voting and civic participation; discourages competitive elections; creates ‘part-time legislators & full-time fund-raisers; deters talent from seeking office; favors millionaires; corrupts legislation. The rough cost to Americans of the private system of financing elections was $50 billion – by contrast, the cost of public financing is $500 million to $1 billion.
Green: “In a study conducted by Ellen Miller of the Center for Responsive Politics, 20% of..members of Congress admitted..campaign contributions affected their voting; only half claimed contributions had no effect, and 30% said they weren’t sure.”
Green: “The pay-to-play mentality has so seeped into our system..there now exist two classes of citizens..those for whom tax breaks, bailouts, and subsidies are granted; for whom running for and winning office is plausible; and with whom elected officials take time to meet. And then..the rest of us – the non-donors for whom taxes go up, consumer prices rise, and influence evaporates.”
Green: “When candidates are forced to spend so much time listening to the problems of the wealthy, “wrote Mary H. Cooper in ‘The CQ Researcher,’ ‘they don’t hear about how hard it is to get decent health coverage or child care. Instead they get an earful about taxes or government regulations. That the wealthy keep the president on a leash is ..[made].. obvious by what gets done in Washington – and what doesn’t.”
Green: “Anyone who has been around Congress or a state or a city council knows that over time the pay off by public officials for..PAC contributions they receive is as real and sure and certain as the sunrise..The contributions constitute gilded corruption that has no sight, no. taste, no smell, no feel, no sound, and, of course – no smoking gun..one reason..it is so insidious. The other reason is..everybody does it, or almost everybody.” [Senator William Proxmire]
Green: “Money is speech. This is Senator McConnell’s ace in the hole, a noble constitutional justification for a sleazy system. Except that even the Buckley v. Valeo he so often cites never made this pure a declaration…if money were speech, there could be no laws against saying, “I”ll give you $10,000 if you kill this bill in committee”…”Money is not speech,” wrote former Senator Bill Bradley. “A rich man’s wallet does not merit5 the same protection as a poor man’s soap box.”…Money can’t be identical to speech or else Bill Gates has greater First Amendment rights than you or me.”
Green: Justice David Souter, for the “Shrink” majority: “Leave the perception of impropriety unanswered and the cynical assumption..large donors call the tune could jeopardize the willingness of voters to take part in democratic government. Democracy works ‘only if the people have faith in those who govern, and that faith is bound to be shattered when high officials and their appointees engage in activities which arouse suspicions of malfeasance and corruption’…There is little reason to doubt..sometimes large contributions will work actual corruption of our political system, and no reason to question the existence of a corresponding suspicion among voters.”
Green: “How do you know when a democracy is in decline?……when the 0.1% of Americans who contribute $1000 or more to political candidates have far more influence than the other 99.9%; when, in an election year, it’s nearly likely for an incumbent congressperson to die than to lose; when senators from the ten largest states have to raise an average of over $34,000 a week, every week, for six years to stay in office; when the cost of winning a House or Senate seat has risen tenfold in 24 years; when it’s far easier for a working-class person to win a seat in the Russian congress than in the American one; when legislatively interested PAC money goes 7 to 1 for incumbents over challengers – and 98% of House incumbents win; when most other democracies get a 70 to 80% turnout of eligible voters, while in the U.S. it’s half in presidential elections, a third in congressional elections, and often only a fifth in primaries; when one senator and one mayor each spend more getting elected than ALL the legislative candidates in Great Britain combined.”
Green: “When Representative Jim Leach [R-IA] once suggested to an urban Democrat with no dairy constituency that he should oppose a dairy price support, the Democrat said, “Their PAC gave me money. I have to support them.”
“When former Representative Claudine Schneider [R-CT] asked a colleague to oppose more funding for a nuclear reactor, he declined, explaining, “Yes, but Westinghouse is a big contributor of mine.”
“Former Representative Al Swift [D-WA] recalled how “one PAC director told me that he heard colleagues saying that they wanted to deliver a check just before the vote but also..members were calling EXPEDITING checks before a vote.”
“Former Representative Dan Glickman [D-KS] asked a colleague to oppose a bill to prohibit the Federal Trade Commission from regulating auto dealers. “I’m committed,’ answered the colleague. “I got a $10,000 check from the National Automobile Dealers’ Association. I can’t change my vote now.”
“Former Representative Leon Panetta [D-CA] described how a $1500 contributor asked him to support a trade protectionist bill; when Panetta asked about the substance, he was told, “I don’t have to tell you anything substantively – we gave you money and we expect you to.”…
“Senator Paul Wellstone observed..”Colleagues are not so crass as to actually say money made them do it. What they do say is ‘My people back home just won’t let me do it’ – and what’s insidious is that it’s understood he favors the measure but moneyed interests won’t let him.”
