Americans Unchained: Guns, Government and Justice

I’m starting to understand why there are 311 million Americans and 310 million guns in America. It’s not just about hunting or collecting.

It’s about self-defense – not against street crime, which has dropped like a rock over the last two decades, but against a world that seems to have run amok, and against which the government frequently seems inept or powerless.

I’m not just talking about 9/11 – though I’m willing to bet that gun sales spiked after our country, with all its military might and a $300 billion defense budget, proved defenseless against nineteen extremists with box cutters. Consider how Washington and Wall Street connived to betray America under the guise of “deregulation,” leaving our homes, jobs, and life savings at the mercy of greed-driven speculation. It will take years for most Americans to recover what they lost since 2008 – many never will. The U.S. government proved quite adept at arranging the immediate rescue of the Money Industry; but huge numbers of our citizenry are stuck in the equivalent of the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina – left to fend for themselves.

Name a major disaster and then connect the dots, as I have attempted previously: the Enron/California Energy Crisis Hoax, 9/11, Katrina, the mass shootings by deranged loners who somehow “fall through the cracks” till they slaughter our loved ones. Then add the nation’s gravely inadequate response to global warming – the most dangerous and disruptive threat to our security on the horizon. A fearful pattern of incompetence emerges.

And so, if our government cannot protect us, we will protect ourselves ­– or at least try to, as if putting weapons in cockpits or classrooms is going to work.

A dramatic decline in public confidence in the government is clearly underway. 81% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, according to the Gallup polling organization. That’s actually an improvement over its all-time worst score of 90% last August, but hardly anything the Founders would be proud of. President Obama is also doing better, but his disapproval rating has soared from 15% in January 2009 to 43% a few days ago.

These numbers change when Americans are asked to assess the presidency and Congress as institutions in the abstract. The former scored a 43% disapproval rating – nearly identical to the current occupant’s. But only 65% of Americans disapproved of the legislative branch – fifteen points lower than the disapproval rate for the current Congress.

Rating the federal government as a whole, 63% of Americans say they are dissatisfied.

That the executive and legislative branches are held in low esteem is not news, and being the so-called “political” branches, not particularly surprising.

More important is the ranking of the branch of government whose single job is to maintain the basic software of the U.S. operating system – our laws. These are the principles, originating in the Constitution, by which democracy and its citizens are supposed to abide.  They are administered by the judicial branch, the one branch of government structured to be impervious to political pressure, including the influence of money.

Trust in the legal system is higher than either the executive or legislative branches, Gallup researchers report, but a solid third of all Americans disapprove of the judicial branch. The good news is that Americans’ view of the courts hasn’t changed much since 1973.

By some objective measures, however, America’s once vaunted system of laws fares poorly with respect to other socio-economically similar nations. The World Justice Project’s annual “Rule of Law Index” places the U.S. nineteenth out of twenty-nine countries, principally because of wealth-based disparities in Americans’ access to the legal system.

The judicial branch faces four serious challenges that, unless abated, are going to further undermine public confidence – not just in the judiciary, but also in government and democracy.

First is the increasingly politicized conduct of the courts themselves.

In 2000, the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court stopped the vote count process in Florida and awarded the election to George Bush. In 2011, the Republican majority on the high court ruled that those “arbitration clauses” inserted in the fine print of virtually every contract between a giant corporation and consumers must be enforced to deny people their right to sue a company in court. And then of course there is the infamous Citizens United case, in which the Republican majority ruled that injecting money into elections to influence the outcome is a form of free speech, and that corporations exercising that right are protected by the First Amendment. In that single decision, the Court disenfranchised the vast majority of Americans who cannot hire their own lobbyist or fund the election of a friendly politician.

Finally, most Americans are aware that Chief Justice Roberts broke with his Republican colleagues to uphold federal health care reform last year. What they’re not aware of is this: buried in the legalese of that decision, Justice Roberts opened the door to a change in constitutional jurisprudence that would roll back American law to the standards in effect in 1905, when the Supreme Court struck down congressional workplace and other reforms. Consistently favoring corporations over people is not just bad law, it’s bad for the credibility of the court.

And it’s not just the Supreme Court.  The overtly political and severely partisan appointments process for federal judges leads to decisions based on ideology rather than law, as the New York Times, surveying several recent books, reports.

Second, special interests are increasingly trying to corrupt judicial elections, a phenomenon that I’ve noted grew to serious proportions last year as a result of the Citizens United decision. Business groups seeking favorable treatment are challenging the judges who have ruled against them, or might do so in the future. John Grisham’s novel “The Appeal” is thinly veiled fact; the searing documentary “Hot Coffee” exposes the true story of how several state supreme court justices were ousted by business lobbyists. Far from being embarrassed by the assault on judicial impartiality, no less an institution than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is leading the charge along with other business funded groups. The taxpayer-subsidized organizations’ two-step system is to first target state court systems based on whether they are pro-business or pro-consumer. A Chamber collaborator is slightly less nuanced: it calls these courts “judicial hellholes,” a term it has copyrighted. Then the groups help organize the political campaigns against the judges, replacing them with candidates who will rule in favor of big-business. An estimated $30 million was spent on TV ads alone in 2012 judicial elections. Once judges get sucked into the machinery of electoral campaigns, Americans will doubt their impartiality.

Third, the courts have approved crummy settlements in numerous lawsuits – often brought by government agencies – citing banks for unlawful foreclosure practices, illegal manipulation of interests rates, and a host of other multi-billion dollar heists and scams of breathtaking audacity connected to the financial debacle. My colleague Marty Berg has documented just a few of the many examples of settlements that leave the victims with next to nothing, while the banks and their fat cat execs get off with a slap on the wrist... or even a kiss on the lips. It’s not the courts’ fault that federal prosecutors can’t seem to throw a net around the high-level white-collar crooks that ran our economy into a ditch and destroyed so many people’s lives. But the courts do have the responsibility to reject the vacuous deals that benefit only the perps and their political friends. With the few notable exceptions of federal judges insisting on tougher terms, the vast majority of these sweetheart settlements are rubber-stamped.

Fourth, the court systems in many states have sustained heavy collateral damage from the Wall Street Financial Debacle of 2008. In California, budget deficits have led to massive cuts in funding for the courts; some courtrooms have closed; judges have retired; and parties now have to pay for their own court reporters to record the proceedings.  It is not mere inconvenience that concerns lawyers here. “Justice is now being rationed in our state,” Patrick Kelly, the President of the California State Bar said. He told the Los Angeles Daily Journal: “The public….[is] used to a court system that handles all these issues, child support obligations, contract disputes. What is going to happen when the court system can no longer take care of that? … There is a potential [for] serious degeneration of civil responsibility in California.”

