Dollarocracy (49 page)

Likewise, as we discuss in
Chapter 5
, the FCC should be requiring broadcast stations to establish the veracity of third-party political ads before they air them, as they are supposed to do by law, and hold stations accountable if they do not. It is a national scandal that the Obama FCC snoozed through the 2012 election cycle and allowed stations to air countless hours of blatantly false third-party political ads that their own reporters had exposed as fraudulent.
We have long argued that the president should be appointing FCC commissioners who are prepared to move on these fronts, just as he should use his bully pulpit to advocate for the restoration of reason to the licensing process for broadcasters. Surely, if a media company agrees to broadcast in the public interest, that commitment must be met by providing full and fair coverage of election campaigns. A license should also assure citizens that their local stations will broadcast several candidate debates—for all candidates on the ballot—for all federal and statewide races in their viewing areas.

And, surely, it is time to renew advocacy for a related public-service initiative: the “free-airtime” requirements outlined in the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform legislation initially proposed in the mid-1990s—not as a perfect “fix” but as an indication of how, even in the interim, reforms can be crafted that allow Americans who are not billionaires or in the service of billionaires to compete in campaigns for federal offices.
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The FCC can and should play a central role in addressing the absurdity of campaigns where, in many instances, television stations drown viewers in a slurry of crude thirty-second ads that actually make those viewers less capable of casting an informed vote.

Along the same lines, the president and his FCC commissioners must join with responsible members of Congress to advocate aggressively for dramatic increases in the funding of public and community media and for new funding initiatives and tax policies that will sustain journalism on broadcast, print, and digital platforms. Journalism, renewed and enhanced and freed from a debilitating relationship with the money that pays for campaign ads, is vital to the struggle against the money-and-media election complex.

Likewise, there must be a renewed effort to have strict privacy regulations for the Internet, with citizens having effective control over data collected from them as they are being stalked online by commercial interests, politicians, and national security agencies. This will go a long way toward making the Internet a central forum for America's democratic future, as opposed to the Orwellian hellhole that some of the wisest analysts of the digital experience fear could be its fate.
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In particular, federal interventions can derail some of the troublesome digital practices—in areas ranging from data collection to political texting—that began to emerge in the 2012 campaign.

At every stage and in every way, reformers must call the bluff of the Roberts Supreme Court and continue to legislate toward a better system—not on the
naïve assumption that the High Court will defer to the will of Congress or the American people but with the understanding that the rejection of that will by the chief justice and his narrow majority will make the need for constitutional interventions all the more evident. In the U.S. House, a task force has been developed by Congressman John Larson, a Democrat from Connecticut, and other top Democrats to explore every legislative avenue for challenging Dollarocracy. Members of the task force have renewed the proposal for the sweeping reforms outlined in the federal Fair Elections Now Act. Unfortunately, though that measure has attracted some bipartisan support, few of the members of Congress we interviewed in 2013 expected that it would get far in a Republican-dominated House. Why try then? Because building support for this plan to develop public financing for campaigns shows what could be done if Congress were freed to regulate the Money Power that Teddy Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and the Progressives took on a century ago—and if the Supreme Court, either with a change of personnel or under pressure from a constitutional reform movement, decided to remove the barriers to legislative reforms.

Another prime congressional vehicle is the DISCLOSE Act, which reads like the old bipartisan proposals for basic transparency from donors but is now officially opposed by the Republican Party in its platform. The League of Women Voters and other good-government groups continue to engage in the frustrating work of trying to get Republicans to back even this minor reform, and their prospects ought not to be underestimated. If in the coming years rational Republicans want to reposition themselves after Mitt Romney's “47 percent” debacle, this is a vehicle they could and should embrace. Ultimately, however, it is far more likely that reform breakthroughs on the disclosure front, which the Supreme Court might accept, will come from the states. The same goes for most other immediate reforms.

Public Campaign, Common Cause, and a network of local and regional groups continue to do tremendous work in the states, and they've secured some key allies in the aftermath of the 2012 election. New groups such as CREDO SuperPAC and Friends of Democracy are going into state election fights with an eye toward exposing and challenging Big Money influence on elections and the candidates who bow to that influence. And a new post-2012 project, the Democracy Initiative, has brought together unions such as the
Communications Workers of America with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and civil rights groups such as the NAACP to focus financial resources and people-power energy on reform fights in targeted states such as North Carolina, where they are challenging the grip on elections and policy-making that right-wing millionaire Art Pope has purchased with lavish spending in recent years. The genius of the Democracy Initiative is that it will systematically make the linkages between Big Money politics and everything from the assault on labor rights to fracking to privatization of prisons.
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That's a message that another new group, United Republic, has delivered with particular skill, arguing that it is possible to build “a bold grassroots campaign to get millions of Americans—from Occupy to the Tea Party—actively supporting comprehensive legislation that reshapes American politics.”
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These coalitions are invariably easier to forge at the state and local levels than in the special-interest-driven swamp of Washington.

