Selling Out

by GREEN MARK

• ISBN13: 9780060523923
• ISBN10: 0060523921
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-19
• Publisher: Regan Books

Summary

<p>With CEOs and corporations currently under fire for years of outrageous deception and fraud, the time is long overdue for an accounting of just how grievously special-interest money has infiltrated our political process. Now, longtime political watchdog (and recent political candidate) Mark Green offers just that.</p><p>In <i>Selling Out,</i> Green exposes the truth about the poisonous role money has come to play in our political culture -- a role that has too long been conveniently overlooked. The practice of trading campaign donations for political favors, he reminds us, is as old as the nation itself. And yet in recent years the American political landscape has become an open market, where influence is bought and sold wholesale, with little accountability and no apparent shame. How did Enron and so many other corporations buy political protection? Why do legislators pay more attention to contributors than to constituents?</p><p>"Our textbook system of checks and balances," answers Green, "has devolved into a system of checks, checks, and more checks-and few politicians bite the hand that funds them." Government today, he argues, is a system that produces loopholes and subsidies for the 1 percent of Americans who can afford to be big donors -- and produces exorbitant health-care costs, uncontrolled pollution, and underfunded schools for the rest of us,</p><p>As a candidate who himself raised $16 million in his campaign for mayor of New York City, Green has seen the political process as both critic and participant. Drawing on interviews with dozens of other major players and his own lifelong crusade for better government, he highlights an array of eye-opening case studies linking money and results-from how senators favor big-industry polluters over their own constituents to how the wealthiest have won big tax breaks even as CEOs' salaries have increased ten times faster than their employees'. And the solutions Green offers are both bold and practical, and in some cases are already working, at the local, state, and national levels, to return power to the American people.</p><p>Fast-paced and impressively researched, provocative in its commentary and conclusions, <i>Selling Out</i> is sure to inflame anyone who's stunned by the latest scandals-or who's curious about how so many have gotten away with so much for so long.</p>

Author Biography

Mark Green's first book on campaign finance, Who Runs Congress?, was a number one New York Times bestseller in 1972. After working with Ralph Nader for ten years in Washington, Green served for twelve years as New York City's consumer affairs commissioner and then as its first elected public advocate. In 2001, he was the Democratic nominee for the office of mayor of New York against Michael Bloomberg. Currently a distinguished visiting lecturer at the New York University School of Law, he recently founded the New Democracy Project, a national and urban affairs institute. Green and his family live in New York City.

Table of Contents

The Evil of Access: An Introduction	p. 1
The History of Money in Politics: Scandal, Reform, Scandal...	p. 27
"Swilling the Planters with Bumbo"	p. 28
The Emergence of Professional Politics	p. 30
Money Starts to Talk	p. 32
The Age of Bribery	p. 35
Progressive Reform?	p. 39
FDR vs. "Economic Royalists"	p. 45
The New Media Age	p. 47
More Reform and More Scandal	p. 49
Rules and Laws: How Money Shouts	p. 55
Buckley Rules	p. 55
The First Wave After Buckley: PACs and Boren	p. 61
The Second Wave: More Scandal--S&Ls and Keating	p. 65
The Third Wave: The Clinton Roller Coaster and Soft Money Explosion	p. 68
The Fourth Wave: McCain-Feingold	p. 73
Current Rules of Engagement	p. 83
Campaigning for Money: 30,000 Phone Calls Later...	p. 105
The Arms Race and the Ads Race	p. 106
The Professionalization of Politics	p. 117
Dialing for Dollars	p. 120
Incumbent Protection Program	p. 128
The Challenger's Paradox	p. 131
Supply Side Warriors	p. 135
The Cost of Money: Democracy Under Attack	p. 147
The Money Chase Discourages Voting and Civic Participation	p. 150
The Money Chase Discourages Competitive Elections	p. 154
The Money Chase Creates "Part-Time Legislators, Full-Time Fund-Raisers"	p. 155
The Money Chase Deters Talent from Seeking Office	p. 157
The Money Chase Favors Multimillionaires	p. 158
The Money Chase Corrupts Legislation	p. 161
The Players: Profiles from the Money Game	p. 193
The Company	p. 193
The Hammer	p. 203
The Senator from Big Business	p. 209
The Hustler	p. 213
The Wealthy Guy	p. 217
The Populist	p. 223
The Refuseniks	p. 229
Reforms Don't Work?: Visit New York City, Maine, Arizona...	p. 237
The Apologists	p. 238
Public Sentiments	p. 243
A Tale of Two Cities: Campaign Financing in Albany and New York City	p. 247
Laboratories of Democracy	p. 256
Other Countries	p. 264
Change, for Good: Who Owns Democracy--Enron or You?	p. 267
Solutions	p. 270
Epilogue: "Imagine..."	p. 289
Acknowledgments	p. 293
Notes	p. 295
Index	p. 329
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Selling Out
How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation, and Betrays Our Democracy

