Or, as President Woodrow Wilson put it while explaining the need for vigorous antitrust action to preserve American democracy, “If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”ĭuring this period of intensifying corporate power, Americans across the ideological spectrum responded by passing measures such as the Sherman Antitrust Act, which criminalized monopoly and was ultimately used to break up Standard Oil. Morgan, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few … but we can’t have both.” As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis explained a century ago, at the height of the power of railroad, steel, and banking barons like J.P. They fought political corruption and preserved democracy by breaking up monopolies and setting market rules in ways that prevented the build-up of concentrated economic power. Previous generations of Americans took a different approach to sustain the democratic process. Through all these mechanisms, moneyed interests can control the flow of information in public debates and determine which issues become part of the nation’s political agenda, and which remain on the fringe. Big business and wealthy donors fund lobbyists and think tanks, corrupt academic science with “sponsored” research, and underwrite popular media publications and news networks. More fundamentally, the focus on campaign finance reform fails to address the many other ways in which concentrated moneyed interests corrupt the political process. Another is the ingenuity that moneyed interests have always shown in evading regulations, from the use of soft money during the late 90s to the Super PACs of today. One reason is the Supreme Court’s insistence that political spending is a form of protected free speech. Seventy-eight percent of American adults oppose that ruling.īut trying to contain the influence of money on politics through campaign finance reform alone is problematic. Many point in particular to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling-which abolished limits on corporations’ political spending. The way to remedy this imbalance, many believe, is to pursue new restrictions on how much money wealthy individuals and corporations can contribute to campaigns. Fully two-thirds of Americans say the wealthy enjoy more sway over the election process than the average citizen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |