A Broken Land

“If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply any demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government.” - Lincoln Steffens, journalist, muckraker

Blame it all on money.

I remember sitting in a high school gymnasium in Los Angeles in June of 1999 when George W. Bush announced his first presidential campaign fund-raising totals. The $36.2 million generated in the first FEC reporting period was nine times greater than Sen. John McCain and an historical record that political analysts called staggering. In his runup to a reelection campaign, Bush broke more records and put $131 million into his campaign accounts. When he told the audience of journalists, staff, and supporters, the amount of his donations in the first quarter of reporting in 1999, there was an audible group gasp in the room.

A huge portion of Bush’s cash came from wealthy and influential types who bundled together maximum legal donations per individual into $100,000 totals. That was not an insignificant achievement since individual contributions were limited to $1000 under federal guidelines. Individual caps have climbed almost every election cycle since 2000 and are now $2800 per candidate.

But that’s just part of our problem.

The Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United is a decision that put one of the final nails in the casket of our hospice-housed democracy. The court decided that money and speech were, essentially, the same thing, and ruled that corporations, billionaires, and even foreign interests could spend whatever in the glory hell they wanted on campaigns using Super PACs. And that is exactly what they have done because, as Sen. Mitt Romney said during his failed presidential campaign, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

Corporations are not, of course, people except under a distorted interpretation of the law. The high court has opened elections to anyone who can set up a Super PAC and write a check. There are no constraints and every candidate and issue is up for sale and the wealthy and corporations are busy shopping for, and buying, influence. Bush’s record-breaking numbers are quite insignificant when compared to the dollars the Trump Campaign racked up. He and his cohorts raised more than a billion dollars, about $350 million of which came from large donors. Joe Biden also raised more than a billion from individual donors and more than $580 million from outside groups.

How does this manifest itself in policy? Look around, even glance just quickly at Trump’s tenure. Executive orders reduced the size of national parks like Bears’ Ears and the Grand Staircase Escalante, both in Utah, to open those lands up to mining for natural resource companies. He rolled back EPA protections on air and water because they were burdensome for energy companies and manufacturers, and, most critically, he cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent. American based multi-national corporations used that money to buy back their own stock and throw cash in the bank. Nobody really got “trickled down” on by investment or business largesse, and anyone who says those tax cuts spurred economic growth is just reciting GOP pablum and Trump party propaganda.

Money used to be the tool for getting out a message, but it has now become the message.

The dollar is far more valuable in American electoral politics than is the vote. If you want to comprehend how hopelessly outgunned are citizens, then simply look at our defense department. Major defense contractors spend millions supporting candidates who are conservative and hawkish about U.S. defense. When those candidates take office, they appropriate large amounts of tax money to build weapons systems the Department of Defense says are needed, and which fill the bank accounts of corporate defense contractors. The defense budget goes up every year, and there is almost no oversight or restraint on spending.

There are multiple examples of this absurdity. The Zumwalt battleship is probably the most iconic recent example of defense spending gone wrong. The program for the Zumwalt cost $10 billion to develop and each copy of the ship is $4.5 billion dollars. An attack platform that was supposed to have the most advanced technology has failed, miserably. Only five of the ship’s twelve key technologies were considered “mature” when build-out began at the Bath Iron Works in Maine. The Zumwalt carries two giant guns that will never fire because the technology did not work out and it was also to include a weapons system that used GPS guided shells that were $800,000 each to fire at a target, almost as expensive as the longer range and more deadly cruise missiles. The Zumwalt was cancelled by congress when the cost overruns exceeded the budget by 50 percent.

