Stark New Evidence on How Money Shapes America’s Elections

Written on August 10th, 2016 in politics Comments Off

Published on Institute for New Economic Thinking, by Lynn Parramore, Aug 8, 2016.

… Outrage over how big money influences American politics has been boiling over this political season, energizing the campaigns of GOP nominee Donald Trump and former Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders alike. Citizens have long suspected that “We the People” increasingly means “We the Rich” at election time.  

Yet surprisingly, two generations of social scientists have insisted that wallets don’t matter that much in American politics. Elections are really about giving the people what they want. Money, they claim, has negligible impact on elections.

That was a good line for Cold War propaganda, and good for tenure, too. Corporate titans seized upon it to argue that their money should be freer to flow into political campaigns. Not only billionaires, but academics, too, argued that more money in elections meant more democracy.

Even today, many academics and pundits still insist that money matters less to political outcomes than ordinary citizens think, even as business executives throw down mind-boggling sums to dine with politicians and Super Pacs spring up like mushrooms. The few dissenters from this consensus, like Noam Chomsky, are ignored in the U.S. as “unpersons,” though they are enormously respected abroad.

This is a scandal. It has stymied efforts at campaign finance reform and weakened American democracy.

Political scientist Thomas Ferguson, Director of Research at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), has spent a career setting the record straight with clear empirical evidence in a field where such research has been shockingly rare. Ever since his 1995 book Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition blasted through received academic wisdom by showing how wealthy individuals and businesses strategically invest in political parties for the biggest pay off, Ferguson has been the man to seek when you really wanted to know how elections work and who controls them.

White collar criminologist William K. Black and others still recall Ferguson’s famous warning, issued long before the nominating convention in 2008, that the contributions from big finance piling up in Barack Obama’s campaign war chest meant that his promises of sweeping reforms of finance were not to be believed. In 2014, he foresaw the unraveling of America’s two major political parties and predicted that voters feeling betrayed would increasingly abandon both.

“Want a happy ending?” he quips. “See a Disney movie.”

In recent years, Ferguson has often worked with two other talented researchers, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen. The three have tracked the generous funding of Obama by high tech businesses engaged in spying on the American public and the waves of money from polluters into the Republican Party.

Spend money, win votes: … //
… Does money just follow popular candidates? … //
… Eccentric gazillionaires or big corporations driving elections? … //

… (full text).

Links:

Brexit and the EU implosion, national sovereignty, for what purpose? on MRzine, by Samir Amin, Aug 8, 2016;

Sécurité à Droite Toute – C dans l’air du 08 août 2016, 66.00 min, mise en ligne par C dans l’air;

Could a Re-focused World Social Forum Tackle the 1 Per Cent, Globalization, and Neo-liberalism? on Dissident Voice, by Nick Fillmore, Aug 8, 2016;

4 signs your body is too acidic and how to fix it, 5.01 min, uploaded by Article-TUBE2, July 30, 2016 … if you want to restore the alkalinity you need to eat lots of;

How Much Do Shady Financial Practices Cost You, Exactly? on Institute for New Economic Thinking, by Lynn Parramore, July 22, 2016;

Vis-à-vis – Peter Sloterdijk, 58.12 min, von Mc Maze, am 13. März 2016 … befragt von Frank A. Meyer;

Die “Angst” vor den dramatischen Verwerfungen – Dirk Müller, 13.52 min, von Bananenrepublik1 am 17. Februar hochgeladen … bei Markus Lanz;

… and this:

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