Chapter One

The Evil of Access:
An Introduction

"There are two things you need for success in politics. Money ... and I can't think of the other."
-- Senator Mark Hanna (R–OH), 1903

"Political action committees and moneyed interests are setting the nation's political agenda. ... Are we saying that only the rich have brains in this country? Or only people who have influential friends who have money can be in the Senate?"
-- Senator Barry Goldwater (R–AZ), 1988

"The Enron scandal should launch a national movement to leash the corrupt power of money in politics so that legislators and regulators can serve the public interest."
-- The American Prospect, February 2002

Representative Jim Shannon, a Democrat from Boston's North End -- home to working-class families as far back as the 1848 potato famine -- wasn't happy. As a protégé of Speaker Tip O'Neill, and a member of the prestigious Ways and Means Committee, he thought he'd learned all about the culture of Congress, about its blend of high-minded rhetoric and low-road cynicism. But now he was confronted with an overbearing business lobbyist, telling him that his client was disappointed with Shannon's position on an important tax bill while reminding Shannon that this particular client "makes good PAC contributions to the party." Shannon exploded. "I'm tired of hearing appeals based on money," he shouted. Looking pained, the lobbyist responded, "You think I like this any more than you do?"

How do you know when a democracy is in decline? When a bridge collapses, so does the reputation of its engineer. When a plane loses two engines, passengers suddenly lose their lives. A democracy, however, is more like a bather in water slowly getting hotter and hotter: it's hard to notice the change in circumstances until it's too late.

How do you know when a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind, when a democracy goes from warm to scalded?

• when the 0.1 percent of Americans who contribute $1000 or more to political candidates have far more influence than the other 99.9 percent;
• when, in an election year, it's nearly more likely for an incumbent congressperson to die than to lose;
• when senators from the ten largest states have to raise an average of over $34,000 a week, every week, for six years to stay in office;
• when the cost of winning a House or Senate seat has risen tenfold in twenty-four years;
• when it's far easier for a working-class person to win a seat in the Russian congress than in the American one;
• when legislatively interested PAC money goes 7 to 1 for incumbents over challengers -- and 98 percent of House incumbents win;
• when most other democracies get a 70 to 80 percent turnout of eligible voters, while in the U.S. it's half in presidential elections, a third in congressional elections, and often only a fifth in primaries;
• when one senator and one mayor each spend more getting elected than all the legislative candidates in Great Britain combined.

It's true, as Václav Havel wrote, that a genuine democracy is the equivalent of a distant horizon we can see but never reach. Still, at minimum a democracy requires that "the people will participate in the process by which their lives are organized," as historian Lawrence Goodwin put it. But is it a democracy if 0.1 percent pay the piper, if 80 percent stay at home in primaries, if 98 percent of incumbents return to a "permanent Congress"?

Selling Out is a book about how big money is sabotaging our democracy -- and how to stop it. For despite occasional bursts of reform, the system of checks and balances we studied in high school has steadily evolved instead into a system of checks, checks, and more checks. Warren Beatty's caricatured rants in Bulworth about how elected officials care more about their contributors than about their constituents are a far more accurate depiction of Washington and state capitals today than those heard in July 4th speeches.

Indeed, the corporate abuse in mid-2002 was the direct by-product of a corporate Washington filled with those paid to be what Kipling called "shut-eyed sentries." In the view of Joan Claybrook, head of Public Citizen and a veteran of the campaign finance wars, "political money from the Enrons and others bought loopholes, exemptions, lax law enforcement, underfunded regulatory agencies, and the presumption that corporate officials could buy anything they wanted with the shareholders' money."

The basic problem is that candidates regard money as Mark Twain did bourbon: "Too much is not enough." Because the press and public judge a candidacy by its treasury, and because no one can be sure how much will be "enough," candidates feel the pressure to engage in financial overkill, just as the Soviets and Americans did with nuclear missiles in their arms race. And when the Supreme Court in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision struck down the Federal Election Campaign Act's spending ceilings, the alms race took off. Then -- and now -- the sky's the limit.

Yes, we're weary of screeds about money in politics. It's an old story: from Plutarch writing about how money corrupted elections and ruined Rome ... to the Standard Oil Trust in the 1890s, which, it was said, "did everything to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it" ... to Lyndon Johnson's emergence as a major politician, according to biographer Robert A. Caro, only when he distributed large funds from Texas oil interests to congressional colleagues ... to Richard Nixon's $2 million contribution from milk interests in 1972, followed by his order to increase milk price supports and thereby milk prices to millions of American families ... to Charles Keating, of "Keating Five" fame, who, when asked whether his substantial contributions influenced the policy makers receiving them, helpfully replied, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so."

We've been so periodically bombarded by small-bore corruption or Watergate-size scandals that money in politics has become like sex in Victorian England -- a subject of gossip, amusement, and ultimately indifference. "They all do it," many citizens sigh, with a shrug.

Selling Out
How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation, and Betrays Our Democracy. Copyright © by Mark Green. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Selling Out: How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation, and Betrays Our Democracy by Mark Green
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