Running for office costs money. Television air time costs money. Radio air time costs money. Billboards cost money. Websites cost money. Mailing lists, flyers, staff, and telephones cost money. And that money has to come from somewhere. Right now, that somewhere is in large part big businesses with a financial interest in legislation. And what’s good for industry is almost never what’s good for consumers.
Law-making ought to be about the public interest, but it’s not. There’s so much corporate cash floating around that ordinary citizens many times can’t be heard. That’s why campaigns should be publicly financed and tightly regulated. Bipartisan legislation currently before Congress would, if enacted, sharply limit the influence of corporations and their pinstriped lobbyists who time and again use their substantial resources to distort the debate and torpedo legislation aimed at helping people.
During the recent health care reform debate for example, insurance companies, which stand to lose huge sums of money if real reform passes, spent in excess of $126,430,438, much of it given directly to politicians set to vote on reform. That money wasn’t spent so that Americans could have good government. It was spent to buy influence so insurance lobbyists could prevent passage of any law that cut into industry profits. They couldn’t care less about the effect their legislative “suggestions” have on the millions of people who have no access to health care and the over 45,000 who die every year because they can’t see a doctor.
This isn’t a Democrat/Republican issue. Wherever people stand on issues, it simply is beyond dispute that industries with huge sums of money to spend have a hugely disproportionate influence on policy. They use that influence to steer policy and legislation in a direction that benefits their bottom line, regardless of the effect it has on people or even the planet.
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is a perfect example. Inhofe is the Senate’s most outspoken climate change skeptic. Just this weekend, he called American generals publicity hounds for supporting policies aimed at protecting the environment and our troops. He has called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Inhofe says science doesn’t support the widely held view that carbon emissions are causing our planet to change. He therefore opposes virtually every proposal aimed at protecting the environment that has come before Congress.
But Inhofe wasn’t always so strident. As he tells it, he used to believe that man-made climate change was real:
Inhofe says that he changed his mind when he discovered what it would cost to conform to the Kyoto Treaty. He later claimed that he discovered that the phony climate change crisis was ginned up by the UN. Inhofe has since repeatedly pointed to a group of scientists who no longer believe that climate change is man made to support his view. So the impetus behind Senator Inhofe’s conversion from climate change believer to skeptic is in doubt.
But there is no question about this: The oil and gas industry is opposed to legislation which would limit greenhouse gases. James Inhofe and his leadership PAC “have received $2,182,631 from the oil & gas industries since 1998.”
Was Inhofe’s conversion from believer to skeptic genuine? I guess anything is possible, but how can we know? Isn’t it more likely that Inhofe, who received a perfect score from oil and gas interests, is doing exactly what that industry paid him to do? Wouldn’t we be far better off if people like Senator Inhofe could focus solely on facts and not have to worry about whether taking a certain position could negatively effect his big-money benefactors and thus his future fundraising? Wouldn’t the public interest be better served if a hypothetical Inhofe challenger — Republican or Democrat — didn’t start out a race against him at an insurmountable disadvantage because of the huge sum of oil money pouring into Inhofe’s coffers?
Jim Inhofe is hardly the only legislator who receives substantial sums of money from industries he’s supposed to regulate. Examples abound: Senators Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, and many, may others have done the bidding of corporate interests despite the negative impact their conduct has on their constituents. Even Vice President Biden, when he was in the Senate, voted for obscene legislation which made it harder for people who have to declare bankruptcy to get out of debt. Biden, from Delaware, was acting at the behest of the credit card companies back home which lobbied for the bill. Many of these politicians can count on reelection, though, because of the huge financial advantage they enjoy courtesy of the big businesses whose bidding they’ve done.
And legislators aren’t the only ones being bought by big business.
The Texas Supreme Court, the nation’s most reflexively anti-consumer judicial body, shamelessly and repeatedly overturns jury verdicts in favor of ordinary citizens when they win cases against big businesses. The nine judges who sit on that court (all of whom are Republicans) campaign for their offices. They take large sums of cash from companies with cases before it. A recent University of Texas study found that 87% of the time, defendants win — regardless of what a jury found.
Go to the Supreme Court’s website and take a look at some of the rulings. If you see Smith v. Giant Insurance Conglomerate, you don’t have to be a lawyer to know that Smith is going to lose — even if Smith is a Republican.
The practice of businesses giving money to the very politicians tasked with regulating them is inherently corrupt. It’s time we valued our democracy enough to spend that money ourselves so that the voices of ordinary citizens stop getting drowned out by bigshot CEOs with wads of cash to hand out and a cynical disregard for the interests of the American people.
Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and everywhere else on Facebook or at www.kpft.org.
