Dollarocracy Read online

  DOLLAROCRACY

  Also by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney

  It’s the Media, Stupid (2000)

  Our Media, Not Theirs (2002)

  Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (2005)

  The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (2010)

  DOLLAROCRACY

  How the Money-and-Media Election

  Complex Is Destroying America

  JOHN NICHOLS

  AND ROBERT W. McCHESNEY

  Copyright © 2013 by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney

  Published by

  Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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  Designed by Pauline Brown

  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  ISBN: 978-1-56858-711-0 (e-book)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Whitman, Amy, and Lucy

  I speak the password primeval,

  I give the sign of democracy;

  By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

  WALT WHITMAN, SONG OF MYSELF

  CONTENTS

  Foreword, Senator Bernie Sanders

  Preface

  Introduction: Privilege Resurgent

  1 This is Not What Democracy Looks Like

  2 The $10 Billion Election: What It Looks Like When Billionaires Start Spending

  3 The Architects of Dollarocracy: Lewis Powell, John Roberts, and the Robber Baron Court

  4 The Bull Market: Political Advertising

  5 Media Corporations: Where the Bucks Stop

  6 The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism

  7 Journalism Exits, Stage Right

  8 Digital Politics: There Is No Such Thing as “Too Much Information”

  9 The Right to Vote: Beginning the New Age of Reform

  Notes

  Index

  FOREWORD

  United States Senator Bernie Sanders

  More than a decade ago, in April 2002, I opened a crowded meeting at the Unitarian Church on Main Street in Montpelier, Vermont, by announcing, “I want to welcome you to what I believe is the first congressional town meeting ever organized to address the issue of corporate control of the media.” For the next several hours, John Nichols, Bob McChesney, and I had the remarkable experience of talking with and listening to citizens who were ready to engage in a serious discourse about the role of a free press in sustaining democracy. The people got it, as they almost always do. Even then, they could see what we saw: a decline in the amount and quality of journalism and a parallel rise in the influence of Big Money in our politics.

  The media reform movement that Nichols and McChesney have done so much to foster—as the authors of four books on media policy, as advocates for independent media, and as cofounders of the nation’s media reform network, Free Press—has always sought to address that concern. I’ve been proud to work with them on media issues and proud of the successes we have had in pushing back against consolidation of media ownership and in supporting public and community broadcasting and maintaining net neutrality.

  But Nichols and McChesney have always argued that realizing the full promise of a free press in America must be seen as the founders saw it: as a way of providing the information and ideas that sustain democratic discourse and enable citizens to cast informed votes. And the past decade has, unfortunately, been rough on democratic discourse and on democracy itself. Local newspapers have closed or been downsized. Coverage of statehouses and even of Washington, DC, is declining. Although there is hope for online journalism, resources are few. For tens of millions of Americans, an information void has developed. And it is being filled by political advertising and public relations spin.

  The simple truth is that we cannot govern our own affairs when our national, state, and local debates are bought and sold by billionaires, who use thirty-second commercials to shout down anyone who disagrees. Democracy demands a rich, robust discourse about ideas, not a spending spree that demeans those ideas, diminishes honest debate, and turns voters off to the political process. Yet this is the threat we now face. In this book, Nichols and McChesney, pioneers in explaining the relationship between media and democracy, step up to address the great challenge of our time: the replacement of democracy with what they describe as Dollarocracy.

  This is not a casually chosen term. They suggest that with the decline of independent journalism as a primary source of information about elections and governing, and its replacement by now-omnipresent political advertising, especially since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling, we have seen the development of an electoral equivalent to the self-perpetuating military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about. The money-and-media election complex, producing a slurry of negative ads, spin, and obstruction, is not what the founders intended.

  That’s one reason that I was proud to introduce a Saving American Democracy amendment to the U.S. Constitution that says corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people, corporations are subject to regulation by the people, corporations may not make campaign contributions or any election expenditures, and Congress and the states have the power to regulate campaign finances. In this book, Nichols and McChesney make a powerful case for why it is necessary to amend the Constitution to tackle the Money Power that the Progressive reformers of a century ago warned would replace democracy with plutocracy.