By applying the rule of law, courts play a critical role in preserving American ideals of fairness, competition and impartial justice. John Adams, who helped Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence and later became the second president of the United States, said this of the Seventh Amendment: “without the right to trial by jury we have no way to keep us from being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, fed like swine and clothed like hounds.”

The presence of a million more guns than people in this country is an alarming plebiscite on the nation’s confidence in the rule of law. If Americans lose faith in the courts as they have with other democratic institutions, disputes that would otherwise be settled by law will be settled by force. Take a look at the chaos and devastation now underway in countries where the only law that governs is the law of the jungle.

Did the Mayans Predict the Fiscal Cliff?

We’re so worried about the fiscal cliff that we’ve all but forgotten the end of the 25,000 year Mayan calendar, supposedly on December 21, at which time – depending on who you talk to – the Earth’s poles will reverse, the Sun will disappear for awhile, and a select few will enter the Age of Aquarius, when shag haircuts will once again be in style.

Whoa. What if this is no coincidence and the two are related? Maybe the Mayans were off by ten days, and the global catastrophe they predicted was the expiration of tax breaks on New Year’s Eve!

I have no evidence linking the Maya to the Tea Party – except that they both liked to dress up in costumes.

One of the weirdest events of 2012 – putting aside for a moment the melting of the polar ice caps – occurred at exactly 1:00 am the day after Election Day. Without any warning, the discussion of creating more jobs in America completely disappeared. Jobs had dominated American politics since September 17, 2011, when a group of angry, out of work Americans occupied a park near Wall Street and ignited a debate over the distribution of wealth in the U.S. between the .1% super-haves and the 99.9% have-nots. Eventually the presidential race became a debate over the best way to generate more jobs.

But the moment Romney stepped up to the podium to concede he had lost the election, the concern over jobs vanished. Now, we are back once again to debating the U.S. budget deficit – the issue Romney and his supporters cared the most about. The losers’ agenda is now driving the national debate.

It’s as if the polls got reversed on Election Day.

That’s the kind of strange phenomenon that occurs when our national leadership sacks out, as it did in July, 2011, when Congress decided it could not decide on a budget and the Republicans did not want to approve the government’s authority to borrow more money to cover federal programs.

The compromise was to kick the deficit issue down the road, till after the presidential election. So the Congress, treating itself like a child, set up a set of onerous financial consequences that will take effect if it doesn’t figure out some other plan by midnight on the 31st of this month. These include deep cuts in unemployment benefits and defense spending, and the elimination of payroll and income tax cuts, some dating back to President George W. Bush.

It’s like the classic Cold War satire “Dr. Strangelove,” in which the Soviets reveal they have constructed a doomsday device that will blow up the entire planet in the event the United States attacks Russia.

Though it’s not quite an extinction level event, the FC is not going to be shopping as usual either.

Everyone’s going to feel the effects if we careen off the edge. The United States will slip back into a recession, according to many economists. That’s particularly dark, given that the economists say the U.S. recession ended three years ago, but most Americans are still struggling to survive. And if America’s economy turns upside down, the ripple effect will trigger a global economic tailspin.

But you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the doomsday measures in the fiscal cliff will fall hardest upon the middle class and the poor. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, wealthy people will pay the most in additional taxes, but their tax increase will average 20.3%. Single persons, students, and retirees will see their taxes go up by 55.2%, 37.9% and 42.4%, respectively.

It’s hard to fathom that we are even debating severe cuts in government spending at this point, with 12.3 million Americans unemployed and the economy far from recovered.

It’s just common sense: if your family runs into financial trouble, and your expenses are greater than your income, what do you do? Sure, you cut out the unnecessary expenditures. But then you borrow money to pay the important bills: food, the mortgage, health care. Stop paying those bills and you are dead, figuratively if not literally. Borrowing money can be dangerous, but it’s what keeps you afloat so you can survive – and repay the debt later.

Borrowing is standard practice in the business world: think of all those Silicon Valley start-ups like Apple, Google and Twitter that need capital infusions to get off the ground and keep growing. What kept the U.S. banks and credit card companies alive after the house of cards they constructed collapsed in 2008? Money they borrowed from the federal government – us. The trillion dollar taxpayer bailout was essential, according to their friends in high places, because bankruptcy would have been more devastating to the economy.

So what’s wrong with the government offering the rest of us more assistance?

Government deficit spending is most needed when times are tough and people need extra support – like unemployment benefits. Or jobs funded by the government because the private sector is too weak to hire. Think of it as your Uncle Sam taking care of a family member in need. If he’s got the cash – or can borrow it – that’s the right thing to do. He can deal with the debt later – when the family member recovers and can pay him back.

Barring Uncle Sam from providing aid and comfort to Americans in distress sits well with those who don’t need the government (at least for benefits) because they have enough money to ride out the storm on their own – like those captains of Wall Street who are earning record executive salaries once again. But check out what’s happened in Europe, where “deficit hawks” have imposed their will on nations trying to work their way out of the economic calamity triggered by Wall Street’s implosion in 2008. Drastic cuts in government spending have devastated the economies of Greece, Spain, Italy and France, creating despair and rage among their citizens.

The drama of the fiscal cliff feeds our fascination with disaster. There’s a strong undercurrent in the American spirit that yearns for change – even radical change – as much as fears it. The closer we get to the edge, the more exciting it is. Angelenos were mesmerized by scenes of sections of their city sliding into the Pacific in the apocalyptic movie “2012.” We’re not there yet, but decisions we make or evade now will have grave consequences. America is not too big to fail: just ask the Mayans, who disappeared a millennium ago. Thanks to the election, U.S. politics are as polarized as ever, and no one in Washington seems able to exert the political gravity needed to order the planets into alignment.

Five Things Senator Elizabeth Warren Should Do Right Away

Beating the $5.5 million that the Money Industry spent against Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren was the easy part.

Now Warren has to decide what she’s going to do in the U.S. Senate, where just a couple of years ago, powerful pro-Wall Street Democrats like Christopher Dodd and Treasury Secretary Geithner killed any chance that she’d be confirmed to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – possibly the most significant part of the post-2008 crash financial reform legislation. As they hoped, President Obama didn’t even bother to nominate her – even though the concept of a federal agency to protect consumers against Wall Street’s misdeeds was hers.

