Bill Moyers on How Money is Choking our Democracy to Death

The role of money in American politics is a pernicious system that perpetuates itself. Big moneyed interests “donate” (actually ‘invest’ would be a more accurate term) large amounts of money to politicians, and in return those politicians enact legislation that helps those interests to get more money, at the expense of the public, thereby enhancing their wealth and power and enabling them to continue to feed the beast.

When powerful private corporations give big money to public legislators (or other public officials) in return for legislative favors, a reasonable person would call that bribery – notwithstanding the fact that it is usually legal in our country today. The only differences between such acts that are deemed legal and those that are deemed illegal involve the explicitness with which the deal is made. When public officials become so careless that the deal is spelled out in black and white, as was the case with Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Tom DeLay, they can be prosecuted for bribery. But when, as in most cases, it is not so obvious that the acceptance by public officials of tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions was done in return for helping to enact corporate favorable legislation, it is legal. Why is that?

Defenders of this type of bribery claim that lobbying involves “educating” legislators and exercising our First Amendment rights to petition Congress. But does our First Amendment include the right to pay (i.e., bribe) legislators to be educated? What if it was made illegal to give large amounts of money to public officials? In other words, what if corporations were allowed to continue to “educate” our public officials but not allowed to bribe them? Would they then continue to devote time, effort and money to “educating” them?

This is a profound transformation in a country whose DNA contains the inherent promise of an equal opportunity at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and whose collective memory resonates with the hallowed idea of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The great progressive struggles in our history have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich, share in the benefits of a free society. Yet as the public today supports such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working conditions, a secure retirement, and clean air and water, there is no government to deliver on those aspirations. Instead, our elections are bought out from under us… So powerfully has wealth shaped our political agenda that we cannot say America is working for all of America. In the words of Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices: “You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few or democracy, but you can’t have both.” Money is choking democracy to death.

Men and women who have mastered the money game have taken advantage of that weakness in our democracy to systematically sell it off to the highest bidders. Let’s start with the K Street Project… the brainchild of Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist, the right wing strategist who famously said that his goal is to shrink government so that it can be “drowned in a bathtub.” This, of course, would render it impotent to defend ordinary people against the large economic forces – the so-called free market – that Norquist and his pals think should be running America….They centralized in their own hands the power to write legislation. Drastic revisions to major bills were often written at night, with lobbyists hovering over them, then rushed through as “emergency measures”…

The Gilded ages – then and now – have one thing in common: audacious and shameless people for whom the very idea of the public trust is a cynical joke…Having cast our ballots in the sanctity of the voting booth, we go about our daily lives expecting the people we put in office to weight the competing interests and decide to the best of their ability what is right…

Twenty-five years ago Grover Norquist had said that “What Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoffs in Washington…” Well, they got it, and the arc of the conservative takeover of government was completed… Money, politics, and ideology became one and the same in a juggernaut of power that crushed everything in sight…

This crowd in charge has a vision sharply at odds with the American People. They would arrange Washington and the world for the convenience of themselves and the transnational corporations that pay for their elections… The people who control the U.S. government today want “a society run by the powerful, oblivious to the weak, free of any oversight, enjoying a cozy relationship government, and thriving on crony capitalism

We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we’d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn’t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A “campaign contribution”.

Let’s call it what it is: a bribe.

Look back at the bulk of legislation passed by Congress in the past decade: an energy bill that gave oil companies huge tax breaks at the same time that Exxon Mobile posted $36 billion in profits and our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high; a bankruptcy “reform” bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe; the deregulation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors, which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors; the deregulation of the telecommunications sector, which led to cable-industry price gouging and an undermining of news coverage; protection for rampant overpricing of pharmaceutical drugs; and the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opining a post-office box in an offshore tax haven…

I have painted a bleak picture of our political process. I believe it is a true picture. But it is not a hopeless picture. Something can be done about it. Organized people have always had to take on organized money. If they had not, blacks would still be slaves, women wouldn’t have the vote, workers couldn’t organize, and children would still be working in the mines…

It is time to fight again. These people in Washington have no right to be doing what they are doing. It’s not their government, it’s your government. They work for you. They’re public employees – and if they let us down and sell us out, they should be fired… They would have you think that if they pass a few nominal reforms, put a little more distance between the politician and the lobbyist, you will think everything is okay…

Look what happened in Connecticut… The legislature passed clean-money reform… The bill bans campaign contributions from lobbyists and state contractors and … approved full public funding for their own races… Both Arizona and Maine offer full public financing of statewide and legislative races… In these places… the system allows candidates to run competitive campaigns for office even if they do not have ties to well-heeled donors or Big Money lobbyists…

Nationally we could buy back our Congress and the White House with full public financing for about $10 per taxpayer per year… It would go a long way towards breaking the link between big donors and public officials and to restoring democracy to the people. Until we offer qualified candidates a different source of funding for their campaigns – clean, disinterested, accountable public money – the selling of America will go on…

Representative Barney Frank says of Congress: “We are the only people in the world required by law to take large amounts of money from strangers and then act as if it has no effect on our behavior.”…

As long as elected officials need that constant stream of cash, someone will run our country but it won’t be you… The real answer is federal financing of Congressional elections… This isn’t about a few bad apples. This is about the system. We can change the system…

Theodore Roosevelt said in 1912… “We are standing for elementary decency in politics. We are fighting for honesty against naked robbery. It is not a partisan issue… it is a great moral issue… If we condone political theft… our civilization cannot endure.”

We need that fighting spirit today – the tough, outraged, and resilient spirit that knows we have been delivered the great and precious legacy, “government of, by, and for the people”, and by God we’re going to pass it on.

It just didn't seem timely to talk about money and politics while the country was still in mourning. But I began to notice some items in the news that struck me as especially repugnant amid all the grief. In washington, where environmentalists and other public interest advocates had suspended normal political activities, corporate lobbyists were suddenly mounting a full court press for special favors at taxpayer expense.... Visions of newfound gold danced in the heads of lobbyists. And in corporate suites across the country CEOs were waking up to the prospect of a bonanza born of tragedy. Within 2 weeks of 9/11 the business press was telling of corporate directors rushing to give bargain priced stock options to their top executives... Stocks had fallen sharply after the attacks... As stock options grant executives the right to buy shares at that low price yor years to come, the lower price when options are awarded, the more lucrative they are... One company had begun laying off employees just hours before the terrorists struck; the chairman, nonetheless, helped himself to 602,589 options just two weeks later.