  But they do not stop there. They recall the Progressive Era and argue that America is ripe for a new age of reform that focuses on renewing democracy and that takes as its foundational premise an understanding that the essential act of democracy, voting, must be protected and made meaningful by legislation, statutes, and amendments. Nichols and McChesney are not doctrinaire; they recognize that many reforms can and should be entertained and that not every American will agree on every proposal. But, they argue, the energy that has been seen in popular protests on behalf of labor rights; in campaigns to defend public education and public services; in the movements to save Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; in the Occupy movement’s challenge to income inequality; and in the town meetings of my home state of Vermont, which have called for amending the Constitution to address corporate abuses of the political process constitutes evidence of a rising call for reforms that will allow American democracy to work for all Americans, not just a privileged and powerful few.

  This is an exciting prospect and one with deep roots in American history. The wisest of the founders recognized that America would evolve and change with time, and they rested great power in the people to assure that the evolution might serve the common good. With this book, John Nichols and Bob McChesney invite Americans to examine in new ways the challenges facing America and to fully recognize the threat that the combination of Big Money and big media poses
to the promise of self-government. They paint a daunting picture, rich in detail based on intense reporting and groundbreaking research. But they do not offer us a pessimistic take. Rather, they call us, as Tom Paine did more than two centuries ago, to turn knowledge into power. And they tell us that we can and must respond to our contemporary challenges as a nation by rejecting Dollarocracy and renewing our commitment to democracy.

  BURLINGTON, VERMONT

  FEBRUARY 2013

  PREFACE

  O, let America be America again—

  The land that never has been yet—

  And yet must be

  LANGSTON HUGHES, “LET AMERICA

  BE AMERICA AGAIN,” 1936

  There comes a point, sometime after the last election campaign, when a politician becomes a statesman or a stateswoman. And it is at that point when he or she begins to speak the deeper truth, what Walt Whitman described as the “password primeval” of our American experiment.1

  The truth these statesmen and stateswomen tell today is a harrowing one.

  Bemoaning “a dangerous deficit of governance” that has left critical issues unaddressed, former vice president Al Gore argued in his 2013 book, The Future, that “not since the 1890s has U.S. government decision making been as feeble, dysfunctional, and servile to corporate and other special interests as it is now.”2 From across the aisle, 2012 Republican presidential contender Jon Huntsman decried deficits of leadership and confidence and declared that, corrupted by special-interest money and corroded by the crude cynicism of negative politics, “the system is broken.”3 But the most damning delineation of the Zeitgeist came from the most senior of our nation’s former presidents, Jimmy Carter, who looked out across the American political landscape in the midst of the 2012 election campaign and saw a political process “shot through with financial corruption” and witnessing “a total transformation of America into a negative campaigning process.”4

  Describing the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. FEC as “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans,” Carter declared—as the planet’s most famous election observer—that “we have one of the worst election processes in the world right in the United States of America, and it’s almost entirely because of the excessive influx of money.”5

  Imagine if the internationally renowned, Nobel Peace Prize–winning former president of any other country were to say that his homeland suffered under “the worst election processes in the world.” We would, as Americans, be justifiably skeptical of claims that the country in question met the basic standards of democratic governance. We might even threaten to cut off foreign aid until fundamental reforms were initiated. Yet like the frog in the pot that is slowly coming to a boil, we do not always respond with the same urgency to indications of a crisis at home.

  This book argues for a conclusion that is obvious and unavoidable to anyone paying attention to the likes of Gore, Huntsman, and Carter: that with democracy itself so threatened, citizens must, as they have before, respond with the boldness appropriate to maintain the American experiment. In a country where, as Huntsman noted, millions of Americans decide not to vote because they think the political process is “rigged” to produce the results desired by contemporary robber barons, the time for debating whether a crisis exists is long past. It is no longer rational, let alone permissible, to neglect the crisis of our political process, which goes far beyond the challenges posed by corporate cash and the renewal of the Money Power that the last century’s Progressives took on in a battle for the soul of the nation.

  This is a radical book in the best sense of that term. It reminds the American people, who, polling suggests, are well aware of the crisis and are searching for solutions, that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in his wisdom, “When you are right you cannot be too radical.”6 It is not just right but also necessary to reach a radical recognition of the scope of the crisis, to understand that a discussion of a “broken system” must identify the points of rupture: special-interest influence on our politics, to be sure; but also the collapse of a journalism sufficient to name and shame the influence peddlers; the abandonment of basic premises of democracy by partisans who are willing to win at any cost; and the rise of a consulting class that makes “win at any cost” politics possible by shaping a money-and-media election complex every bit as dismissive of the popular will as the military-industrial complex is.

