'That doesn't make sense.' How is cutting taxes, regulations, and consumer protections related to bribing politicians?
Political campaigns are run by bribes (or “campaign donations,” as they’re officially called). The more money a candidate gets, the more campaigning they can do, the more TV commercials they can buy, the more they can pound their message home and gear up people to vote for them. And there is a long tradition of quid pro quo, where politicians then pass legislation favorable to those companies -- deregulation, for example, or tax breaks.
In the context of that Ted Cruz post, Ted Cruz is going around telling people that the government is the problem because corporations have legislators in their back pocket. But instead of reforming campaign finance and doing away with Citizens United (which allows for unlimited donations to Super PACs) to get the disproportionate corporate interests out of elections, Ted wants to do away with government itself.
The trouble isn’t that government exists, it’s that legislators who are too close to these large companies are all too eager to throw out the lessons of the past and deregulate, under the banner of “let the market decide.” But we’ve seen time and time again that greed will win out over the good of the populace, over and over and over again, and to pretend that a complete lack of regulation is a goal to strive for is asinine.
Here’s another example, lest you think I’m just picking on Republicans (although “deregulation” is pretty much their bread and butter, except when it comes to religion where far too many Republicans want to legislate their version of their faith into law).
One of the many Clinton scandals that Bernie Sanders has not brought up during his campaign (but I guarantee it will come out in the post-Primary campaign if Hillary is the Democratic nominee) is The Clinton Foundation -- a non-profit founded by the Clintons in 2001. The foundation accepted large donations from wealthy citizens of other countries, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, and then suddenly the State Department was giving lucrative contracts to the businesses those people owned. Domestically, it was more of the same -- companies like General Electric and Microsoft made sizable donations to the Foundation, and were then awarded lucrative contracts by the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Maybe those contracts would have been awarded anyway, maybe they would not. But in every job I’ve had that wasn’t with a mom & pop company, part of my new hire paperwork would have a clause prohibiting the acceptance of gifts if it would even give the appearance of possible impropriety. Why should our elected leaders be held to a lower standard than a Disney cast member?
That’s part of why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are doing so well this year (as much as it pains me to use those names in the same sentence). They both represent a change from the status quo -- they just have extremely different views on how to change it. Trump wants to keep out Muslims and Mexicans as his solution to crime, and sue the press if they say anything bad about him, where Bernie pinpoints the problems as stemming from things Washington has done wrong. Trump is playing a blame game, and Bernie is saying “let’s just fix it.”
That brings me back to Ted. His version of fixing things is “if Washington is corrupt, why give Washington any power?” It never occurs to him that we could, you know, get the corruption out of government, hold our elected officials accountable for their actions (and their inactions), and fix the system we have -- that maybe the do-nothing Congress of his tenure doesn’t have to be the pinnacle of legislative achievement. Ted, as much as I loathe him, is a very smart person. And devious. He knows darn well that government can be very effective if it is run effectively, but he knows that it’s in his own best interests if that doesn’t happen.
Whether we elect people who are bought and paid for by the corporations who then receive tax cuts and deregulation as “thank you notes” from the politicians, or whether we take away the government’s power to regulate in the first place, the result is the same -- no regulation. Unlimited carbon emissions, no closing of tax law loopholes that let corporations stash their money overseas to avoid paying taxes on it, no legislation to protect equal rights from those who use their religion as their justification for their own hatred, no consumer protection against underhanded business tactics, a return of monopolies because we forgot the effects those have, and a general “you’re on your own” attitude is not conducive to the promoting of the general welfare stated in the preamble as one of the very reasons for the existence of the Constitution.
In an ideal world, any candidate elected after receiving major support from a large company should be excluded from any legislation involving that company. That would be almost impossible to implement in reality, though, as there are many businesses that will donate to both sides of campaigns, making sure they have an “in” no matter who wins.
