New York Times Endorses Plutocracy!

By David Sirota, Salon

05 July 13

The Grey Lady calls "coziness with the moneyed class" an "asset," in an editorial supporting Cory Booker. Seriously.

f you happened to have read the New York Times' opinion section this weekend, you may have noticed you were told that the U.S. Senate - the body comprised primarily of millionaires - apparently needs more lawmakers who are very close to the wealthy.

Yes, despite every member of the upper house raising huge amounts of campaign money primarily from the American aristocracy, and despite the fact that legalized bribery results in votes that consistently defend the aristocracy's economic interests at the expense of everyone else - the grey lady's editorial board implored voters to see Senate candidates' all-too-close relationship with America's uber-rich not as something suspicious or repugnant, but as something commendable and worthy of reward.

This was the powerful message in the Times' house editorial this weekend endorsing Newark Mayor Cory Booker's candidacy in New Jersey's upcoming special U.S. Senate election. Citing Booker's success engineering a $100 million donation to Newark schools from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (but conveniently not mentioning the ugly controversies surrounding the donation), the newspaper concluded its endorsement with a slap at Booker's opponents - one that in a single sentence revealed everything you need to know about the elite media's royalism (emphasis added):

Some of Mr. Booker's opponents are trying to denigrate those assets - his fame, his ability to work with Republicans, his coziness with the moneyed class.

You read that correctly: According to the Times, being "cozy with the moneyed class" should be seen by voters as an "asset" for an aspiring senator - one the Times insinuates shouldn't dare be "denigrated" by other candidates.

Of course, the Times is fairly accurate in declaring Booker as "cozy with the moneyed class." If anything, in fact, it's an understatement - Booker is one of Corporate America's most loyal and obedient Democratic politicians.

As the Republic Report and ThinkProgress both document, Booker's entire political career has been bankrolled by Wall Street. According to The Record newspaper, that includes his current U.S. Senate race, in which Booker "is tapping high-tech billionaires (and) Wall Street hedge-fund managers" to finance his campaign. Additionally, Booker has done something most politicians are too embarrassed to do because it is so blatantly unethical: whereas most politicians wait to retire before personally cashing in on their government service, Booker has personally pocketed massive speaking fees from corporations and interest groups while simultaneously holding a full-time public office.

This kind of financial investment in Booker would no doubt result in big legislative returns for the rich and corporations if he becomes a senator - just as those investments have already resulted in big returns for the "moneyed class" with Booker as prominent municipal politician.

For example, while raking in all this corporate money, Booker has been a driving force behind the national effort to privatize public schools - an effort that is making huge money for education profiteers. He also seemed to consider endorsing corporate-backed cuts to Social Security - until he was recently humiliated into backing down. But most notably of all, Booker used his political fame to publicly attack the Democratic Party's rhetorical criticism of Wall Street in the middle of the 2012 election.

That's right, last year Booker took to national television to slam President Obama for raising legitimate questions about Bain Capital's brand of Gordon Gekko-style vulture capitalism.

"It's nauseating to the American public," Booker thundered during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity."

He then added that "from a very personal level I'm not about to sit here and indict private equity (because) they've done a lot to support businesses [and] to grow businesses."

Booker's statements - which omitted private equity's increasingly problematic record - generated nationwide headlines and dominated the news cycle for days. It was the kind of publicity that the aristocracy could only dream of - or simply buy outright. In fact, as my Salon colleague Steve Kornacki noted at the time, the latter is probably exactly what Booker's televised defense of Wall Street was all about. Booker had long before been bought, and he was most likely paying the investment back so as to guarantee even more corporate money for himself in the future.

Considering all that, you might expect an allegedly liberal editorial board in this Citizens United era to issue a scathing editorial denouncing Booker and endorsing one of his opponents with a more virtuous record. The fact that the opposite happened this weekend at one of the world's largest newspapers exposes a taboo truth: namely, that regardless of stated ideology on hot-button issues, the establishment press across the ideological spectrum almost universally accepts and/or lauds - rather than questions - the corrosive influence of money in politics. Indeed, even the ostensibly liberal New York Times editorial board doesn't view Booker's unseemly relationship with the "moneyed class" as any kind of liability - it openly views it and praises it as a cherished "asset."

Now, sure, Booker's version of pay-to-play corruption is old news, as is the elite media's typical deference to politicians who most steadfastly embody such legalized corruption. However, that deference usually expresses itself as positive puff pieces, softball questions and generally slanted coverage - and it is almost never just declared in crystal clear language.

That's what makes the Times' house editorial so important and such a critical historical marker in this new Gilded Age: beyond its endorsement of a particular corporatist candidate, it provides a rare example of the establishment press admitting to its plutocratic worldview.

In that worldview, voters are not supposed to see politicians' loyalty to corporations and the wealthy as the root of so many of the nation's problems. Instead, we are supposed to see a politician's unity with the "moneyed class" as an altogether desirable "asset" - no matter how much that so-called "asset" harms the country.

