2155. American Capitalist Democracy: A Congressman's View

By Steve Israel, The New York Times, January 8, 2016 

Washington — IT’S now safe to pick up your phones and read your emails. That’s right, I won’t be calling to ask you to donate to my congressional campaign. As I announced on Tuesday, I’ll be leaving Congress at the end of this term — sentimental about many things, but liberated from a fund-raising regime that’s never been more dangerous to our democracy.

In the days after my first election to Congress, in 2000, I attended several orientation sessions in Washington, eager to absorb the lessons of history. I wanted to learn what Congressman Abraham Lincoln had learned, to hear the wisdom of predecessors like John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Joseph Gurney Cannon. The romance was crushed by lesson No. 1: Get re-elected. A fund-raising consultant advised that if I didn’t raise at least $10,000 a week (in pre-Citizens United dollars), I wouldn’t be back.

The money race began, and I attended political action committee fund-raisers, which are like panhandling with hors d’oeuvres. There were hours of “call time” — huddled in a cubicle, dialing donors. Sometimes double dialing and triple dialing. Whispering sweet nothings and other small talk into the phone in hopes of receiving large somethings. I’d sit next to an assistant who collated “call sheets” with donor’s names, contribution histories and other useful information. (“How’s Sheila? Your wife. Oh, Shelly? Sorry.”)

Since then, I’ve spent roughly 4,200 hours in call time, attended more than 1,600 fund-raisers just for my own campaign and raised nearly $20 million in increments of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000 per election cycle. And things have only become worse in the five years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which ignited an explosion of money in politics by ruling that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in elections.

I saw the consequences firsthand.

As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, I was invited to glamorous Washington galas, the ones where thousands of eyes make no eye contact, where pupils constantly rove in search of someone more powerful. At one dinner, in 2012, I was chatting with a powerful Republican congressional colleague. Despite the fact that the Democrats were in the minority, our campaign committee had in recent years equaled or surpassed the G.O.P. in fund-raising. My colleague amiably congratulated me and then added, “But in the end our guys will have more super PAC money than your guys.”

He was right. Early one morning, as I was headed from New York to California to stump for Democrats, I received a staff member’s urgent call. G.O.P. groups, she told me, had bought $2 million of TV time against one of our incumbents the previous night. We needed to match them to maintain parity on the air. We juggled dollars, shuffled resources and sent panicked email appeals to our donors that read, “IT’S OVER!!!” and “ALL IS LOST!!!” Luckily, we managed to cover the gap.

Hours later, I landed in Los Angeles. My phone rang. The same staff member repeated the same crisis. Annoyed, I said, “We handled this already!” She responded: “No, Mr. Chairman. The Republicans dumped in another $2 million when they saw our $2 million.”

This isn’t “Shark Tank.” This is your democracy. But as the bidding grows higher, your voice gets lower. You’re simply priced out of the marketplace of ideas. That is, unless you are one of the ultra wealthy.

Democrats in Congress and all of the party’s presidential candidates strongly support campaign finance reforms. In 2010, when our party was in the majority in the House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we passed the Disclose Act, a bill designed to help counter the effects of Citizens United, but Senate Republicans stymied it. Representative John Sarbanes, a Democrat from Maryland, has worked tirelessly with colleagues to pass viable campaign finance measures. As a 16-year veteran of Congress, I’d calculate the probability that the current Republican majority schedules a vote on that bill at: LOL.

There are some small steps we can take. Next week I will attend my final State of the Union speech. I hope that the president will announce an executive order requiring that federal contractors disclose their political spending.

Ultimately, however, the only solution is across-the-board changes in campaign finance. We need “who-gives-what” transparency in real time (not after the damage has been done), shareholder disclosure of all corporate political expenditures and public financing of congressional elections.

But here’s a political fact of life: Not one of these things will be passed by the current crowd in charge. The only hope for reform is to replace the majority that is stopping reform at every turn.

I’ll miss Congress: the history, colleagues on both sides of the aisle, the ability to help my constituents. But on hallowed ground where Lincoln inspired us to oppose slavery, where F.D.R. summoned us after Pearl Harbor, where L.B.J. demanded voting rights for African-Americans, I won’t miss leaving phone messages asking PACs to “max out before the end of the quarter.”

My new “call time” will be spent waiting for a customer service agent to help me decipher a cable bill. Even that will be more pleasant.

Steve Israel, a Democrat, is a United States representative for New York. He is the author of the novel “The Global War on Morris.”

2142. American Capitalist Democracy Today

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, January 1, 2016

Donald Trump

Wealth can be bad for your soul. That’s not just a hoary piece of folk wisdom; it’s a conclusion from serious social science, confirmed by statistical analysis and experiment. The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder.

And it’s obvious, even if we don’t have statistical confirmation, that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It’s not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others.

So what happens to a nation that gives ever-growing political power to the superrich?

Modern America is a society in which a growing share of income and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, and these people have huge political influence — in the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, around half the contributions came from fewer than 200 wealthy families. The usual concern about this march toward oligarchy is that the interests and policy preferences of the very rich are quite different from those of the population at large, and that is surely the biggest problem.

But it’s also true that those empowered by money-driven politics include a disproportionate number of spoiled egomaniacs. Which brings me to the current election cycle.

The most obvious illustration of the point I’ve been making is the man now leading the Republican field. Donald Trump would probably have been a blowhard and a bully whatever his social station. But his billions have insulated him from the external checks that limit most people’s ability to act out their narcissistic tendencies; nobody has ever been in a position to tell him, “You’re fired!” And the result is the face you keep seeing on your TV.

But Mr. Trump isn’t the only awesomely self-centered billionaire playing an outsized role in the 2016 campaign.

There have been some interesting news reports lately about Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas gambling magnate. Mr. Adelson has been involved in some fairly complex court proceedings, which revolve around claims of misconduct in his operations in Macau, including links to organized crime and prostitution. Given his business, this may not be all that surprising. What was surprising was his behavior in court, where he refused to answer routine questions and argued with the judge, Elizabeth Gonzales. That, as she rightly pointed out, isn’t something witnesses get to do.

Then Mr. Adelson bought Nevada’s largest newspaper. As the sale was being finalized, reporters at the paper were told to drop everything and start monitoring all activity of three judges, including Ms. Gonzales. And while the paper never published any results from that investigation, an attack on Judge Gonzales, with what looks like a fictitious byline, did appear in a small Connecticut newspaper owned by one of Mr. Adelson’s associates.

Are there other cases? Yes indeed, even if the egomania doesn’t rise to Adelson levels. I find myself thinking, for example, of the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, another big power in the G.O.P., who published an investor’s letter declaring that inflation was running rampant — he could tell from the prices of Hamptons real estate and high-end art. Economists got some laughs out of the incident, but think of the self-absorption required to write something like that without realizing how it would sound to non-billionaires.

Or think of the various billionaires who, a few years ago, were declaring with straight faces, and no sign of self-awareness, that President Obama was holding back the economy by suggesting that some businesspeople had misbehaved. You see, he was hurting their feelings.

Just to be clear, the biggest reason to oppose the power of money in politics is the way it lets the wealthy rig the system and distort policy priorities. And the biggest reason billionaires hate Mr. Obama is what he did to their taxes, not their feelings. The fact that some of those buying influence are also horrible people is secondary.

But it’s not trivial. Oligarchy, rule by the few, also tends to become rule by the monstrously self-centered. Narcisstocracy? Jerkigarchy? Anyway, it’s an ugly spectacle, and it’s probably going to get even uglier over the course of the year ahead.