The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  “Popular elections, Your Grace. Of a sort. Most incumbent congressmen seek to get reelected, and almost all of them obtain the needed votes as a matter of course. Put another way, fairly few seats are genuinely contested. And from within this small pool of seats, if a candidate is affiliated with the minority party in a given district, then his chances are not good. Bottom line, there are relatively few cases in which new candidates have a viable pathway to secure a place in Congress.”

  Basile added, “Those newcomers who do win a seat overwhelmingly hail from either the banking, business, or law sectors.”

  The presiding chair raised an eyebrow at this. “Oh?”

  “Chair commissioner, these are the sectors in which people can typically tap into a professional network of people with deep pockets and raise funds during the early, critical stage of the campaign. As you can deduce, winning an election—as they frame this—has precious little to do with one’s capability to lay down remarkable, forward-looking policies and to negotiate complex issues of national import. It is about networking and fundraising: the terra firma around which everything revolves.”

  “Why is the need to raise funds a consideration when seeking to obtain a position in their legislature?”

  “Within the existing setup, a campaign requires funds: to print brochures, poll data, place ads, take trips, and enlist people to knock on doors. And without fundraising, there is no money—or any real chance of winning the election. The implausible happens, and so do lottery winnings, but I talk about the general pattern, not the occasional anomaly.”

  “In that case,” one of the commissioners finally said, “can’t their government allocate public funding to candidates who garnered a certain minimal number of signatures—and be done with this sordid aspect of the election?”

  “Why, yes,” Basile said. “This would have been a nice idea.” He went on, “In the world of their making, though, to run for Congress is akin to launching a startup: with investors, a mission statement, and a marketing campaign. What’s more, candidates can expect to rely almost exclusively on personal acquaintances to raise the early funds needed to kick-start things.” He gave a thin smile. “Beyond the need for cash, successful early fundraising signals the viability of the campaign to the media, traditional donor sources, party insiders, and other community opinion-makers.”

  “So fundraising is the ticket.”

  “It is really more of a prerequisite than a ticket,” said Basile and lapsed into silence.

  “Your Graces,” he resumed after a short pause, “there are but two high­ways that may take an aspiring office holder to the Hill, the Democrat and Republican highways. You might as well not even try if you want to take the dirt roads of the smaller political parties, such as that of the Green Party or the Constitution Party; these pathways dead-end long before Capitol Hill swings into view. You also might as well not try to secure a congressional seat if you wish to trailblaze a new political pathway.” Basile looked suddenly thoughtful, as if it dawned on him the full importance of what he had just said.

  “All right then, what can you tell us about the Democrat and Republican political parties?”

  “Under these two brands are multiple caucuses and factions spanning a broad political spectrum: social justice progressives, neocons, libertarian-lites, socialists, centrist, and others. Some differ enough and would have run as independent political parties had third parties been a viable option in the United States.” He considered it for a moment. “I suppose you can regard the two major parties as uber-parties, as two galaxies encompassing a constellation of interests and ideological groups.

  “You can imagine each of them as an encampment with dozens of national pavilions and many hundreds of local tents constituting informal networks and groups.

  “In the vast Republican camp, you can see the long-established, large pavilions of Young America’s Foundation, or YAF, National Right to Life, the Koch’s political network, Chamber of Commerce, FreedomWorks, National Rifle Association, or NRA, along with sizable tents of ideologue mega-donors such as those of Timothy Mellon, the Adelsons, and the Uihleins.

  “On the other side of the Potomac River, you can see the vast Democrat encampment. One can make out the banners of Women Vote!, George Soros’ political network, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, Democratic Socialists of America, and also some pavilions that were recently set up, bearing the banners of Indivisible, Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and MoveOn. In addition, the Democrat encampment sports tents of various Hollywood celebrities and some media outlets, such as HuffPost and Slate.

  “Both encampments enjoy the hospitality suites of Goldman Sachs, Lockheed Martin, Farm Bureau, Dow Chemical, and many other large entities with a vested interest to see legislation focus on the right issues or subsidies funneled in the right direction.

  “Regardless with which of the two camps they associate themselves, all these myriad organizations aim to see policies implemented that promote their own agendas. Typically, they seek to impose some legal or fiscal measure on the nation as a whole—or else they would not have been aiding and in some cases providing political training to get people who champion their cause into the government. Every one of those groups try to co-opt a given party brand and apparatus.

  “Take, for example, the political network set by the Koch brothers, oligarchs who head a giant petroleum corporation. Their political network employs over one thousand staffers in numerous offices throughout the country. Its mission is to mold American public life around the economic outlook of the two billionaire brothers. They have door knockers, focus groups, and messaging experts.

  “Many of these networks play an important role in pushing a person through the primary pipeline and onto the general election, where the majority of people rubber-stamp the nominee of the political party they identify with. As you can imagine, in many cases the real action is at the primary election.

  “The fact that the media provides almost no substantive information about the different primary House nominees is a boon to these interest groups. This way, they control much of the messaging and information received by the one fifth, or however many, of the eligible voters who end up voting in the congressional primaries.