First, Warren has to choose what role she’ll play once she’s on the inside. Its members like to think of themselves as august and deliberative, but in fact the Senate is deeply dysfunctional and its Democratic leadership easily deterred from meaningful action by the mere threat of a filibuster. In a recent New York Times piece on the Senator-elect, you could easily spot the inside-the-Beltway types trying to crush expectations – Warren’s and ours.

Don’t dismiss the perils of the decision.

Official Washington wants Warren to play the game, wait her turn, not rock the boat and eventually win the respect and support of her “colleagues” – the traditional route to power, influence and effectiveness in the Senate. Or she can damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead in support of popular consumer reforms, at the risk of angering and alienating those who might otherwise be her allies.

And don’t forget who her true opposition is:  the multinational corporations and their Washington lobbyists, who supply senators with the cash they need to get elected. That’s what drove the American economy into a depression four years ago, as we explained in our report “Sold Out: How Washington and Wall Street Betrayed America.” (PDF) Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, they’re free to spend as much of it as they want to influence the democratic process.

Senator-elect Warren has already indicated which way she’s headed. “If the notion … is we’re going to elect somebody to the United States Senate so they can be the 100th least senior person in there and be polite, and somewhere in their fourth or fifth year do some bipartisan bill that nobody cares about, don’t vote for me,” she has said.

That’s precisely the right call. Warren is a deceptively disarming warrior – I called her “the lawyer with the dragon tattoo” a few years back. She’s got unique nerd-quality credentials, a national support base, and the close attention of the news media. Not since Ralph Nader drew nationwide attention to consumer health, safety and environmental issues in the 1970s has there been such a respected and resonant voice on consumer issues.

No one else in the Senate – or even the federal government, with the exceptions of the President and the Secretary of State – comes close.  She can leverage her rock star status to propel a progressive agenda of reforms that will be so popular with the public that the other 99 will have little choice but to go along. Her leadership will prove particularly helpful to her fellow Democrats, who badly need to show that as a majority they can get something done for average Americans. The Congress and the country needs a lion in the Senate. That’s what they used to call Ted Kennedy, whose seat Warren will occupy. It’s poetic politics.

The next question for Warren will be what to work on. Here are five suggestions:

1. Bankruptcy reform. Warren, a bankruptcy expert, became widely known in the 1990s for her critique of the practices of America’s banks and credit card companies in law reviews and academic pieces. When the financial industry was lobbying Congress to make it harder for the average American to declare bankruptcy, Warren penned a landmark analysis (PDF) that concluded that most Americans sought bankruptcy protection not because they were freeloaders or deadbeats but because they could no longer afford to pay their medical bills. Unfortunately, Wall Street won, and the so-called “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005” made it nearly impossible for beleaguered consumers to get a fresh start – a huge victory for the credit card industry that made sure repayment of plastic debt got higher priority than child support payments, for example. Warren should investigate the inequities of the 2005 law and then seek corrective amendments.

2. Lower credit card interest rates. Having bailed out the banking industry, Congress was under pressure to do something about credit card abuses. The “Credit Card Act of 2009” was the deeply compromised and flawed result – read our analysis here.  Missing, especially, was a cap on credit card interest rates. While consumers are struggling to cover their mortgages, and pay down credit card debt at 20-30% interest rates, the banks and credit card companies get to borrow taxpayer money – our money – from the Federal Reserve at nearly 0% interest rates. That needs to be fixed, and if it is: imagine the stimulus effect on the U.S. economy.

3. Fix the Senate filibuster rule. The filibuster used to be a powerful tool for a minority of members of the Senate to take on the majority: Senators could block a vote on a bill by speaking on the floor of the Senate until they dropped... or sixty Senators voted to shut down the filibuster. Unfortunately, this extraordinary measure, once rarely invoked, has devolved. Under the current practice, a Senator need only threaten a filibuster to block a vote. It’s been used hundreds of times since 2006 by Senate Republicans to derail action on important bills and judicial appointments. Warren has already pledged to revise the filibuster rule when the Senate convenes in January. As she points out, preventing abuse of the filibuster is necessary if the Senate is going to move forward to address the nation’s most pressing problems.

4. Speak out every week. Lawmaking is just one role of a U.S. Senator. Another is to use the power and influence of the position to investigate and highlight problems in and outside of government. Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire did just that in the 1970s and 1980s through what he called “The Golden Fleece Award,” which he presented monthly to public officials who, he believed, were wasting taxpayer money. Proxmire’s pronouncements, which both amused and maddened taxpayers, were closely followed by the news media. Warren should initiate a weekly tradition of calling out waste, inefficiency, and corruption, wherever it is found.

 5. Restore the First Amendment to Human Beings. According to five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, the right of corporations to spend money to influence elections, and to give money and gifts to politicians for the purpose of influencing their votes, is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be limited or regulated. That’s the infamous ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Supreme Court’s decision has unleashed a tidal wave of corporate money, often undisclosed, into our elections, one that has drowned out the voices of average Americans and turned our country into an aristocracy in which the People are taxed for the benefit of the powerful elites that run Wall Street and Washington. A grassroots campaign is underway to enact a Constitutional Amendment specifying that, “the protections of the First Amendment that apply to the spending of money on lobbying and elections, whether by contributions, expenditures or otherwise, shall extend only to human beings.” Senator Warren should be one of the leaders of that crucial reform.

And The Loser Is….We, the People

 

No matter which way it goes on Tuesday, this election – the first presidential contest since the U.S. Supreme Court let the dogs out in Citizens United – has to be recognized as a disaster for democracy. In thousands of races, from the presidential down to statehouse races, an unprecedented influx of money has corrupted the electoral process.

Here are five dangerous trends in American politics that have manifested themselves this year.

1. Spending by “Outsiders.” In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that spending money is a form of freedom of speech under the First Amendment. And the court gave corporations the same “freedom of speech” that American citizens were granted by the Bill of Rights. That ruling, issued in January 2010, freed corporations and other inanimate entities from limits on influencing elections.