States such as Vermont, where progressives control the executive and legislative branches, and Montana, which in November elected a governor who has been in the trenches of reform fights, Democrat Steve Bullock, remain, to our view, the most likely locations for serious challenges to a broken status quo. But as we note in
Chapter 3
, Montana's Bullock, a former attorney general, has already been shot down by the Supreme Court in an effort to defend state-based regulation of corporate campaign money. And that brings the discussion back to the fact of a High Court majority that has moved at every opportunity to expand the influence of corporations and major donors on our politics. Of course, President Obama may have an opportunity to nominate new justices, and campaign-finance and media-reform issues add a measure of urgency to what under any circumstance would be essential confirmation fights. But waiting for the right mix on the Court is not a strategy; it's a gamble. A gamble that could cost democracy dearly. Most Americans don't want to take the risk. Three-quarters of them tell pollsters they favor reforms that take corporate money and big donor influence out of our politics.
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When there is this much support for fundamental reform, and when the reform impulse is blocked by so much obstruction in Washington, it is not just right but necessary to recognize, as John Bonifaz suggested, that “the people are ready to take their country back. What's necessary now is to build a movement that is big enough and bold enough to renew their faith that money can be beaten.”
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So Americans are going “the amendment route.” We know they are right to do so. And we are encouraged that President Obama, key members of Congress, and millions of voters have indicated a similar enthusiasm. But we are not content with the notion that undoing the
Citizens United
ruling, or predecessor rulings such as
Buckley v. Valeo
, will be sufficient to claw America back onto a democratic course.

To our view, it is necessary to think much bigger, as has happened in previous reform moments. Yes, campaign-finance reforms are necessary. But so, too, are media reforms that recognize the wisdom of John F. Kennedy's observation that “only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, ‘enlighten the people generally and tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.'”
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American electoral structures, processes, and practices, many of which date to times when conservative forces sought to constrain, rather than expand, the franchise, represent a democratic disaster—not in the making but already made. And if this is to be a true reform moment, one that marks a genuine embrace of America's democratic promise, we can and must borrow from the best ideas of a world that—inspired by that promise—has often done a better job of implementing it.

While it is true that America has in recent decades missed opportunities to define best practices for sustaining and extending democracy—to the immense detriment not just of our electoral politics but also of our governance—those practices have been established and well defined in other lands. We don't suggest that the United States should, or even could, mirror all the practices of other countries. Some models would be hard, perhaps impossible, to replicate in so large and diverse a country as the United States. Constitutional issues and the challenges created by a system where states define so much of our election law will always make the broad reforming of campaign practices and schedules complicated, as will the immense lobbies of the special interests that benefit so mightily from the current system—first and foremost the broadcasters that have staked their futures on the new “cost centers” of multibillion-dollar
campaigns.
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The radical reforms that are necessary to renew American democracy will ultimately be defined by the American circumstance. Yet to our view, Americans are still, as Thomas Paine suggested almost 240 years ago, well benefited by “frequent interchange” with the ideas and ideals of our fellow citizens of the world.

We begin outlining a reform agenda with the premise that underpins the whole of this book: that democracy demands full public financing of elections, a well-funded public broadcasting system, and subsidies to preserve print journalism where it is viable and to promote the development of “new media” journalism sufficiently substantial to fill the void created by the collapse of reporting by so-called old media. Yet recognizing that fresh ideas regarding the scope, character, and content of reforms can and should be entertained, we have looked to evolving democracies around the world for examples of approaches that are valid, transferable, and responsive to the challenges America now faces. They are not hard to identify, as many countries—often newer and more fragile democracies, but some of them rivaling the United States in their well-established structures and histories—have maintained the great tradition of democratic experimentation that must be renewed in America.

Here are four places to begin.

Free airtime is an essential building block for a functional debate, no matter how a country's media system is constructed and no matter what constitutional, legislative, or political constraints may exist. Whether party campaigns rely on public funding (as is common in countries ranked as healthy democracies), a mix of public and private funding, or primarily private funding, dozens of countries around the world have rules that require public and private broadcasters to make free time available to parties and candidates.
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This is not some radical new idea developed in response to the rise of negative political advertising designed to suppress, rather than encourage, voting. Nor is it merely a contemporary strategy to counter spending by well-financed political parties, individuals, or corporations. Its roots go back to the definitional years of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the 1920s.
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The provision of free airtime is an old, yet still necessary response to the development of broadcasting. And it is an alternative to “the idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal,” which two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson decried when television was on the rise as “the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.”
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Free airtime has been a part of the democracy calculus from the beginning not just of the television age but even from the dawn of the “voice age,” when politicians spoke to crowds using the “enunciators” that would eventually come to be known as “microphones.” Though American politicians continue to debate the very idea of providing candidates with free airtime—having rejected it in the early stages of the debate over the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act
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—politicians in most countries are able to communicate their ideas and their ideals without having to engage in the sort of election season cash grubbing that recalls another Adlai Stevenson one-liner: “The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.”
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It is, to our view, entirely reasonable and appropriate to suggest that when nations make free airtime available and offer it to all candidates with sufficient ballot status to actually win so as to open up and enliven the debate, they create a politics that inspires the 70, 80, or even 90 percent election turnout levels toward which America should aspire.