  “Now, I don’t want to give the impression there is something terribly complex about pushing nominees through the primaries. Many voters know little about the congressional primary candidates and are not overly concerned to uncover possible, meaningful differences among them. Attention span is brief, and life is hectic. Voting often turns on whether a candidate is local to one’s area or on the candidate’s public image.”

  After a short silence, one of the commissioners asked, “Do you have anything to add to this?”

  Basile considered for a moment. “Old-fashioned party elite endorsements can matter in some races. In any form of business in America, one’s personal and professional associations are vital. Elections are no different.

  “Your Graces, At times, what it takes to get dealt in is a well-placed call by an insider who vouches for the candidate. These insiders are reluctant to consider any prospects that are not vouched by or linked to someone in their professional network. The nominating process is conservative and inward-looking. Incidentally, much of the decision-making of Americans, to whom to donate money and with whom to do business, operates in this fashion. In many situations, extraordinary merit without a support network or social platform amounts to nothing.”

  Basile paused for a moment to ponder.

  “As you can see, there are many entities, modes of operation, and dynamics at play. On top of it are the multiple exceptions to everything that could be stated. It is a complex ecosystem of ever-shifting alliances with myriad currents of powers coursing through its arteries.” Basile scratched his balding head. “I’m reminded of Jackson Pollock’s paintings in the so-called drip style, which I came a
cross on Earth. These abstract compositions are an impossible labyrinth of swirling lines and web-like strands defying the eye to articulate a pattern. This is what the politics behind the politics in Washington is like. All I’m doing is discussing some prominent strands that shed light on the system’s dysfunction, leaving others unnamed and unarticulated as they are not pert­inent to this hearing.”

  “Noted and I thank you for making this point,” said the chair.

  “In presidential and senatorial nominations, the stakes are higher,” said Basile. “And in accord, so is the money funneled into those races and the caliber of maneuvering and manipulations. The House of Representative primaries I’ve just discussed are bush league. I am now moving on to address some of the dynamics of the Major League, as the local idiom goes.

  “Modern-day presidential campaigns marshal hundreds of software engineers, data analysts, product managers, and designers wielding an array of custom software tools. The aim is to generate and sell a manufactured reality appealing to a large voter base. The public senses the government is in paralysis and that nothing major can get accomplished by any of the candidates. Still, once every four years, there is collective suspension of disbelief and acceptance of that old-time magical thinking: maybe this time it will be different, and the political promises will be fulfilled.

  “Campaign staffers package, spin, and dress up candidates for high-stake seats. The decisions of the little people are primed, their perceptions are massaged, and their collective policy preferences are nudged. Memes and sound bites are repeated on all channels and venues, a cacophony that crowds out any possible nuanced, detailed discussions or serious reflections.

  “Your Graces, I understand you have been briefed about the social media on Earth. Let me go ahead then and state that many of the tweets that argue and rave for one candidate or the other are generated by computer programs. These software agents, bots, are like massive flocks of chittering mechanical birds in the guise of humans descending on online public discussions, drowning out some dissenting voices and giving others the appearance of popularity. All the same, money and handlers can get a candidate only so far; star power, personality, and outlook of the candidate matter.”

  Basile went on, “In the months and weeks leading up to an election, the social media moguls, the owners of the online social networks, can have their algorithms identify content pieces that carry the desired political bent—and make them prominent in autocomplete search prompts, in message feeds, in search-engine results, and in news feeds. On the heels of it, many millions of undecided voters may be swayed. That’s enough to definitively tilt the election outcome in accord with the moguls’ political agenda and aspirations.”

  He noted the commissioners’ skeptical glances. “Your Graces, we have tested and verified this very thing; merely by manipulating content rankings, we shifted between 20 and 80 percent of those undecided. It was all subliminal nudges, with none the wiser.” His mouth curved into a smile. “The social-media oligarchs have the ability to put their thumbs on the scale and decide on the outcome of closely contested elections.”

  Basile removed and then twirled his glasses in a sardonic gesture. “In closing, one can say America has a representative democracy. That is, the more resources one marshals, the more representation one gets.”

  He bowed, indicating this segment of his presentation was at an end.

  Chapter 49

  Once they were all back at their seats, Basile opened, “The fundraising doesn’t stop once a person arrives to the Hill. In fact, things are just getting started.

  “Both parties expect House members to raise money beyond the needs of their personal upcoming reelection campaigns and help to load up the party’s war chest. The amount of money the members raise impacts their committee assignment. Everything else being equal, the more funds they bring in, the more powerful their assigned committee is likely to be. It’s a carrot and stick system. If you bring big contributors to dinner, you get to sit at the big boys’ table, such as the Committee on Ways and Means. This is the carrot part. However, if a House member is not putting out and helping the team, he will have less chance to garner the votes needed for their pet bill or have the House leadership put the bill on the calendar. This is the stick part.

  “As you can deduce, the fate of a piece of legislation hinges far more on power and connections than its merit.”