 Of the record $2 billion raised and spent in the presidential campaign, close to half appears to have come not from money raised by the candidates themselves or their political parties, but rather from Super PACS: campaign organizations that are supposed to be completely independent of the candidates. No talking is allowed between the candidate and the Super PAC. But this “firewall” is a fraud on the voters. All it takes is a few sophisticated lawyers and a “wink and nod” approach for the candidate campaigns to communicate their strategy and desires to the “independent” campaign.

We’re not really talking about “outsiders” here anyhow. The people running these operations are consummate insiders – usually people who have worked directly for the candidates and parties in the very recent past. Strategists for the Romney campaign also consult with Karl Rove’s Super PAC, American Crossroads, which is right down the hall. One of the pro-Obama Super PACs is run by two former White House aides.

2. “Issue” Advertising by Business Interests. The enormous spending reported for or against the presidential candidates by allegedly independent Super PAC supporters doesn’t include expenditures for so-called “issue advertising”: advertising propaganda dumped into our living rooms and pumped into our computers by political partisans who are able to skirt disclosure and other laws by discussing “causes” without actually urging a yes or no vote on a candidate  – even though it’s obvious from the message who the ad targets.

In the post-Citizens United world, the lines are getting even blurrier: business interests that want to explicitly influence candidate elections without revealing their identity have begun funneling money through non-profit organizations set up for that purpose, an abuse of the laws granting tax exempt status to social welfare organizations. For example, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington was able to track $7.4 million in donations the Aetna, the health insurance company, made to two non-profit organizations, and attacking lawmakers for supporting Obamacare – at the same time that the president of Aetna was making public speeches in support of the law. But that is an exception: sophisticated corporations can easily avoid disclosing their “donations” to ersatz non-profit organizations.

3.  Corporations buying the courts. Most state judges are appointed by the governor, but must run for re-election or “retention.” Increasingly, business groups who want favorable court rulings are challenging judges who have ruled against them or might do so. Big money – tens of millions of dollars – is pouring into judicial elections in half a dozen states on Tuesday, featuring the kind of nasty and deceptive thirty second ads that have polluted the airwaves in candidate races. Leading this attempt to stack the deck in the courts is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose corporate members want to elect judges who will throw out consumer, defective product and environmental protection cases. Confronted with well-funded challenges by a special interest, the judges can only defend themselves by raising money from…some other special interest.

This is not just tawdry, it's a devastating threat to our country. The judiciary is the one branch of government that is supposed to be insulated from partisanship; where decisions are made based on the rule of law, not political considerations. A series of rulings by the current US Supreme Court – Bush v Gore, for example, Citizens United, and even its decision upholding federal health care reform (read the fine print) – have already undermined that principle; public disapproval of the high court, once held sacrosanct, now approaches 40%. Once the American people lose confidence in the integrity of the judicial branch, democracy itself is in jeopardy.

4. The Millionaires Club. Let’s say you want to run for public office because you want to help solve America’s problems. And you aren’t beholden to anyone; in fact, corruption is one of the problems you want to solve. There are lots of Americans of all political stripes who would want to serve their country. But with so much corporate money in politics, how are people who are not in the pocket of some special interest able to run? You have to be rich! Nearly half of the US House of Representatives, and two-thirds of the US Senate, are millionaires, according to a study published last year.

It’s tempting to think that the wealthy will better serve the public because they have no need to raise money from special interests, but we in California learned the hard way that that is not necessarily true: “As you know, I don't need to take any money from anybody” then action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger told Jay Leno” back in 2003. “I have plenty of money myself.” The next year, Schwarzenegger ran for Governor to replace Governor Gray Davis, who was widely criticized for his incessant fundraising. As Governor, Schwarzenegger broke Davis’s fundraising record.

The disparity in wealth between elected officials and the people they are supposed to represent is at least partly why America’s economy is in terrible shape today. When Wall Street and Washington got together, few public officials were willing to oppose the deregulatory policies that led to the financial crash in 2008. (Download our report on the Great Betrayal here.) It’s the reason why, when Congress passed credit card reform, the piece most important to average Americans was missing: a cap on interest rates. The experience of being a member of the middle class, or poor, isn't a reality for most of our elected officials. The rest of us pay for that.

5. Your vote, nullified. Supporters of the Wild West approach to political funding like to point out that the voters still have the last word. Corporations ostensibly can’t vote – at least not yet.  But take a look at what has happened: the average American has little possibility of running for office when up against well-funded candidates beholden to special interests. We have freedom of speech, but unless you own a TV station, your views are drowned out by billions of dollars in paid advertising. Meanwhile, pocketbook issues of profound import for the middle class – international trade, Social Security – are off the table – hardly debated by the candidates, so as not to offend the powerful. Voters today have been reduced to spectators: we are presented with a slate of candidates and causes by way of thirty-second commercials, and we have to hope we can discern the truth.

There is only one solution to this crisis: a constitutional amendment to restore our democracy to the people.  Here’s our formulation of the 28th Amendment to the Constitution:

“The protections of the First Amendment that apply to the spending of money on lobbying and elections, whether by contributions, expenditures or otherwise, shall extend only to human beings.”

Whatever the outcome tomorrow, this is the campaign all Americans need to get behind.

Images of Pres. Obama and Gov. Romney (c) Charles Lynn Bragg – Thanks, Bro!

Release the Kraken

 

I filled out my California ballot today, choosing candidates and wading through the propositions trying to figure out who’s behind what and why. I don’t blame people who feel like bystanders in democracy these days – that some ethereal dispute is underway that most of us aren’t meant to understand. It's like in the movie “Clash of the Titans,” in which the gods are fighting each other while mere mortals are mostly just trying to avoid becoming collateral damage, dodging the Kraken and other nightmares hurled down upon them from Mount Olympus.

The various official and Super PAC campaigns for the presidential candidates are expected to break the $2 billion barrier by Election Day, a dubious record made possible by several men in black on the United States Supreme Court, whose decision in Citizens United authorized corporations to take control of American politics under the guise of freedom of speech.

In California, meanwhile, well-heeled politicians and special interest partisans in the proposition battles are spending hundreds of millions more flooding the airwaves and mailboxes.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the electoral marketplace is prosperous – like the stock market. Meanwhile, back on the planet, those Americans not employed by the Money Industry (unemployment rate: 4.6%), or its dependent relative the Political Industry, are desperately trying to hang on to a job, or more likely a part-time job. And yet, as my colleague Marty Berg and Ralph Nader have pointed out, neither Obama nor Romney have had anything to say about raising the minimum wage. It’s $7.25 an hour for federal workers; a whopping $8 an hour in California.

