Hightower Lowdown

"For too long," wailed the senator in a heart-tugging cry for justice, "some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process."

Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate, has never been mistaken for a bleeding-heart liberal, so you can rest assured that his anguish over inequality did not concern the disenfranchisement of minorities or poor people--or any kind of people, for that matter. No, it is the tragic political deprivation faced by America's corporations that moved Mitch to such an outpouring of woe.

And you thought compassionate conservatism was dead.

McConnell was expressing his solidarity with the five Supreme Court justices who ruled on January 21 that our poor corporate citizens are victims of a crass "censorship" unjustly imposed on them by local, state, and national campaign-spending laws. "Let Corporations Speak," chanted the Supreme Five. "Free the Corporate Money," they demanded.

And lo, they made it so. In the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, these five judicial contortionists perverted the Constitution, a century of the Court's own precedents, common sense, logic, and the laws of nature to decree that inanimate, corporate entities must be granted the human right to "speak" in the political arena. Never mind that a corporation is nothing but a legal construct created by the state and has no mouth, tongue, or brain for speaking--the Court fabricated a political voice for these paper inventions by declaring that their money is their language.

Thus, not only can the living, breathing executives of corporations continue dumping millions of their own dollars into elections (money that totaled more than a billion dollars in the 2008 cycle, meaning that corporate interests already possess far and away the most dominant voice in shaping our public policies), but henceforth, the trillions of dollars held by the corporate entities themselves can also be poured into electioneering ads and other forms of "speech." [ read more ]

Despite a constant racket from the forces of the far-out right (Fox television's yackety-yackers, just-say-no GOP know-nothings, tea-bag howlers, Sarah Palinistas, et al.), the great majority of Americans support a bold progressive agenda for our country, ranging from Medicare for all to the decentralization and re-regulation of Wall Street. Indeed, in the elections of 2006 and 2008, people voted for a fundamental break from Washington's 30-year push to enthrone a corporate kleptocracy.

Yet the economic and political thievery continues, as the White House, Congress, both parties, the courts, the media, much of academia, and other national institutions that shape our public policies reflexively shy away from any structural change. Instead, the first instinct of these entities is to soothe the fevered brow of corporate power by insisting that corporate primacy be the starting point of any "reform." Thus, when Washington began its widely ballyhooed effort last year to reform our health-care system, step number one was to announce publicly that the monopolistic, bureaucratic insurance behemoths that cost us so much and deliver so little would retain their controlling position in the structure. Likewise, Wall Street barons who crashed America's financial system were allowed to oversee the system's remake--and (Big Surprise!) the same top-heavy structure and shaky practices that caused the crash are being kept in place.

In other words, the foxes who ate the chickens keep being put in charge of designing the new hen house--so nothing really changes.

This is more than frustrating, it's infuriating --and it's debilitating for our democracy. As a fellow said to me about the lack of real changes in national policy during the Clinton presidency, "I don't mind losing when we lose, but I hate losing when we win."

Why does this keep happening to us, and who's doing it? It's not merely a matter of too many fickle and pusillanimous politicians--they're the on-stage actors in this drama, but not the producers, not the ones behind the scenes plotting to thwart the people's democratic will. Who, specifically, are these plotters, and how do they impose their narrow agenda of self-interest over the public interest?

These crucial questions for our democratic republic are the focus of this Lowdown, and they'll be a recurring topic in future issues. After all, to achieve genuine grassroots power, we have to know the full dimensions of the plutocratic powers we're up against. Most Americans are totally unaware of these interests, which have attained a dangerous reach by quietly embedding themselves (and their self-centered worldview) much more deeply in our society's governing institutions than they want us to realize. So let's take a peek at them, beginning with a look at the intricate web of power woven by a huge corporation you've probably never heard of, even though your consumer dollars are financing its right-wing political agenda. [ read more ]

The name Felix Walker is not one you would recognize, but this 19th-century congressman inadvertently contributed a word to America's political lexicon that you will recognize--a word that fairly well sums up a lot of what we're getting these days from right-wing politicos and pundits.

In the 1820s, Walker was the U.S. representative for Buncombe County, North Carolina. In an age of great political orators, Walker was not one. He was a droner, a dull fellow known for expressing his dullness at great length on every topic. No matter what issue was up for debate in the House--no matter whether he had any real knowledge, facts, or insights to add--Walker would rise to speak, insisting that his constituents back home would want his voice heard. He would then launch into a wandering, wearisome, often-nonsensical discourse that he always called "a speech for Buncombe."

Exasperated colleagues began to refer to Walker's interminable prattling as "just so much buncombe," a phrase that has been passed down to us as "bunk"--a synonym for meaningless political claptrap.

We've been getting an overload of bunk in recent weeks from a gaggle of Fox-brained Republican Congress critters. They've been flapping their gums to demonize and destroy a grassroots group that has offended them by--get ready to be outraged--organizing and helping to empower thousands of Americans who live in low-income and working-class neighborhoods all across the country.

ACORN is this grassroots group. For four decades, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has been going door to door, neighborhood to neighborhood, to extend basic democratic tools to people who've been dissed and dismissed by the political system. What ACORN's effort amounts to is civic education. Few members of the local chapters have ever been active in community decision making. After all, that process is usually held in the tight grip of moneyed interests who reside and work in distant, much tonier zip codes, and regular folks rarely are welcome. [ read more ]