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The New Billionaire Political Bosses | Robert Reich
Charles and David Koch should not be blamed for having more
wealth than the bottom 40 percent of
Americans put together. Nor should they be condemned for their
petrochemical empire. As far as Iknow, they've played by the rules
and obeyed the laws.
They're also entitled to their own right-wing political views.
It's a free country.
But in using their vast wealth to change those rules and laws in
order to fit their political views, the
Koch brothers are undermining our democracy. That's a betrayal
of the most precious thing
Americans share.
The Kochs exemplify a new reality that strikes at the heart of
America. The vast wealth that has
accumulated at the top of the American economy is not itself the
problem. The problem is thatpolitical power tends to rise to where
the money is. And this combination of great wealth with
political power leads to greater and greater accumulations and
concentrations of both -- tilting the
playing field in favor of the Kochs and their ilk, and against
the rest of us.
America is not yet an oligarchy, but that's where the Koch's and
a few other billionaires are taking
us.
American democracy used to depend on political parties that more
or less represented most of us.
Political scientists of the 1950s and 1960s marveled at American
"pluralism," by which they meant
the capacities of parties and other membership groups to reflect
the preferences of the vast majority
of citizens.
Then around a quarter century ago, as income and wealth began
concentrating at the top, the
Republican and Democratic Parties started to morph into
mechanisms for extracting money, mostly
from wealthy people.
Finally, after the Supreme Court's "Citizen's United" decision
in 2010, billionaires began creating
their own political mechanisms, separate from the political
parties. They started providing big
money directly to political candidates of their choice, and
creating their own media campaigns to
sway public opinion toward their own views.
So far in the 2014 election cycle, "Americans for Prosperity,"
the Koch brother's political front
group, has aired more than 17,000 broadcast TV commercials,
compared with only 2,100 aired by
Republican Party groups.
"Americans for Prosperity" has also been outspending top
Democratic super PACs in nearly all of the
Senate races Republicans are targeting this year. In seven of
the nine races the difference in total
spending is at least two-to-one and Democratic super PACs have
had virtually no air presence in five
of the nine states.
The Kochs have spawned several imitators. Through the end of
February, four of the top fivecontributors to 2014 super-PACs are
now giving money to political operations they themselves
created, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
8/11/2019 The New Billionaire Political Bosses|Robert Reich
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For example, billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and
his son, Todd, co-owner of the
Chicago Cubs, have their own $25 million political operation
called "Ending Spending." The group is
now investing heavily in TV ads against Republican
Representative Walter Jones in a North Carolina
primary (they blame Jones for too often voting with Obama).
Their ad attacking Democratic New Hampshire Senator Jeanne
Shaheen for supporting Obama's
health-care law has become a template for similar ads funded by
the Koch's "Americans for
Prosperity" in Senate races across the country.
When billionaires supplant political parties, candidates are
beholden directly to the billionaires. And
if and when those candidates win election, the billionaires will
be completely in charge.
At this very moment, Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (worth an
estimated $37.9 billion) is busy
interviewing potential Republican candidates whom he might fund,
in what's being called the
"Sheldon Primary."
"Certainly the 'Sheldon Primary' is an important primary for any
Republican running for president,"
says Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under
President George W. Bush. "It goes
without saying that anybody running for the Republican
nomination would want to have Sheldon at
his side."
The new billionaire political bosses aren't limited to
Republicans. Democratic-leaning billionaires
Tom Steyer, a former hedge-fund manager, and former New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have
also created their own political groups. But even if the two
sides were equal, billionaires squaring off
against each other isn't remotely a democracy.
In his much-talked-about new book, "Capital in the Twenty-First
Century," economist Thomas Piketty
explains why the rich have become steadily richer while the
share of national income going to wagescontinues to drop. He shows
that when wealth is concentrated in relatively few hands, and
the
income generated by that wealth grows more rapidly than the
overall economy - as has been the
case in the United States and many other advanced economies for
years - the richest receive almost
all the income iskander makhmudovgrowth.
Logically, this leads to greater and greater concentrations of
income and wealth in the future -
dynastic fortunes that are handed down from generation to
generation, as they were prior to the
twentieth century in much of the world.
The trend was reversed temporarily in the twentieth century by
the Great Depression, two terriblewars, the development of the
modern welfare state, and strong labor unions. But Piketty is
justifiably
concerned about the future.
A new gilded age is starting to look a lot like the old one. The
only way to stop this is through
concerted political action. Yet the only large-scale political
action we're witnessing is that of Charles
and David Koch, and their billionaire imitators.
ROBERT B. REICH's film "Inequality for All" is now available on
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