We could probably increase the minimum wage significantly just by taxing political advertising in the United States. Doubt that would get past the Supreme Court, though.

It’s not only the amount of money, but how it’s being unleashed: in an extraordinary assault of distortions and lies, raining down on the heads of voters from incomprehensible, sometimes secret sources. Take the California elections, for example. Proponents of Proposition 32 on the ballot insist that by limiting the political activities of unions, it will increase government “transparency.” But the Proposition 32 campaign is being funded by out of state money of unknown origin. The lobbyists hired by Proposition 33, which is 99.4% funded by the long-time CEO of Mercury Insurance Company, sued several of us who are opposed to the measure in court last August. They lost; but last week they claimed that we sued them and we lost. Huh? Then there’s Proposition 37, which would accomplish the unarguable goal of requiring food that is genetically engineered to disclose it on the packaging. You couldn’t possibly understand that from the TV ad against Prop 37, which features doctors and farmers riffing on how Prop 37 will inspire frivolous lawsuits, raise your grocery bills by zillions of dollars and favor dogs over people. It's the Kraken, beamed into our living rooms to terrorize us.

Figuring out the truth about this proposition is hard enough; figuring out who's paying for the TV commercials is impossible. No, really: try it for yourself. Watch this YouTube video and see if you can read the 75 words that appear for exactly three seconds in block micro-print at around 27 seconds in. If you pause it and squint, you might catch the names DuPont, Monsanto and ConAgra. Kind of alters your view of Prop. 37, doesn't it?

The nation’s electoral discourse is so polluted by money-driven deceit these days that it has its own sociological description: “post-truth” politics.

Honesty in campaigns used to be policed by journalists, particularly newspaper reporters, who had the expertise and experience to weigh in on complex issues and call out the liars. But their numbers have dwindled, leaving the combatants (or in the case of the special interests, their highly paid surrogates)  to slug it out. The Golden Rule often determines who prevails: he who has the gold, rules.

Or maybe it makes no difference at all. According to a story in this week’s New Yorker, the Obama campaign has concluded, after an exhaustive study of the 2008 race, that the most effective way to reach a voter is “not TV ads or glossy mail but contact from an enthusiastic human being.” Is it possible Americans have finally figured out that when “the TV tells you” how to vote, as one voter said to me back in a 1998, night after night without surcease, you can probably safely assume the sponsor of that ad is not on your side, and vote the other way? Maybe if someone you trust calls or shows up at your doorstep – but that costs a lot of money, too.

The average American cannot compete against the monied and powerful in the political or legislative arena. That's the betrayal of America's Constitution rotting at the core of the Citizens United decision. By equating money to speech, and decreeing that corporations have the same free speech rights as human beings, the high court rendered most Americans mute. We are now spectators, hoping we will somehow see the truth. Or at least not get hurt.

Illustration (c) Charles Lynn Bragg

The Quiet Occupying of LA

The Occupy Movement changed the national policy debate last year, but then its supporters dispersed or – more accurately – were driven out of public parks by the police and winter.

A different kind of occupation has occurred, almost unnoticed, in Los Angeles over the last few weeks.

In late September, thousands of Californians waited in long lines at the Sports Arena in downtown Los Angeles for free medical and dental care provided by Care Harbor, a local non-profit organization. About 6.9 million Californians don’t have health insurance: about 1 in 5. They are not only the poor; about 27% of families making $50,000 or more each year are uninsured. Skyrocketing insurance rates, higher deductibles and dwindling benefits have left many in the middle class without insurance – or greatly under-insured, so that an unexpected illness or root canal can have a devastating financial impact. Thanks to the Financial Debacle, credit cards aren’t much of a fall back anymore. Hence the 3,754 patients, many of whom showed up three days early, grateful to receive the attention of thousands of doctors, dentists and other volunteering medical professionals, even if that meant being treated among strangers in a massive hall with no privacy. The sponsors of the event, now in its fourth year, call it a “health fair.”

Save the Dream

A week later and a few miles north, the line began forming early around the Convention Center, where more thousands hoped for a chance to refinance their mortgages in order to keep their homes. The five day event – part of a national tour it calls “Save the Dream”– was sponsored by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, another non-profit that has stepped into the breach opened by the failure of the marketplace. Operating in triage-like conditions in the conference hall, it arranged refinancing for beleaguered homeowners, many of whom were the victims of predatory lending, who would otherwise face foreclosure.

Monikers like “Health fair” or “Save the Dream” create a comforting, almost festive feeling about these occasions. But they can’t mask the despairing situation many of our fellow Americans now find themselves in.

The New Orleans Superdome 2005

The images of people seeking help with basic necessities – medical care, a place to live – reminded me of the breadlines of the Depression era, before the social safety net was put in place by FDR. The cavernous venues themselves recalled a more dire moment: the gruesome pictures from the New Orleans Superdome in 2005, to which residents were evacuated during Hurricane Katrina, and there left to fend for themselves for days. "I've seen things," NBC News anchor Brian William said of his time inside that nightmare, "I never thought I'd see in the United States."

The Occupy Wall Street supporters and their local affiliates across the nation were loud and angry enough to get the news media’s attention. A few instances of police brutality certainly helped. For all the many things the Occupy movement subsequently failed to do, like create a political force that could have been deployed in national and local election campaigns, just pointing out the wealth disparity – the 1% versus the 99% – vectored public attention from the abstraction of the national deficit to the concrete pocketbook issue of the imbalance of power between the powerful and everyone else.

But there was relatively little news coverage of the quiet, peaceful members of the 99-percent encircled around arenas that usually cater to business meetings or sports, people whose life stories have been derailed by credit default swaps, derivatives and other shenanigans by speculators over which they had no control.

Wall Street got it’s stimulus package – an estimated $29 trillion bailout, courtesy of  U.S. taxpayers, in the form of cash infusions, tax breaks, and the ability to borrow at an almost zero interest rate from the Federal Reserve. But Main Street’s stimulus package was $700 million – demonstrably not enough to do the job of getting Americans back in their jobs.

Compare the two stimulus packages and explain to me why we can’t afford to address the plight of job-less, home-less and savings-less Americans.

