Is A Corporate Takeover Of The U.S. Government Inevitable-- Or Has It Already Happened (Even Beyond The Senate)?

The Democratic grassroots-- and the Democratic elite that pays the grassroots any attention at all, either thru shared values or fear-- and the Republican Party had very different reactions to the narrow corporate coup pulled off by Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Roberts (Citizens United v FEC). Democrats who harbor the notion that our elected officials are responsive to us rather than to corporate management were horrified that greedy, conservative, bottom-line trawling corporate managers could no longer be kept from directly waging campaigns for or against politicians who please or displease them. As my friend Bob Fertik pointed out to me today, it isn't "responsible" corporations we should be so worried about as much as the serial bad actors like, say, Blackwater (recently caught up in another bribery scandal) or some very determined foreign government with an agenda and a corporation or two with U.S. subsidiaries-- say Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Israel or Venezuela.

Inside-the-Beltway politicians of almost all stripes-- there are a few exceptions even in the bribe-riddled, worthless Senate-- don't see corporate managers as the fount of all evil and the barriers to Change and Hope or to going beyond the status quo. They see them as the financiers and power boosters of their political careers and their post-political meal tickets. Who got the most money in the history of the world from the Finance Sector?


From the war industry?


From the Medical-Industrial Complex?


From AgriBusiness?


If you want to know who's holding up healthcare reform and Wall Street reform and why we're still in a fruitless and tragic war in Afghanistan, it would be unfair and incorrect to only blame the Republicans. Sure, they're guilty as hell-- but there are enough Democrats, especially in the worthless House of Lords, to make this kind of corruption very bipartisan and to guarantee an effective conservative majority in at least the Senate. And since the legislators police themselves and grant themselves licenses to steal... well, let's put it like this, until I'm king, there will never be public stonings, or some more humane kind of a death penalty, for corrupt politicians.

If elements of the Democratic Establishment-- Schumer, Menendez, Van Hollen, others-- were at least paying lip service to grassroots outrage, and perhaps even on the same page (I know plenty of Democratic elected officials, and a smattering of Republicans, believe it or not, who are)-- the Republican establishment was breaking out the Cuban cigars and the French champagne. But what about the right-wing populists (teabaggers and otherwise) who aren't all that thrilled about the dominance of Big Business?

Are they really the populists they say they are, or just racists and bigots willing to sell out to the political party that embraces racism and bigotry. That should be interesting to watch over the coming months as the battle to reform this Supreme Court diktat comes into focus. And as Marc Ambinder pointed out yesterday at The Atlantic, corporations have already been outspending the political parties, so it's not like their "voices" have been muzzled.

For the first time in recent history, the lobbying, grassroots and advertising budget of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has surpassed the spending of BOTH the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee.

This is significant. It means that the Great Transition has already begun.  In the days following the decision in Citizens United, campaign finance experts predicted that the decision would open the floodgates of money for trade associations like the Chamber of Commerce. The influx of corporate money, according to some, would weaken the power of the political parties and candidates and lead the political parties to become less important. Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg went so far as to say that the parties would be "threatened by extinction." And Ginsberg supports the CU decision!

As it turns out, the surge of contributions into the U.S. Chamber has already caused its budget on lobbying, grassroots and advertising to surpass that of both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee for the first time in recent memory. According to The Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its national subsidiaries spent $144.5 million in 2009, far more than the RNC and more than double the expenditures by the DNC.

The Chamber spent much of its money in 2009 on campaigns that worked -- it scared the Senate away from considering a version of the Waxman/Markey cap-and-trade legislation, and an argument can be made that its cutting ads on health care (with money taken from some insurance companies) helped to undercut support for the legislation.

Included in the U.S. Chamber amount are expenditures of about $1 million each in Virginia and Massachusetts on electioneering in off-year contests in those states, and sizeable spending on advertising campaigns in key states and districts aimed at defeating health care, climate change and financial reform legislation.