But we never run out of ways to waste money when spending on defense. Politicians are more concerned with the myth of the welfare Cadillac than they are the money they are wasting on artifacts like the F-35 airplane, which the Pentagon has admitted, untold billions later, is a huge failure. Just firing the main gun on the aircraft can cause the fuselage to crack. Parts fail, pilots blackout, software has never worked properly, but Lockheed Martin keeps getting paid. The F-35 costs $44,000 an hour to fly. The plane was supposed to manage every combat mission needed except for those to be flown by heavy bombers. Instead, the lifetime cost of this epic failure will be $1.5 trillion dollars, and the supposedly less expensive replacement is expected to be just as pricey over the course of its development and fly away.

How does a contractor screw up so badly and stay in business? Contribute to campaigns and invest in lobbyists. In 2020, Lockheed Martin donated just under $7 million dollars to candidates that will serve the cause of defense spending, but they left none of that to chance by spending $12,960,810 on lobbying the same year. Defense appropriations by congress are assured regardless of any budget constraints on health care or food stamps or higher education or research or low-income housing or parental leave. Investing in better ways to kill always offers a good return on capital. No officeholder ever gets reelected by campaigning to cut defense budgets, either, because it makes them look like they don’t want to keep America safe.

By god!

Lockheed Martin Marketing video

We might be able to overcome such idiocy if we formed bipartisan coalitions to more closely examine the way our government spends money, but the notion of cooperation between the two parties is only conceptual in this century. We have given rise to a cycle of opposition that makes accomplishment for a candidate’s party the critical goal, and not trying to develop policies that improve the country. If the majority party in the U.S. government holds the presidency and only one chamber of congress, the chances of it getting legislation passed are marginal, especially with the Trump party controlling what was formerly known as the GOP. Any Republican moving toward the middle to facilitate a compromise runs the risk of facing a Trumper in a primary and losing their office. Consequently, votes in the Senate and House occur only along party lines. The goal is to stop the party in power from doing anything valuable that might help it or the country and force an accumulation of failures that will lead to the minority party taking control in the next election.

There has always been debate but our national discourse has acquired a degree of intransigence that has rendered our government almost vestigial. There used to be a touch of subtlety about disagreements but the current Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, brought the modern obstructionism into public view when he famously told reporters about President Obama, “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” Silly you probably thought he was supposed to facilitate legislation to advance our country.

This standoff is sustained on our media because it draws viewers and readers and listeners. Compromise and cooperation leading to achievement is not nearly as engaging as conflict without resolution. Every day on FOX News, entertainers passing themselves off as journalists reliably criticize whatever policy or legislation or decision is being made by Democrats while MSNBC’s thinkers explain how Republicans and Trumpers are stopping important bills from being passed and are ignoring the law. The difference between the two networks, if anyone cares to watch closely, is that MSNBC’s opinions are interpretations of facts while FOX relies on nonsense derived from the convolutions of brains like Tucker Carlson’s. The Internet, too, has prompted editorial decisions for networks that make them choose conflict to entertain because they are competing for attention with thousands of online distractions.

The antipathy between the two main political parties is also doing great damage to democracy at the state level. In 2021, it was reported that 19 states passed 34 laws that made voting much more difficult with varying ranges of restrictions. The effort, though, was actually much broader because 440 measures to restrict voting were introduced in 49 states, and the trend is not likely to slow in 2022. These are generally being approved in states with Republican legislatures and governors and are designed to keep power out of the hands of the opposing party, and minority voters.

And it’s working.

In Harris County, Texas, this state’s most populous, election officials say that new restrictions on mail in ballot applications are causing 16 percent of them to be rejected. Travis County registrars in Austin indicate that fifty percent of its mail in ballot requests are being rejected for failure to include identification numbers like social security and driver’s license and proper signatures at the right location on the documents. These results are by the design of SB1, which was passed in the Trump party-controlled Texas legislature. There is always the chance the regulations will equally impact both parties, though adding friction to the electoral process has historically reduced minority and working-class voter turnouts, which is the goal for the GOP in Texas.

