Four hundred protesters associated with the Democracy Spring movement were arrested in Washington, DC last week after demonstrators descended upon the US Capitol
writes
Benny Huang.
They spoke out against money in politics, the Koch brothers, and the
Citizens United ruling that overturned key provisions of campaign
finance law. The demonstration was clearly a statement against corporate
influence in politics.
The protesters aren’t entirely wrong. Yes, political influence is
unequally distributed because money begets power and vice versa. A guy
who changes oil for a living doesn’t have as much pull as a guy who owns
an oil company. But what can be done about it?
Societies that have
experimented with radical egalitarianism have yielded horrific results—and none of them can even claim to have achieved their purported goal of leveling the playing field for everyone.
We’re left to ponder why efforts to equalize political power always
fail. Could it be that even those who demand equal voices in government
don’t really want it? From observing Democracy Spring in action I can
only conclude that the answer is yes. They’re neither class warriors nor
small-“d” democrats; they’re just hacks.
Take, for example, Democracy Spring’s fixation on the libertarian
Koch brothers, the Left’s new Emmanuel Goldstein. I’m sure that
Democracy Spring would have you believe that they simply want the Koch
brothers to butt out of politics because their substantial fortune buys
them outsized influence; but that can’t be the real reason because they
don’t want all filthy rich political donors to butt out. Tellingly,
there’s no Two Minutes Hate against George Soros.
George Soros is exactly the kind of unscrupulous hedge fund manager
that the Left should despise by default—and yet they don’t. Gee, do you
think it’s because he’s their sugar daddy? A 2010 report
from Opensecrets.org contrasting the Koch brothers’ contributions to
Soros’ contributions revealed that both sides dump money into politics
by the truckload. Trying to calculate who spends more is difficult
because they spend differently.
"Ever since Americans were old enough to crawl in front of a television set," adds
Kyle Becker,
they’ve been told that Republicans are the party of rich white guys, and Democrats are the champions of the poor.
Prepare to flip that thinking upside down.
… 20 of the top 32 donors lean Democrat, while only 6 lean Republican. The rest are on the fence.
… if you factor in all the indirect benefits the Democrat Party gets from the non-profit sector, left-wing activism, public and private sector unions, Wall Street banks, universities, and superfund contributors, it has been estimated by Dr. David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin in their book The New Leviathan that the Republican Party is outspent in politics by a factor of 7-to-1by a factor of 7-to-1.
Bear this in mind when the left goes off on a tirade about the Koch Brothers bogeymen, who come in 59th on a list of top contributors. Public and private sector unions leave the Koch Brother’s measly $18 million over 25 years in the dust.
Benny Huang continues:
But Democracy Spring, while claiming that it only wants to eradicate
money’s corrupting influence, doesn’t mention Soros’s substantial
contributions. Is it because Soros is funding Democracy Spring? Campaign
Director Kai Newkirk says Soros hasn’t “given us a dime,”
but the same cannot be said of its supporting organizations. Democracy
Spring’s website boasts of endorsements from more than one hundred
groups, some of which are funded with Soros money. The political titan
MoveOn.org, for example, is listed as a Democracy Spring endorser and
has received funding from Soros. Other endorsing groups that have taken
Soros money include People for the American Way and Demos.
One endorser, an organization calling itself The Other 98%, even has a handy infographic
on its website to explain why the billionaire Koch brothers are bad but
billionaire George Soros is good. I could find no evidence that The
Other 98% is funded by George Soros though its infographic wreaks of
agitprop. It depicts Soros as a public-minded philanthropist and the
Koch brothers as greedy, evil tycoons who use their money to advance the
devil’s agenda. It’s more “our money good, their money bad”
propaganda—and that is why these people lack credibility. Despite their
rhetoric, it’s not “We the People” versus the corporations, nor is it
the 98 percent versus the super-rich 2 percent. It’s their favorite
billionaire against yours.
Once you understand the endorsing organizations’ support from (and
for?) George Soros it suddenly becomes clear why these crusaders against
money in politics don’t protest his influence-peddling. Even if the
leaders of this Democracy Spring movement are completely sincere in
their desire to drive all the big donors from politics (and I’m not sure
that they are) their endorsing organizations are not. There’s almost an
unspoken agreement—the endorsing organizations will continue to support
Democracy Spring as long as their own donors are shielded from
criticism. Democracy Spring accepts this condition because it wants
their support.
If Democracy Spring wants to end the corporate corruption of our
democratic process they might want to focus their efforts on the
troubling trend of corporations threatening states with economic
sanctions. This tactic appears to work well because large corporations
can inflict real pain upon the populations of states that refuse to do
their bidding.
For example, the Walt Disney Company recently threatened
Georgia that it would pull all film production from that state if the
governor signed a religious freedom bill. The bill, which really
shouldn’t be necessary in a country that already has the first and
thirteenth amendments, protects private business owners from homosexuals
who want to make them unwilling participants in same-sex weddings.
… Why are these anti-corporate activists not raising hell? Disney is an
enormous, out-of-state media conglomerate that issued an ultimatum to a
state governor to veto a bill that was passed overwhelmingly by the people’s elected representatives—and the governor complied.
A huge corporation said ‘jump’ and a Governor Deal said ‘how high?’
Sadly, I think nearly all of our state governors would have done the
same.
I can hear the objections now—that the bill was terrible, awful,
discriminatory, practically Jim Crow all over again. That’s nonsense of
course, but it’s also irrelevant. What matters is that the people of
Georgia wanted that bill and presumably still do but they can’t have it
because the corporations sounded a resounding “No!”
The Left’s support
for these corporate boycotts tells me that they don’t always side with
the people against the corporations. When the people are “bigots” they
like to see corporations thrash them into line. They can’t say
unequivocally that the will of the people should prevail when it
collides with the will of corporations. It depends, really. Are the
corporations progressive? Are the people backwards hicks? These details
matter.
If that’s your position you are neither anti-corporate nor
pro-democracy. You’re not leading a People’s movement against corporate
interests. Stop lying to yourselves and the rest of us. Hacks like you
don’t get to claim lofty ideals because you don’t have any. You have an
agenda, nothing more.
Other states have had fights with corporations over other bills, most
of which involve protecting people of faith targeted by homofascist
bullies. That’s because homosexuals, far from being the underdogs they
pretend to be, are well-organized, well-connected, and extremely
well-funded. When people try to defend themselves the homofascists
unleash the corporate hounds. Works every time.
Walmart, for example, exerted a lot of political pressure on
Arkansas’s governor to veto a religious freedom bill in that state. The
governor signed a watered-down version. So it’s official—liberals took the side of Walmart over religious freedom. Walmart! Hating Walmart is reflexive for liberals, almost like breathing. The aforementioned Other 98% has even started its own Walmart boycott,
though not because Walmart hates religious freedom or because it used
its political clout to overrule the will of the people. They’re
boycotting Walmart because it doesn’t yet pay its employees $15 an hour.
Liberals would rather waterboard a baby seal than shop at Walmart but
clearly they don’t hate Walmart as much as they hate Christians. That’s a
special kind of hate.
It’s undeniable that people with big checkbooks exert more power than
the rest of us. That’s a truism that will probably never change. But
the people who complain the most about it should get real and admit that
they aren’t really concerned about corporate influence or money in
politics. That’s a pose, not a position. What they don’t like is when
it’s used against them, to thwart their policy goals and block their legislation. That’s understandable, I suppose, but it shouldn’t be confused with principle.