  The high-stakes partisanship of the moment causes even the best of those who are in power to be cautious in their responses to the crisis. A perfect example came when President Barack Obama delivered his fourth State of the Union address in February 2013. He delivered a stirring defense of the right to vote—a right that this book argues must be explicitly protected by our Constitution. But then, against all the evidence of a need for a bold response to explicit disenfranchisement and to the broader dysfunction of the system, President Obama proposed merely to appoint a commission to reflect on the challenge. Worse yet, the commission the president named for the purpose of improving “the voting experience in America” was to be chaired by the most rigid of partisans: the top election lawyer for the Democrats and the top election lawyer for the Republicans.7

  The president likes to say that with regard to the challenges posed for voters, “We have to fix that.” We agree, but it has to be the right fix, not just in the details but also in the character and the scope of its ambition.

  We do not mean to be cynical, but we are certain that any improvement of “the voting experience in America” that is proposed and implemented by partisans of the current process, any insider “fix,” will be insufficient to address the pathologies inherent in “one of the worst election processes in the world.”

  The change must come, as it always has, from the people. It must go beyond partisanship and ideology, beyond the narrow confines of a discourse that too frequently sustains, rather than challenges, that “broken system.” This book invites the reader to embrace what is best about America: a bold willingness to subvert the dominant paradigm and to begin the world over again. Our history tells us that Americans can reclaim their country and chart a democratic course toward a future that is not only better than this moment but also better than the best moments of our past. America is a progressive nation, and it is time, once more, for it to progress.

  OUR CONFIDENCE in this prospect comes from the people who helped to make this book possible, in particular Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine, who, in the aftermath of the High Court’s Citizens United ruling and the 2010 election campaign’s beginning revelation of the fullness of the crisis at hand, invited us to write an article on the development of a money-and-media election complex. Almost as soon as the article appeared, we found ourselves entertaining conversations with publishers, which is a nice place to be, especially when you have our terrific agent, Sandra Dijkstra, and her team sorting things out. Ultimately, we ended up with Nation Books, working again with our friend and comrade editorial director Carl Bromley. Carl is the hero of this book. At a critical point in the writing process, he recognized with us that the timeline was wrong; instead of anticipating the 2012 election, we needed to cover it and incorporate into the book an understanding of where the process is now.

  Carl was not the only patient supporter of the long reporting and writing process. John Nichols was cheered on along the way by Roane Carey, Peter Rothberg, Betsy Reed, Richard Kim, Emily Douglas, Liliana Segura, and everyone else at The Nation, as well as Dave Zweifel, Judie Kleinmaier, Lynn Danielson, and all the folks at the Capital Times in Madison. Many of the ideas contained in this book were explored in media appearances by John on MSNBC, with Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, and Chris Hayes, among others, and the MSNBC crew of Rich Stockwell, Querry Robinson, Arianna Jones, Gregg Cockrell, Sheara Braun, Jen Zweben, and so many
others. James Holm and Diane Shamis deserve special mention as friends and colleagues, as do Brent, Wendy, and all the folks who work with Ed Schultz’s radio show. Conversations with Amy Goodman, Juan González, Nermeen Shaikh, and the Democracy Now! crew were invaluable. And the same goes for on-air and off-air discussions with Shihab Rattansi for Al Jazeera English, as well as the folks with BBC and RTE-Radio Ireland and, of course, Wisconsin Public Radio. And a special shout-out to Thom Hartmann, brilliant radio and television host and author of groundbreaking books on corporate power. Tim Carpenter, Steve Cobble, and all the people associated with Progressive Democrats of America have hosted many events at which John has appeared to debate and discuss all the issues addressed in this book, as have RoseAnn DeMoro, Michael Lighty, Chuck Idelson, Jean Ross, and everyone else with National Nurses United.

  John also owes thanks to Mark Janson, Ed Garvey, Lisa Graves, Rob Richie, Jeff Clements, Doug Clopp, Michael Briggs, John Bonifaz, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Congressman Keith Ellison, Congressman Mark Pocan, David Panofsky, Pat Smith, Sharon Lezberg, Brian Yandell, Susan Stern, Kitty Nichols, Cary Featherstone, Meredith Clark, all the activists in Wisconsin (especially those in Spring Green and Burlington!), campaigners across the country for Move to Amend and Free Speech for People, and too many other friends and comrades to name who helped wrestle with these issues.

  Bob owes particular thanks to David Tewksbury, his chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, and everyone in the department and at the university who bent over backward to make this research possible. Bob is extremely fortunate to have such a supportive environment for research. Some material in this book overlaps work Bob did for his 2013 book Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New Press). Bob thanks both publishers for their collegiality.