http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/04/unions-vs-rich-businessmen-who-funds-democratsUnions vs. Rich Businessmen: Who Funds the Democrats?
— By Nick Baumann
| Fri Apr. 1, 2011 1:04 PM PDT
Kevin Drum's March/April cover story on the decline of labor unions as a political force in the United States and the corresponding rise of income inequality is a must-read as Republican governors across the country work to strip workers of collective bargaining rights. Kevin's conclusion—that if we don't want inequality and corporate/Wall Street rapacity to get out of hand, we have to find something to replace unions as a mass political force advocating for the interests of the middle class—was widely debated in the blogosphere. Kevin seemed to imply that the death of unions will mean the decline of the Democratic party, which relies on labor as a major source of campaign funds. But Matt Yglesias had another theory:
I think people should shy away from overestimating the partisan stakes here. It's true that in the very short term extirpating public sector unions will damage the finances of the Democratic Party. But the political system has a strong tendency toward equilibrium. Democrats will keep getting enough money to stay in business and will keep winning approximately half the elections. It's just that in post-union America, rich businessmen will be the only viable sources of political funding.
My friend (and former Mother Jones employee) Mike Beckel at the Center for Responsive Politics seems to have proven Yglesias' point. Mike crunched the data, and it turns out that as Democrats have become less dependent on unions, they've become ever-more-dependent on rich businessmen and corporations:
-snip-
What Beckel wrote about this for OpenSecrets.org:
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2011/03/unions-businesses-vie-to-fill.htmlUnions, Businesses Vie to Fill Democratic Pocketbook
By Michael Beckel on March 16, 2011 4:05 PM
Even as many Democrats have stood in solidarity with workers whose collective bargaining rights have come under fire in Wisconsin and elsewhere across the country, at the federal level, Democratic candidates and groups have increasingly relied on the business community for support.
A decade ago, during the 2000 election cycle, labor unions accounted for about 40 percent of all money Democrats collected from political action committees, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics.
-snip-
By the 2010 election cycle, union contributions accounted for just 24 percent of all PAC money Democrats received, the Center's research shows.
Put another way, for every dollar that Democrats got from union PACs during the 2000 election cycle, they received $1.25 from business PACs. But by the 2010 election cycle, for every dollar that Democrats got from union PACs, they received $2.55 from business PACs, according to the Center's analysis.
-snip-
Beckel then refers to the same Kevin Drum article that Baumann referred to -- "Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About":
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-declineThis four-page article in the March/April issue of MoJo is a must-read, but it got almost no attention here, as far as I could discover. (It was posted in the Labor forum, where it didn't get a single reply. It was posted at least three times in GD, where one topic got 5 replies and the other two got two replies each. And I linked to it in a reply in my topic on how Democrats need to start using the word "plutocracy" more often (which got a lot more replies, many disagreeing with me).
I didn't post any of the article then, but I want to now, since this is important:
Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About
How screwing unions screws the entire middle class.
— By Kevin Drum
March/April 2011 Issue
IN 2008, A LIBERAL Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.
Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened, it's not enough to examine polls and tea parties and the makeup of Barack Obama's economic team. You have to understand how we fell so short, and what we rightfully should have expected from Obama's election. And you have to understand two crucial things about American politics.
The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.
Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.
-snip-
Link to Bartels' study on "Economic Inequality and Political Representation" -- it was revised in 2005:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36931202/Larry-Bartels-Economic-Inequality-and-Political-RepresentationMuch of Bartels' study is too technical for me, especially where he's explaining the statistical models he used. So I skimmed down to the conclusion:
My analysis suggests that senators are vastly more responsive to the views of affluent constituents than to constituents of modest means. The magnitude of this difference varies from issue to issue, and some of the separate estimates fail to satisfy conventional standards of “statistical significance.” Nevertheless, the consistency of the difference across a variety of political contexts, issues, opinion measures, and model specifications is impressive, and the magnitude of the disparities in responsiveness to rich and poor constituents implied by my results is even more impressive.
-snip-
There is clearly a great deal more work to be done investigating the mechanisms by which economic inequality gets reproduced in the political realm. The simple assumption that the rich are more influential than the poor because they are more likely to vote receives no support in my analysis. The idea that they are more influential because they are better informed about politics and government fares equally poorly. The notion that they are more influential because they are more likely to contact government officials receives some modest support, but is clearly far from being the whole story. The even simpler assumption that the rich are more influential than the poor because they provide the contributions that fuel contemporary campaigning and lobbying activities receives somewhat stronger support; but that support is quite indirect, and the role of money in shaping public policy clearly deserves much more careful empirical examination (Hall and Wayman 1990; Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003).
In the meantime, despite the significant limitations of my data and the crudeness of my analysis, the sheer magnitude of the disparities in representation documented here must be troubling to anyone who accepts Dahl’s (1971, 1) stipulation that “a key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.” These disparities are especially troubling because they suggest the potential for a debilitating feedback cycle linking the economic and political realms: increasing economic inequality may produce increasing inequality in political responsiveness, which in turn produces public policies increasingly detrimental to the interests of poor citizens, which in turn produces even greater economic inequality, and so on. If that is the case, shifts in the income distribution triggered by exogenous technological forces may in time become augmented, entrenched, and immutable. Obviously, much additional research is warranted to explore the impact of unequal representation on the contours of actual public policy and on the subsequent political capacities of affluent and disadvantaged citizens.
Emphasis added.
We've been seeing that debilitating feedback cycle, increasing economic inequality, for some time now.
We have to hope that it isn't completely entrenched and immutable.
But it does explain why we haven't been seeing more progressive legislation, including from Democrats.
I think our best hope of reversing this is the populist anger we're seeing now, the reaction to the anti-union bills and other examples of overreaching by the GOP.
The GOP hopes to cripple the unions' ability to support candidates financially. But instead they've triggered an avalanche of popular support for not just the unions but all working-class Americans. Even if unions can't donate as much to the candidates of their choice, what they can still do -- plus the activism, donations, and votes of all the people who sympathize with the unions and the fight for economic equality -- can become a countervailing power needed to fight corporate interests.
As Kevin Drum put it, the left has to "to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we've ignored for too long."
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
