Strategy for Democracy: Why and How to Get Money Out of Politics

Abstract

Even President Trump's inaugural identified as his central issue whether our government is controlled by the people.” Polls show this to be a leading public concern that is ignored by the bipartisan political establishment which controls government for the plutocrats who pay to play instead of for the people who vote. (Ch. 1) This issue of failed democracy likely accounts for Trump's victory over the Clintons' plutocratic political machine which offered more diversionary identity politics but no plausible solution to the systemic political corruption Trump described. See also this author's Amendment Diversion, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2722336. That plutocratic rule generates extreme inequality while threatening catastrophe on several other vectors is focusing attention on its cause. (Ch. 2). While some recognize the cause of political corruption, no one, much less Trump, has offered an effective strategy to solve the deepening problem that democracy has been replaced by plutocracy. (Ch. 3) Bernie Sanders who made this issue a cornerstone of his campaign against Clinton had no better strategy to offer than the futility of advocating a constitutional amendment. This is the standard diversion from effective anti-corruption strategy that is offered by the corrupt Democratic Party and its professional activist allies. Citizens United has been the diversionary target of such advocacy, though it is of minor importance to the problem. Even worse is the professional activists' sloganeering about corporate personhood which is rooted in a fiction about what the infamous Citizens United decision in fact held. (Ch. 4)The immediate cause of the current crisis of democracy is not the lack of constitutional amendments but a judicial supremacist Supreme Court (Ch. 5) Plutocracy precludes progressive amendments in any event. (Ch. 6) Judicial supremacists, in any event, distort the meaning of amendments as they have the First Amendment, which does not require toleration of influence peddling and paid plutocratic propaganda in elections. The supremacist Court's 1976 ruling that it does, based on shell-game logic, has ushered in this second Gilded Age, our era of systemic political corruption. (Intro, Ch. 7) Professional activists who market the amendment diversion as if it were a cure for this problem have objectives other than restoring democracy. (Ch. 8) The history of constitutional amendments teaches that this commonly touted, but seldom analyzed amendment “solution” is a counterproductive waste of political energy to counter an act of judicial supremacy. (Ch. 9) This book decries the general void in strategic thinking on the key progressive objective of fighting plutocracy. It suggests effective strategies to solve the contemporary crisis of democracy within the provisions of the original Constitution. (Ch. 10,11). It proposes a fully realized draft of a federal statute that would be a useful initial demand for effective national reform and a starting point for further strategic discussion. (Ch.12)