A Democracy Dependent Upon The Funders

The video above comes from a TED Talk Lawrence Lessig did last year. He contends, correctly, that we have lost our representative democracy and that we have to act to get it back. Choosing between garbage candidates like David Jolly and Alex Sink won't help anyone get anything back. All it will do is perpetuate the deterioration of American democracy.

This short news story from the Associated Press this week shouldn't surprise anyone by it's specifics. But it is instructional nonetheless. This is what's left of our transpartisan faux-democracy:

Democrat Rahm Emanuel and Republican Bruce Rauner have something in common - many of the same wealthy political donors.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that more than 100 campaign contributors have given money to both men.

The newspaper conducted an analysis of campaign contributions since Emanuel, a Democrat, ran for Chicago mayor and since Rauner launched his campaign for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

Common donors include billionaires Citadel investment firm founder Ken Griffin and Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky.

Emanuel and Rauner both have a background in investment.

But Emanuel and Rauner also were the top contributors to their own campaign funds. Rauner has contributed $5 million and Emanuel has given himself $1.1 million.

Chicago-based political consultant Don Rose says big donors often give to ensure future access to political leaders.

Guy Cecil, the executive director of the DSCC, got to pick his own "boss" this cycle and he picked the weakest, most spineless member of the Senate, Michael Bennet of Colorado, a pusillanimous centrist for whom he had served as chief of staff and who he had helped reelect in 2010 (an election in which Bennet squeaked by with 48.1% of the vote against GOP sociopath Ken Buck). Cecil is calling the shots at the DSCC this cycle and is likely to hand the majority over to the Republicans as he spends all the committee's capital on trying to advance pathetic Beltway centrism. The two best Democratic candidates running this cycle, South Dakota's Rick Weiland and Maine's Shenna Bellows, have been shut out from support by Cecil. This is especially odd since the vast majority of Democratic senators have already endorsed Weiland. His brand of aggressive prairie populism is so foreign to a conservative operative like Cecil that he literally can't understand what Weiland is talking about. Bellows, an Elizabeth Warren type of transformational candidate, might as well be on another planet for a creature of the Beltway like Cecil. (You can contribute to Weiland and Bellows here.)

Steve Israel has guaranteed the Democrats will not take back the House and Cecil/Bennet are guaranteeing they will lose the Senate. Is the strategy just to hope the Republicans overreach so badly that Hilary sweeps in big Democratic gains in both Houses in 2016? How sad is that? And how far have we come from a politics of ideas to a politics based on contributions from the richest fraction of one percent of criminal plutocrats?