The total debt owed by consumers in this country for loans and credit cards is roughly $12 trillion, according to the latest report. Every dollar of it could have been erased (including everyone’s mortgage debt!) if those trillion$ had gone to taxpayers instead of Wall Street, as I’ve pointed out previously. Imagine the powerful spending effect on the economy if Americans were given the right to borrow from the Fed at the same low rate that the banks do. Or if someone in Congress or the White House had thought to impose a modest cap on interest rates for consumers as a quid pro quo for the bailout money that went to those firms.

Wall Street and its allies in government have tried to diminish the significance of the bailout, noting that most banks and other corporate beneficiaries have repaid most of the money. But that’s not the right way to gauge the value of what the taxpayers did for them.

Say two people are in a boat when it capsizes.  One of them, the captain, throws a life preserver to his passenger. The passenger survives, but the captain drowns. Wall Street would measure the value of that transaction by the cost of the life preserver. The rest of us would say that the rescue came at a much, much higher price.  That price can be measured by the anguish and fear on the faces of those waiting for big box style medical and financial assistance at the Sports Arena and Convention Center.

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

Loss. That’s what I felt when I watched the space shuttle land at LAX, carried to our City of Angels on the back of a close relative, the mighty Boeing 747 – twelve years older than the shuttle and, though aging, nearly as inspiring when you happen to see one. I recalled where I was when Challenger exploded – studying in a library for the California bar exam – and when Columbia burned up on re-entry – at a cottage in Idyllwild with my family. But I’m talking about a different kind of loss.

When I was a kid, growing up in the Sixties, America seemed to be the land of limitless possibilities. President Kennedy launched the space program in 1961, promising we would reach the Moon by the end of the decade and though incredible, no one doubted the USA would do it. In the more distant future described by Gene Roddenberry, a “replicator” would eliminate want of food or material possessions and humans would be freed to explore any part of the universe they chose.

Sure, there were serious problems right here on Earth, and in this country, but the War on Poverty, the civil rights movement and a bipartisan roster of widely respected – even revered – public officials seemed determined to get these matters in hand. We were working on them, and nothing seemed intractable. The cynical snicker about the Sixties now. But such was the energy and enthusiasm of the economic prosperity of post World War II United States, an era that is already gauzy like our refracted impressions of ancient Rome.

Just after three in the afternoon on July 20, 1969, my friends and I gathered around the clunky RCA television in our den, understanding that the rest of the planet was doing the same. I was seventeen. Like all kids who grew up in the era before cable TV, video games and the Internet, we had spent many late nights outdoors contemplating the Moon, which seemed to us as distant as adulthood.  Now we could barely discern the astronauts in the grainy black and white images as they walked on the lunar surface, but there was no mistaking the achievement of that day. And though it was America’s achievement, the whole world celebrated.

A few days from now, shuttle Endeavor will be drawn through the streets of Los Angeles– like a funeral caisson for a fallen soldier – by a magnificent technological beast. That journey, at 2 mph, will end at a museum twenty-four hours later. There it will rest much like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China, monuments to human will and imagination left to puzzle future generations. No ambitious program to explore the universe will succeed the shuttle.

That’s because there's no money left to pay for our aspirations. The last decade began with a speculation-induced economic recession in 2001. In California, once the home of aerospace, the collapse of the tech-bubble was compounded by the disastrous results of the deregulation of electricity by local lawmakers, which included a bailout for over-priced nuclear power plants that cost consumer ratepayers $28 billion. Then Enron and other Wall Street firms that bought the power plants covertly manipulated the supply of electricity to jack up prices, bankrupting utility companies and forcing the state to buy long term contracts for electricity from the manipulators – at the grossly inflated prices – to keep the lights on and businesses going. The deregulation debacle cost California $71 billion – and the local economy has never been the same.

Many Americans had not recovered from the 2001 recession when the Wall Street derivatives frenzy collapsed in the Fall of 2008. Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their savings. With incomes disappearing, Americans stopped spending. That hurt businesses, especially small businesses that could not borrow. And tax revenues declined. To pay Social Security and jobless benefits, and restart the economy, the federal government spent more than it took in in recent years.

This ignited the raging political debate over the federal government’s stimulus and deficit spending, though few Americans can claim to have been bailed out the way Wall Street was. After taxpayer cash infusions, subsidies, tax breaks and other favors estimated at between $9.7 trillion and $29 trillion, the Money Industry has emerged not merely intact but more profitable than ever.

Add $1.3 trillion for the Afghan and Iraq wars, and you can see why there won’t be a manned mission to Mars anytime soon, much less hyperdrive tours of the galaxy.

Our country paid a heavy price to save Wall Street. Consider that the cost of the getting to the Moon in today’s dollars would be about $26 billion less than taxpayers spent bailing out the insurance giant AIG – about $182 billion. And the Moon program was a massive stimulus program for America in the Sixties, and not just the defense industry. Its benefits included the research and development of a raft of technologies that led to enormous advance in computer, medicine and other industries – not to mention Velcro. Steve Jobs and his colleagues in Silicon Valley didn’t build the modern personal computer industry by themselves: you, the American taxpayer, helped.

Measuring the cost of government assistance to Wall Street versus to business innovators versus to Americans in need compartmentalizes the debate. What does it say about the country – and its future – that the average life expectancy of white Americans who did not graduate high school has dropped by four years, to where it was in the 1950s to Sixties?

Yet a majority of Americans – 54% –believe that the government should do less to solve our country’s problems… though there is a sharp partisan divide on the question, with 82% of Republicans saying less and 67% of Democrats saying more, according to Gallup.

There will be Americans in space in the near future, however. Using the technology and facilities taxpayers built, a number of private companies are developing plans to commercialize orbital space flight, the New York Times reports. And every American who wants to hitch a ride can do so – for somewhere between $50 million and $150 million a ticket, depending on your destination.

As the 747 and the shuttle swung low over Los Angeles, one of my favorite oldies from the Sixties came to mind:

The road is long, with many a winding turn,
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where.

So on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear - we'll get there.

For I know: he would not encumber me.
He ain't heavy: he's my brother.

I thought back to that humid afternoon in July, 1969, when Kennedy’s charge was fulfilled by Apollo 11. JFK was gone; along with his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, struck down by hate, fear, madness.  At the time, they seemed to us pioneers in the still young and uncertain cause of Democracy, and had given their lives to better their fellow Americans and the Nation. The sense of  purpose, destiny, determination and sacrifice – shared by the nation – was inspiring. At least to a young guy from a Boston suburb.

