We Should Be Building A Wall Around Our Elections Instead Of Legalizing Corporate Political Bribery

At this point only the thinnest rhetorical veneer separates us from corporations simply being able to give money outright to their favorite politicians -- to be able to legally bribe them.

(Photo via Getty Images)

There are a lot of things that are good policy, that would positively impact the lives of the vast majority of Americans, and that Republican voters and Democratic voters actually agree on. Yet, nothing is going to be done about these issues for a very long time because corporations are pretty much legally allowed to bribe politicians, and because an increasingly out-of-touch Supreme Court majority purchased by these bribes keeps making it easier for dirty money to flood politicians’ pockets.

Take CEO pay as a timely example. It’s not surprising or even wrong that a CEO of a company is going to earn somewhat more than the average employee. But at a certain point the pay disparity between high managerial officers and production workers (you know, the ones who actually make the stuff) just becomes ridiculous.

In 1965, an average CEO made about 20 times more than the typical worker in the same industry. Today, a CEO can expect to earn around 278 times more than the average worker at his (let’s face it, it’s almost always “his”) company. There is little evidence that this increase has anything to do with a true market for talent in the world of corporate executives. CEOs more or less have the power to raise their own pay, so they do.

Of course, with more money going uselessly to executives, there is less to go around among workers and shareholders. Americans correctly recognize gross CEO overcompensation as one expression of the growing and problematic inequality we now face as a nation.

According to a new survey, 81 percent of Democrats think CEOs at the largest American companies are paid “too much.” What is perhaps a bit remarkable is that 71 percent of Republicans agree. There are not many issues on which we have that kind of bipartisan consensus.

Yet, broad agreement among voters does not lead to action by politicians. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the big ones is an unlimited font of corporate money in politics.

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In 2010, a 5-4 conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down most of a 2002 law that limited the amount corporations could spend to support or oppose presidential candidates and candidates for Congress. Guess who was a big proponent of that ruling?

“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” said Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell at the time. I guess the “some” he was referring to were wealthy businesses and the “full participation” was the ability to spend sums of money that the vast majority of natural persons couldn’t fathom ever possessing, let alone spending, on political candidates.

Fast forward a few years, after McConnell had stolen two Supreme Court seats from two Democratic presidents and given them to Donald Trump. As part of this new conservative Supreme Court majority, these justices recently voted to strike down one of the few remaining anti-corruption provisions of the 2002 campaign finance law to eliminate the $250,000 cap on the amount politicians can be reimbursed for personal loans they made to their own campaigns following an election. At this point, only the thinnest rhetorical veneer separates us from corporations simply being able to give money outright to their favorite politicians — to be able to legally bribe them.

We know where CEOs are spending some of that money they’ve increasingly vacuumed up since the 1960s. In the 2020 election cycle, McConnell raised more money from Fortune 500 CEOs than any other candidate in a competitive race. He used this money to rebuy his Senate seat supposedly representing the people of Kentucky (they contributed less than 8% of the total used to fund his campaign war chest) and to continue his massive fundraising efforts for other like-minded Republicans positioned in just the right places. It doesn’t exactly take a wall of red string to connect the dots here.

We should be building a wall around our elections. Instead, we’re shrugging like it’s some fluke of voter apathy that, when more than seven in 10 Americans across the political spectrum believe in something, there is still nothing Congress can do about it. As long as those who like to take corporate money are empowered to open the spigot on how much corporate cash can slosh around in our elections, we are going to have a problem here.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.