  “Do donors come to collect when time is due?”

  “Nothing as crass as that, Your Grace. Think of it as a gift economy. A check is written, and the congressman now feels obliged to return the favor in kind in some manner at some point. Lobbying and donating is about cultivating ties.

  “For one, he who paid up is a lot more likely to get access—face time—­with the respective congressman or his or her chief of staff. This means one’s petition will be given genuine consideration. This is more than half of the battle and is something that cannot be taken for granted when there are so many supplicants.

  “A few thousand entities contribute the bulk of the funds across all congressional seats, acquiring influence and cementing relationships. For all intents and purposes, this has rendered certain industries un­fettered by regulations. No political will exist to hold those sectors accountable—or to object infusing them with taxpayers’ money if a bailout is needed. In part, ‘too big to fail’ is a code phrase for ‘they contribute too much money to our war chest to let them go under.’

  “There are several reasons why nothing of substance gets done to combat the climate-change. Here is one: The largest oil and gas companies invest annually about two hundred million dollars on lobbying. This provides them with the leverage and influence to delay or block any possible effective policies.

  “No one on the Hill can afford to seriously alienate Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Oil, agribusiness, or the defense contractors.” After attending an earlier briefing, the commissioners were now familiar with these entities, along with the names and activities of the largest transnational corporations. “It would have been tantamount to political suicide. Or who wants to bring down the ire of the social media giants? They manage the modern public square.

  “This is essentially why no one can put the kibosh on the farm bill. The large corporate farmers are the kingmakers of the Midwest; they determine if one is to get reelected. Now, legislators in other territories require the votes of these Midwestern congressmen for their own projects. One hand washes the other. Hence, each year the lot of them swallow down the bile and sign the farm bill, again.

  “Well, here is another example. F-35 Lightning II is a fifth-generation fighter jet. Its production cost and lifetime maintenance have been un­pre­cedented, astronomical. This jet program has also been plagued with technical problems and massive cost overruns. More than one decision-­maker has wondered at one point or another about the wisdom of financing it. Yet, pouring taxpayers’ money down the program’s gullet, they do. It’s about the jobs and revenues this aircraft program provides. And as its supply chain and manufacturing facilities are strategically located in almost all the states, everyone has skin in the game. No member of Congress wants to tell his constituents he caused them to lose their jobs because this venture does not make sense. It does not need to make sense. It just needs to generate taxpayer-funded jobs. Crony capitalism at its finest.”

  There were chuckles around the bench.

  “Then there are personal, long term considerations,” said Basile.

  “Some congressmen and staff members plan to work on the Hill, building up their credentials and connections, and then graduate to become lobbyists or executives with far better pay. Therefore, they are most attentive to those petitioners who at some future point may very well be their employers. Capitol Hill is a farm system—a feeder—for K Street and for Wall Street.”

  “Please expound,” said one of the commissioners.

  “Your Graces, top peo
ple in regulatory agencies, the White House, and Congress who have proven themselves may subsequently be offered lucrative positions in organizations such as Chamber of Commerce, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Goldman Sachs, or American Petroleum Institute.

  “Liz Allen was a Deputy Communications Director of the White House, and later she obtained a job as a senior vice president in the lobbying firm of Glover Park Group, which represents anything from Fuels America to Horizon Pharma. Bruce Carlson was the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office and is currently on the board of directors of Lockheed Martin. Julie Gerberding was the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, resigned, and assumed the position of president of Merck’s vaccine division. Scott Gottlieb was the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, resigned, and became a member of the board of directors of the drug maker Pfizer. John Boehner, who was the Speaker of the House currently represents the lobbying firm of Squire Patton Boggs, which peddles in Washington the interests of various foreign nations, notably China. In fact, Squire Patton Boggs is brimming with ex-government officials, who at one point or another have included John Breaux, a former US Senator; Rodney Slater, a former US Secretary of Transp­ortation; Trent Lott, a former US Senator; Jack Kingston, a former US Representative.

  “The headhunters for the lobby firms and Fortune 500 companies might as well hold an annual job fair in the Capitol Rotunda.”

  Master Basile poured himself some water. They waited while he took a few sips.

  “Your Graces, it sounds like Big Business calls the shots on the Hill. And to an extent, it does. But it’s a two-way street.

  “As the government has its tentacles in everything, no industry or special interest group can go without paying tribute to various committee members in Washington.

  “In accord, many feel compelled to sprinkle money widely, to candidates on both sides of the aisle and across state lines. In this fashion, during the last election cycle, Goldman Sachs’ upper echelon helped fund the campaigns of 166 Democrats and 166 Republicans; Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance executives co-funded 99 Democrats and 121 Republicans. These are but some of the costs of doing business in America. The big firms hedge their bets and maintain access and good relations across the board. The list of those who pay tribute is a long one and includes representatives of National Shooting Sports Foundation, O’Reilly Media, Operating Engineers Union, Syfan Logistics, Vivendi, United Parcel Service, and North American Meat Institute.