 

How Retired Justice David Souter Can Save the Supreme Court

The reputation of the United States Supreme Court is in trouble. Americans’ approval of the Court dropped fifteen points from 2009 to 2011, according to the Gallup Poll. Faith in the Supreme Court is dropping right along with confidence in government as a whole. Less than 2/3 of Americans say they trust the judicial branch, Gallup says.

And with good reason. Beginning with Bush v Gore in 2000, the court has issued a series of starkly partisan rulings in favor of conservative and corporate causes.

The decision of the high court that has most inspired outrage and derision in recent years is Citizens United. The Supreme Court rewrote the First Amendment to equate money spent on influencing elections and lobbying elected officials as a form of free speech under the First Amendment. Then the Court granted corporations the same First Amendment rights as humans. This twofer has unleashed a spree of legalized bribery by corporate America that will reach epic proportions in elections this year. It’s also ignited a grassroots firestorm. Where’s Our Money, and many other organizations, are backing a Constitutional Amendment to restore the primacy of humans to American Democracy.

As Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out in his blistering dissent to the majority’s opinion in Citizens United, the decision overturns a hundred years of  Supreme Court rulings upholding restrictions on corporate campaign spending. Such a sudden and profound reversal in what the Constitution supposedly means is an offense in itself. It flouts a core principle of the American judiciary, known as “stare decisis,” which requires judges to respect the judicial decisions of their predecessors. “Stare decisis” is the basis for public faith in the integrity and honesty of judges and courts.

Perhaps for that reason, the Citizens United decision seems to have inspired several former justices of the Supreme Court to speak out.

In late May, now retired Justice Stevens, in a speech at the University of Arkansas, condemned the majority’s opinion in Citizens United as internally inconsistent because it leads inexorably to the conclusion that “the identity of some speakers may provide a legally acceptable basis for restricting speech,” something that can’t be squared with the text of the First Amendment – even as interpreted by the Republican majority in that very case.

Stevens also defended President Obama for taking on the Citizens United decision in his State of the Union speech in 2010, right in front of several of the justices. Which may or may not have something to do with why Stevens was at the White House last week to receive the Medal of Freedom. Stevens took the opportunity to again criticize Citizens United.

Another retired justice has also weighed in, perhaps involuntarily. As Jeffrey Toobin reported in the New Yorker two weeks ago, Citizens United started out as relatively modest challenge to a federal campaign finance law. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative fellow travelers on the Court subsequently decided to use the case as an opportunity to rewrite the First Amendment in favor of big corporations. But Justice David Souter, a fiercely independent and revered jurist, objected to this tactic. According to Toobin, Souter, scheduled to retire in June, 2009, “wrote a dissent that aired some of the Court’s dirty laundry. By definition, dissents challenge the legal conclusions of the majority, but Souter accused the Chief Justice of violating the Court’s own procedures to engineer the result he wanted.” Toobin describes Souter’s draft dissent as “an extraordinary, bridge-burning farewell to the Court.”

To avoid a published dissent that would have profoundly questioned the integrity of his Court, Chief Justice Roberts set the case for re-argument on June 29, 2009.  This highly unusual move kicked the decision over until the next court term. Toobin says that Roberts did this knowing that Souter would be gone by then.

The source for this explosive reporting could be Justice Stevens... or it could be retired Justice Souter himself.

Souter has donated his papers – including presumably his draft dissent in Citizens United – to the New Hampshire Historical Society. Unfortunately, he has barred any access to them for fifty years.

We can’t wait that long. It’s hard to estimate how much damage to American politics will be done between now and 2056. A nation dominated by corporations and mega-wealthy CEOs for the next half-century will look a lot worse than even the corrupt system in effect today.

And the erosion of trust in the integrity of the Supreme Court is something all Americans – not merely we lawyers devoted to justice – should be alarmed about. The judicial branch used to be the one branch of government where the average person could take on City Hall or a giant corporation and expect to be treated equally, free of political influences. Lose that option, and what’s left for the 99%?

Retired justices typically refrain from criticizing their former colleagues. A sense of decorum, and the sanctity of the judicial process, mandates a quiet retirement for most departed members of the Supreme Court. But the integrity of the institution itself is now in question. The rule of law is being supplanted by the political preferences of the appointees on the Court. It won’t be long before the monstrous swelling of money in politics spread by Citizens United directly infects the composition of the high court itself. Those who care about the independence of the judicial branch should do everything in their power to save the Supreme Court. This includes justices who have left the Court.

Like everything else in our democracy, exposure is the first step toward healing. Americans deserve to know what is going on behind those closed bronze doors, above which reads the promise, “Equal Justice Under Law.”

Justice Souter should permit the immediate release of his original draft dissent in Citizens United.

The Super Heroes vs The Super PACs

The Men in Black kicked the Avengers’ butts last weekend at the box office. The Avengers and the Mibsters both kicked the aliens’ butts (or their biological  equivalent). Gigantic movie battles between innocent, minding-their-own-business Americans and evil-doing invaders intent on destroying our cities have become a Memorial Day tradition. And it’s always the grit and chutzpah of a handful of superheroic patriots that saves the country and the planet.

Why do Americans especially embrace these fantastical films of victory against seemingly invincible enemies during a holiday that recognizes those who have given their lives for their country? It’s probably a coincidence. After all, how many Americans celebrating Memorial Day actually know what it stands for, apart from shopping, barbequing and movie-going?

Not many, is my guess. One reason is that only one half of one percent of the U.S. population – that’s 0.5% – has been on active duty in the military at any point during the last ten years, according to the Pew Research center.  Only a quarter of Americans say they “closely follow” news of the wars in Iran and Afghanistan. About half told pollsters the wars “made little difference” in their lives and that neither was worth the cost. This is hardly surprising; in fact, it was a deliberate strategy by the nation’s leaders.

There was never the congressional Declaration of War that our Founders mandated, in the Constitution, to ensure that the decision had the support of a majority of the country. To avoid a national draft, which they believed would be massively unpopular, Bush Administration officials disastrously outsourced a huge chunk of the work of the two conflicts to private corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater (both have since changed their names).  And war itself increasingly became a sterile and distant affair: U.S. soldiers directed drone attacks from buildings on U.S. soil, using high-tech weaponry much like blockbuster video games.

There was nothing like the clarity of purpose or mission that arises when a galactic Hitler seeks to wipe out the species  - the kind of “live free or die” choice that led a united United States to enter World War II. We were threatened – that much we knew – but the rest of the details were shrouded in secrecy and overt lies.  The post 9/11 wars were under the radar for many – maybe most –Americans.