The Rightwing Donors Who Fuel America's Culture Wars

By Katherine Stewart, Guardian UK

05 July 13

In general, US public opinion is trending liberal. Not that you'd know it from state legislatures bought by conservative dollars.

he laws and bills emerging from many of America's statehouses are farther to the right than they've ever been. But the population overall continues to trend moderately leftward. How to explain this growing divergence between the government and the people?

Mostly, it's about the money.

Alabama, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Mississippi are among the latest to impose unprecedented restrictions on women's access to abortion services. All told, in the first three months of this year, 694 provisions related to reproductive health have come before state legislatures, more than half of them involving abortion restrictions.

We are seeing a similar surge of opposition to science education: in Missouri, Montana, Colorado, and Oklahoma, legislators have introduced bills intended to smuggle creationism and religious dogma into public school classrooms. And the Virginia attorney general is seeking to revive anti-sodomy laws: the way the law is written, that also means no oral sex in the Old Dominion, not even for married straight couples.

But public opinion polls do not suggest that Americans as a whole are trending toward support of this type of legislation. On abortion, the most noticeable feature of the survey data is how flat the trend lines are over the past decade. If anything, they show a very modest drift away from the hardline criminalization position on abortion and a shoring-up of support for Roe v Wade (now at around 70%, per Gallup and Pew). Studies also indicate that support for school-sponsored prayer is on the decline. The fairly dramatic, leftward shift in attitudes toward gay rights is well-established. And the re-election of President Obama - portrayed by the hard right as the epitome of everything wrong with America - should count for something.

Consider North Carolina. On the national stage, the state is as purple as it gets, with nearly 50-50 results in 2008 and 2012. So what brought on the red tide in the state capitol? A few years ago, Art Pope, a wealthy businessman with a far right political vision, decided to, in effect, buy the the state government. He invested millions of dollars in political campaigns, established thinktanks, and funded fellowships. Now, it's payday: North Carolina presently has an extremely conservative legislature and an extremely conservative governor, whose agenda includes the privatization of schools, an end to early education, and elimination of the state's income and corporate tax rates.

Oh, and the governor has just appointed Art Pope the state budget director. That's like the putting the man who wants to burn your house down in charge of fire prevention.

Of course, money can talk for liberal causes, too. It just happens that conservatives are getting more targeted political funding, and they have tended to invest it where it gets the biggest political bang: in the statehouses.

In recent years, the relative impact of money on our political system has gone up. Part of this is due to the US supreme court: by identifying money with speech, it has endowed rich people and corporations to speak loudly in the public sphere. Another part is due to the privatization of the lawmaking process. Groups like Alec, SPN, and Americans United for Life now serve as de facto lawmakers in many state governments. Such organizations bring together in secret meetings big donors with the politicians who need their campaign contributions, and then provide the legislation, word for word, that will make the money move from one pocket to the other. According to Brendan Fischer, general counsel for Center for Media and Democracy:

"It is not unusual for politicians to hold fundraisers at Alec meetings, where lobbyists and corporate representatives are already gathered. But what is unique is the level of secrecy and excessive influence that they facilitate."

The rise of an increasingly powerful minority at both the national and state levels also has much to do with that ugly part of the political machinery called gerrymandering. The redrawing of state and congressional districts in order to lock in partisan advantages has created a slew of seats where Republicans are guaranteed to win. The consequence of that is that the Republican primary determines the winner of that seat. Because America's right flank is turning a deeper shade of red, in the Republican primary, the extremists have extraordinarily disproportionate influence.

It is by now familiar to see this empowerment of an increasingly reactionary minority dominating the economic and fiscal debates. In a country where overwhelming majorities support the continuation of social security, Medicare and Medicaid, the debate in Washington is all about how much to cut from these programs. While majorities routinely endorse a shifting of the tax burden toward the wealthy, the policy debates are mainly about how to shift them to the poor. And while creating jobs should be a top economic priority, the political establishment focuses excessively on deficit reduction.

So, how does the money end up in the culture war?

It is no secret that if you want to get large numbers of lower-income people to support a rightwing fiscal agenda, social issues are a necessary distraction. There is, however, another factor at work, and it has to do with the machinery of American politics. Where do you find the army of activists necessary to push through a rightwing economic agenda? How do you motivate people to commit the time and energy to run for minor political offices? How do you mobilize campaign staffers and volunteers?

That's where the culture wars come in. Pushing complicated tax schemes to sustain oil companies in their riches won't get a lot of state legislators and their supporters up in the morning. On the other hand, opposing abortion, stopping sodomy, and taking back the country for God will.

The culture war also allows this militant minority to sustain the delusion that it speaks for the majority. By wrapping guns and crosses in American flags, they derive power from falsely believing that they represent the "real America". And as they become bolder in their claims, those of us who, in fact, represent the majority - supporting equitable policies on taxation, gun safety, access to reproductive care and the like - tend to limit ourselves. We begin to believe that we represent a minority in our country. We don't.

Younger voters may, indeed, be shying away from extreme positions in the culture wars. But we can't rely on demographics to win these battles for us. Far-right ideologues are a smaller piece of the American pie - and yet, they are winning. The solution is for the rest of us to actively engage in the political process, on all levels.