“One Northeast Democrat representative, who asked to remain anonymous, said with some indignation: “it shows exactly how corrupt Congress is when every single Republican and 46% of Democrats vote to help credit-card companies squeeze money out of low- and middle-income families in bankruptcy because of financial distress. Member after member said the same thing to me: they had previously voted against these companies and the banks on X, Y, or Z issue and they had to throw them one vote. “I can’t vote against them ALL the time,’ they’d say, implicitly referring to campaign donations.”
Green: “..when the Supreme Court in the 1976 ‘Buckley v. Valeo’ struck down the Federal Election Campaign Act’s spending ceilings, the alms race took off. then – and now – the sky’s the limit.”…
“If Buckley had come to a different conclusion, there would be no $2 million House candidates today, no $l5 million Senate candidates, no $74 million mayoral candidates.”
Green: “[Buckley is] one of the most weakly reasoned, poorly written, initially contradictory court opinions I’ve ever read.” [Senator, former federal district court judge. George Mitchell, 1999]
Green; “If money is equivalent to speech, why are there antibribery laws making it a crime to say the sentence “I’ll give you $5000 if you vote for this bill”?”
Green: “Representative Jim Leach [R-IA]: “members indignantly say, “money doesn’t affect my vote, but that defies human nature. If you take money, there’s absolutely an implication..you’ll listen to them..I don’t know a member who doesn’t believe that.”
Green: “..as Chief Justice Burger feared, by restricting the supply of election money while doing nothing to combat the spiraling demand for money, Buckley had the perverse consequence of creating a black market for funds; candidates became ever more dependent on the very special-interest groups whose influence the law was intended to curb.”
Green: “One candidate explained “money tries to buy access. Legislatively interested money is more invested than given, in an unspoken contract both sides understand..in the favor bank of life, nearly everyone is nicer to people who are generous to them When someone hands me a $25,000 contribution..’They’ve got my attention, and in the future I feel it’s rude not to take their call immediately..next time they call.”
Green: “I think most people assume – I do certainly – that someone making an extraordinarily large contribution is going to get some kind of an extraordinary return on it. I think that is a pervasive assumption. And..there is certainly an appearance of it, call it attenuated corruption..that large contributors is simply going to get better service, whatever that service may be, from a politician than the average contributor, let alone no contributor.” [Supreme Court Justice Davie Souter]
Green: “Perhaps the most notorious example of the tobacco lobby’s strength was the $50 billion ‘mystery amendment’ of 1997. In..what Senator Susan Collins..later called ‘backroom politics at its worst,’ a one-sentence, 46-word provision granting $50 billion in tax breaks for cigarette makers was snuck through a House bill in the dead of the night, and rushed to a vote the next day with members of Congress unaware of its existence. Worse yet, the amendment..granted the industry to use tax revenues as credit against the $368 billion smoking-related illness settlement..”
Green: “..at one time, [Senator Rudy] Boschwitz actually had his staff give donors different-colored stamps for them to put on mail they sent to his office to indicate their donation levels in order to facilitate preferential treatment.”
Green: Bruce Ratner: “There was an anxiety that, if we didn’t give, we might not be able to get a meeting, that it might hurt our development efforts, hurt our access. There was a sense..if you contributed, you were a friend..politicians divide the world into those who are for them, and those who are not. More than any other business, in politics power is wielded by those people who are friends, and those who are not are not helped and can even be hurt.”
Green: “Unless we fundamentally change this system, ultimately campaign finance will consume our democracy.”
{representative Lloyd Doggett, D-TX, 1996]
[note: the above is from Mark Green’s 2002 book, “Selling Out. How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation, and Betrays Our Democracy”. Read the book!!! And remember: this is before the massive corruption unleashed by the “supreme court’s” 2010 “Citizens United”. dictate – likely to live in infamy.
These and many more insiders are telling YOU one simple thing: if America does not end the gusher of corrupt, dark money to state and federal legislators and governors/presidents – American “democracy” is. OVER.
The ONLY debate currently is this: is America still a “democracy,” or is it ALREADY a plutocracy??????????
Look at WHO. have been the 205-2024 winners in the Roberts “supreme court” – corporations, the rich, the religious right. Look at. WHO. gets their bills passed in Congress – the rich and corporations. Not opinion – studies have been made since 1980 – this is what the numbers – the decisions almost all show – a near 100% success rate in some bodies, 70-90% in others. Example: it took them 60 years, but the big banks got Glass-Steagall trashed – which gave America not only corruption, but the 2008- Wall Street meltdown and subsequent recession. And, of course, the rich and privileged got baileed out, even bonuses!!! – but ordinary Americans lost their jobs and homes.]0
With Justice For All 