That’s bad news for our democracy.  Countries whose populations were disengaged from the wars conducted in their name have not fared well in history, beginning with the archetypal example: ancient Rome.  As pointed out by Cullen Murphy, that city’s infamous decline and fall bears a distressing similarity to the privatization, coarsened discourse and elite-driven political establishment that characterizes contemporary America. A sense of betrayal and powerlessness – felt most painfully over the last few years as a result of the Wall Street debacle and bailouts – was behind the Tea Party (until it got take over by corporate interests) and Occupy uprisings.

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, the disenfranchisement of average Americans has only accelerated since the crash while a small class of the warrior elite has been elevated: the political consultants. Their mission: to manipulate the judgment of citizens as they attempt to exercise the right to vote.

Back in the day, political consultants were restrained by whatever boundaries were imposed by the candidates and elected officials they represented. The candidates, in turn, were bound by rules limiting how much money special interests could give them.

No more, reports the New York Times.

Ruling in the outrageous Citizens United case that corporations and their leaders have the same First Amendment rights as people, the Supreme Court has cut the tether between candidate and consultant. Now, practitioners of the dark arts of domestic poly-sci warfare can work directly for corporate funded Super PACs without having to worry about anyone’s sensibilities. “You don’t have kitchen cabinets made up of well-intentioned friends and neighbors who don’t know what they’re doing but eat up a lot of your time,” a Republican consultant told the Times. “Super PACs don’t have spouses.”

The Supreme Court has done away with the middleman – the candidate – and, perhaps inadvertently, torn away the modest cloak of legitimacy that the old campaign finance laws used to provide to a fundamentally corrupt system.  Now the corporations and malefactors of wealth exercise with zeal their First Amendment freedom to blast their political opponents into oblivion.

Looking for the Avengers? If we are going to preserve our democracy against this final assault, citizens are going to have to become the superheroes.

Identity Theft in the Matrix

Something weird occurred on my TV when I happened to catch a few minutes of the Madrid Tennis Open on Sunday. Whatever technology these stadiums use to provide constantly changing television advertisements along the sides of the court wasn’t working too well. Some of the furniture on the clay itself seemed to be dissociating on an atomic level. A chair looked as if it was disappearing in a shimmering blue cloud. It was like that moment in the movie The Matrix when the reality of the unreality becomes apparent to Neo – a house cat vanishes for a split second, then reappears.

The technical snafu made the match pretty hard to watch, so I reverted to the New York Times, where columnist Thomas Friedman happened to be expressing astonishment at the profound influence of corporate marketing values on American society. Few have written more enthusiastically about the spread of capitalism worldwide than Friedman, so it was surprising to hear him say he “had no idea” that famous authors, revered sports players and even public institutions have all bartered their identities for corporate cash.

Just then, Roger Federer won the match. “Watch this,” my wife said in a moment.  “He’s going to reach into his gym bag and pull out an expensive watch, so he’s wearing it when he gets the award.” Sure enough, with a bemused grin – I took it to be a guilty “ok, I have to do this” sort of look – Federer theatrically slipped his sweaty hand into the bag and slowly pulled out a gleaming Rolex, which he then slid onto his wrist.

I’m no slouch when it comes to tracking the commodification of our culture – a Ralph Nader spin-off, Commercial Alert, has been quietly raising the issue for years – but I’d never witnessed someone of Federer’s stature actually engage in a corporate sponsorship ritual, one which happens to be well known to tennis fans.

The impact of celebrity endorsements and the promotion of products in TV shows and films is more than just an idle curiosity. For many years, Americans were urged to close the gap between the lifestyle they aspired to – as displayed in the entertainment media – and the economic reality of their lives by borrowing on their homes and credit cards. This masked a gaping and painfully growing chasm that is now the topic of conversation only because Wall Street flushed the toilet on our economy a few years back.  Where once you too might have been able to pull a beautiful watch out of your duffel courtesy of a JP Morgan Chase credit card, that’s no longer possible for many.

Even more insidious than dictating our personal dreams and values is the corporate capture of our political identities. In that sense, the United States Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Citizens United symbolically acknowledges what had long ago become the Golden Rule of American democracy: those who have the gold, rule. By bestowing human rights upon corporate entities, and equating spending money to buy elections with freedom of speech, Citizens United locked in a system of legalized bribery that locks most Americans out of the electoral process that is our birthright.

Sure, we still have the right to vote. But the choices we are offered are usually determined by a political establishment mostly dominated by corporate money and a vast apparatus of election consultants, public relations hacks and lobbyists.

Every corporate dollar spent on candidates and elections pays an enormous return on the investment.  The Money Industry gave $5 billion to federal officials in the ten years leading up to the 2008 financial debacle, as we documentedin 2009 (PDF). The result: “bipartisan” decisions by lawmakers and the executive branch stripping away decades of legislation designed to protect America against lunatic speculation. Liberated, Wall Street gambled till it lost everything. Cost to American taxpayers: hundreds of trillions of dollars in bailouts, lost jobs, battered businesses, devastated communities – a Depression. Heads they win, tales you lose.

A recent study by academics at the University of Kansas examined how a particular federal tax break for multinational corporations became law, and what happened after that. They calculated that for every $1 spent on lobbying in favor of the tax break, the companies were spared $220 in taxes – a return of 22,000%.

Last week’s revelation that JP Morgan Chase had lost $2 billion through trading practices that are supposed to be illegal under the financial reform law passed by Congress in 2010 begged the question: how did they get away with it? Answer: JP Morgan Chase spent millions on lobbyists whose job was to weaken the law, and delay its implementation. The current draft of the federal regulations required to enforce a key provision of the law is a 298-page monstrosity; thanks to JP Morgan’s lawyers, it’s loaded with political booby traps and sabotaging IEDs that will utterly neuter the law, if it ever takes effect.

Mission accomplished.

With staggering results like these, it’s no wonder that the corruption of American politics is now an industry itself. The Times estimates its size at $6 billion a year, and reports that a series of mergers and acquisitions is creating a corporate lobbying conglomerate where the best and brightest – including retiring members of Congress – alight.

This is the Invisible Government that used to be the topic of novelists and conspiracy theorists. In the celebrity-driven entertainment Matrix, it’s easy to miss if you aren’t looking around and wondering what’s going on.