The Newtster-- Wiped Out By The Malefactors Of Great Wealth

Gingrich, who has accused Romney of trying to buy the Republican presidential nomination and of spending $3.5 million in Iowa lying about him, is already an also-ran, wiped out basically by the way the Republican Party is reshaping politics to cement in place the dominance of the one percent. Not that Newt wouldn't continue his servile obeisance to the rich and powerful. That is, after all, a definition of his entire career in politics. But the rich and powerful have their collective mind made up that Romney has the best shot of beating Obama, and they won't allow anything-- not even outsize personal ambition or a colossal ego like Gingrich's or Rick Perry's-- to get in the way.

The draconian disenfranchisement voting regulations GOP governors and legislatures are passing in every state where they manage to seize control were meant to prevent likely Democratic voters from exercising their rights, but as Gingrich and Perry discovered in Virginia, once fascism gets out of the box, it gets a mind of its own. In the 1930s, German reactionaries found that out too-- too late. Sunday's L.A. Times sounded a warning for Republicans about being hoist on their own petard in terms of the jihad they have perpetrated against campaign finance regulations. That has played a decisive role in wrecking Gingrich's chance to run against Obama. Meant to use one-percenter money to destroy Democrats, it also destroys Republicans not backed by the one percenters.

The early activity at all levels heralds a transformation across the country in the first presidential cycle since a 2010 Supreme Court decision lifted the limits on individual and corporate donations to independent political organizations, known as "super PACs."

Super PACs are now outspending the GOP presidential candidates on ads in what could be a $6- or 7-billion election year for federal races, rendering obsolete the old system under which donations were strictly limited to candidates and party committees.

"This is a radical change," said Trevor Potter, a Republican election lawyer who advised Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in his 2008 presidential bid.

If present trends continue, the 2012 election will reverse more than a century of efforts to curb the influence of big money on politics.

During his second term, President Theodore Roosevelt spoke with alarm about the ability of corporate and financial elites-- "malefactors of great wealth"-- to steer government decisions. In 1907, he signed legislation banning corporate contributions to federal candidates.

In future decades-- including during Richard Nixon's presidency-- Congress expanded campaign regulation, requiring disclosure of contributions and limiting the size of donations in federal races. Those restrictions have unraveled since the high court's Citizens United decision.

Some conservatives have applauded the renewed freedom of corporations and the wealthy to finance election campaigns, countering what they see as a longtime advantage held by Democrats and their labor allies. Still, few deny that high-dollar donors are changing the nature of the race in the early presidential delegate selection states.

The highest-profile victim so far is Newt Gingrich, whose rapid descent in opinion polls correlates with the drubbing he received in negative ads produced by a super PAC aligned with Mitt Romney.

That group, Restore Our Future, has outspent the official Romney campaign on TV and radio in Iowa by more than 2 to 1, according to sources familiar with the ad buys. Ultimately, the independent committee will spend $3.1 million in the state, according to the organization's director, Carl Forti.

...Even as spending by these groups rises in the early primary and caucus states, their donors remain veiled because of a Federal Election Commission schedule that doesn't require full disclosure until after the early contests are concluded.

Technically, the new rules permit donations only to independent political committees that do not coordinate their activities with a candidate's official campaign. But in the presidential race the candidates and the super PACs are intertwined by personnel, if not legally.

Forti, who was political director of Romney's first presidential bid in 2008, runs the pro-Romney group along with several other former Romney aides. Revolution PAC, the group backing Ron Paul, has on its advisory board two former staffers of Paul's 2008 presidential bid. And Make Us Great Again, the largest of several groups supporting Perry, is run by his former chief of staff, Mike Toomey.

Rick Tyler, longtime aide and confidante to Gingrich, announced recently that he would join Winning Our Future, the new super PAC set up by another close Gingrich aide.

"Super PACs are headed by political people that know the campaign already," said Fred Davis, a Republican strategist who left Huntsman's presidential campaign this year to direct the super PAC benefiting the former Utah governor. "They know the candidate and they know the players."

Davis estimated that about half of the group's small staff used to work on Huntsman's official campaign.

"You don't have to cheat, you don't have to break the law to know that Newt Gingrich needed to be taken down-- that he was hurting Mitt Romney," Davis said. "If you don't know that, you have the wrong guy heading the PAC."

Reformers are especially alarmed by super PACs active in congressional races, because large sums of money they command can be even more influential in smaller elections than at the presidential level.

Darcy Burner is a progressive activist and serious thinker from the Seattle area. She's running for the open seat in the new Washington state 1st District, east and north of Seattle, and after spending the last two years working with the Progressive Caucus in DC, she's come to the conclusion that campaign finance has brought the whole American democracy project to the brink of disaster.

"It's clear at this point that our political system is broken," she told me this morning. "It's been captured by the largest corporations and the wealthiest and greediest 1%, who have decided to grind the rest of the country to dust for their own benefit. Bankers get bailed out; Americans who have worked hard all their lives get laid off and hung out to dry."

The political system itself has been rigged. How people get elected is determined almost solely by where the money goes; what passes in Congress is determined by rigged rules and bought politicians who put their funders ahead of everyone else. We the American people need to take our government back.

So long as politicians can be bought, there will be people willing to put themselves up for sale. We need to make it impossible for anyone to buy our government. To overturn the Citizens United court decision, which equates money with speech and corporations with people, we are going to need a Constitutional Amendment. That's hard, but not impossible, and we need to get working on it.

And in the meantime we should be doing everything in our power to change the game. We need to create more robust small dollar streams which allow normal folks to get elected; we need to create alternative ways to communicate with voters so that the good folks willing to run can be heard without having to spend millions on television advertising. We need to create systems to push back when the right smears people on our side, fabricating lies about birth certificates or religion or credentials in order to take down the people who might otherwise go to work for us. We need to elect strong voices who will fight for us against the rigged system, not merely those who will protect the status quo and happen to have the right letter after their name.

We need to get serious about pulling out all the stops to take our country back for the American people.

Too late to save the Newtster. Darcy, on the other hand, is someone we need to help get into Congress. You can help her here, even if it means $5 or $10.