The laws are even more insidious than described above. One element of SB1 makes it a felony for an election official to send a vote-by-mail application to any registered voter who did not request one. A conviction for violating those rules will send a public servant to jail for six months to two years and cost them a fine of $10,000. Friday night, though, a federal judge blocked the law from being enforced by ruling that the state of Texas was violating the First Amendment right to free speech. Judge Xavier Rodriguez, a federal court appointee of President George W. Bush, said that “The state of Texas has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is expected to challenge Rodriguez’ decision at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a history of being arch conservative and throwing out almost every progressive lower court ruling coming before its bench. Election officials in Texas and Democrats are worried a quick hearing at the Fifth Circuit will put the law back into effect and have a dramatic impact on voter turnout for the primaries, which begin in a matter of days. Of course, by keeping the SB1 restrictions as law, fewer voters will tend to mean more conservative candidates in Texas and sustaining GOP control at the state and federal level. The effect of this is the power of Republicans to appoint more judges to issue more rulings that favor conservative ideology.

Which is how things started heading toward hell.

We now live in a nation where books are being pulled from libraries and school bookshelves because there are suddenly conservative complaints that our children and others might learn about slavery and how it impacted this country’s development, or they might come to understand that nature creates people who are attracted to their own sex. Parents are showing up at school board meetings to scream at educators about curriculum that was never problematic until conservative money and messengers began attacking the ideas and realities and calling them harmful.

In Texas, we have additional complications. Our governor gets million-dollar campaign donations from energy companies even as the state’s electrical grid fails, and hundreds die from the cold. The grid is still not repaired but utility bills for residential customers carry a surcharge to pay for overpriced natural gas purchased during last year’s storm and to fund improvements that do not seem to get finished. The Abbott Tax on utility bills ought to cost him reelection but he has almost $65 million in his campaign war chest while Democrat Beto O’Rourke sends out emails seeking small donations to help him compete.

Abbott is the same governor who has refused to expand Medicaid to Texas, which has been a central cause of more than two dozen rural hospitals closing in the state during the pandemic. We lead the nation in uninsured residents and instead of urging everyone to wear a mask, or ordering it, he has sought legal rulings that effectively have spread the pandemic virus and led to 82,259 dead Texans. Meanwhile, he wastes billions by posturing at the border as some sort of avatar to stop immigration. Texas National Guard and DPS troopers are deployed by the thousands and arrayed along the Rio Grande in a few spots as if there weren’t hundreds of miles of open country on either side of their positions.

A few troops have committed suicide and there have been accidental gunshot deaths associated with the deployments and several judges are releasing hundreds of jailed immigrants that were wrongfully arrested and charged with trespassing. Guard troops say they do nothing, they have no tasks, and their mission lacks a purpose and is a waste of time and resources. Morale is low, pay is often late, and educational benefits have been cut even as they make sacrifices away from their jobs and family. Plus, there is no end in sight to the deployment. My belief is they will be on duty at least until after the GOP primary, but maybe all the way through the fall election so they can continue to serve as a campaign prop for Greg Abbott.

In the meantime, our governor, like his party, supports a former president who incited a riot and conspired to overthrow an election that tossed him out of office. The American system of jurisprudence continues to struggle with bringing to justice members of the Trump administration who fomented the assault on the U.S. Capitol, and who plotted to seize voting machines, and who continue to insist the election was illegal and stolen from the failed former businessman. The evidence is overwhelming against Trump and his acts of sedition against this country and if the law holds no penalty for attempting to circumvent the very processes on which our democracy is based, then there is little hope for our faltering republic.  

People already no longer believe their vote matters, that big money has taken control of our democracy, and they can do nothing to stop the conservative laws that decrease access to the ballot box and move congressional lines around to make certain only the chosen conservatives win elections and not Democrats. Moderate Republicans are afraid to stand up to Trump because they will lose primary elections, and, consequently, we find ourselves locked in a cycle of standoffs where achievements of great social import would otherwise be possible. But there is no longer any common ground.

We are a broken land.