Senator Sheldon Whitehouse Spotlights The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy in Captured!

 

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The Constitution’s Blind Spot 

AMERICA WAS FOUNDED AS AN EXPERIMENT. It was not an easy one. No one anywhere had successfully created our dream: a popular government, without kings and crowns, without aristocracy and class privileges, and safe from military rule by force of arms. Trusting common people with uncommon power—the power to govern themselves—was the great cause of our liberty. The Founders knew the threats that they were up against. Experienced politicians, they had a keen sense of how easily things could go wrong. They had seen how selfish pressures and popular passions could overwhelm a government, and they knew government power could be captured or perverted to a wrongful purpose. Protecting against these threats, so that a popular government could prevail against them, was the great task of the Constitution. We are all familiar with the renowned system of “checks and balances” the Founders created to preempt the threat that any one branch of government would become too powerful. Yet even with all of the Constitution’s precautions, there was at least one major threat that the Founders failed to foresee. The Founding Fathers were learning on the fly—this truly was an experiment. They had Locke and Montesquieu and other Enlightenment thinkers to give them a general conceptual structure, but their experiment was a more challenging task than penning philosophical principles. They had to adapt those high-minded principles to the pressures of politics and the practicalities of governing. They had to make the theories work amid the dust and drama and passion of real-life politics. This was a new frontier. The Founders’ first effort at a constitution was designed to address the threats to democracy that they perceived. We know what those threats were, because they were the topic of the Federalist Papers. Published in various newspapers in 1787 and 1788 under the pen name “Publius,” the Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to sell the new constitution to skeptical voters across the colonies. The arguments in the Federalist Papers signal to us the concerns of the time. The predominant concerns were these: 

• how the Constitution would protect the individual from the power of government, 
• how it would protect society from the dangers of faction, and 
• how it would protect the new democracy against the emergence of a new aristocracy or a new royalty. 

When it came into effect in 1789, the Constitution erected its defense against these threats primarily through its careful separation of powers. But the Constitution wasn’t enough. The American people were not satisfied. They wanted still more assurances about their role and rights as citizens of this new Republic. So the Founders went back and drew up the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights did two key things: 

• it buttressed the public rights of the Constitution with an array of hard-and-fast individual rights, and 
• it provided specific defenses of those rights in areas such as free speech, criminal process, and access to a jury. Getting this done was a long and exhausting process. 

The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776; the Bill of Rights wasn’t adopted until 1791. A passionate running dialogue lit up that fifteen-year period—a dialogue among brilliant individual Founders, between rival states, between federalists and anti-federalists, and throughout a new American citizenry. They thought deeply and argued fiercely about this new democratic form of government. And they were proud. Their American achievement reverberated throughout the world. The revolutionary Americans who had pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to the cause yearned to prove that this experiment was worth all their blood and hope and sacrifice.1 They felt a keen obligation to history to get this right, and getting it right meant building into this new Constitution defenses against all the threats they perceived. They threw their hearts and souls into building those defenses. 

But they overlooked one threat. They overlooked the corporation. At the time, they overlooked it with reason. The first corporations in America bore no resemblance to big, modern, for-profit entities. Originally, incorporated entities were mostly cities, schools, and charities. They usually had a public purpose or carried out quasi-governmental tasks. By the 1790s, business corporations began to emerge in America, but at the outset they were few. These corporations were usually specific in purpose, and the business purpose was still usually quasi-governmental—to build a toll road or a canal, for instance. They were often given a temporary monopoly, and they often closed up once the corporate purpose was achieved.2 The few corporations that existed were fully the legal creatures of state legislatures, and they existed under close local political control. A specific legislative charter spelled out everything from the corporation’s capitalization and life span to its functions and operations. If a corporation in some way misbehaved or became politically aggressive, its charter could be revoked or modified, and that ended that. Nothing about corporations looked like a threat. No American megacorporation marauded through the Founders’ political landscape. On our American continent, the big British corporations threatened no harm. The Hudson’s Bay Company (or, more formally, the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay) was operating far away in Canada and not interfering in the American colonies.3 The Massachusetts Bay Company was long gone; in fact, it had lost its charter even before the colony it founded fought its way to independence.4 Had the Founders given more attention to corporations, and foreseen that corporations might slip their bounds of public purpose and public control, every indication is that they would have been skeptical and suspicious of a political role for them. The experience of the great British corporations in the mother country would have been cautionary. The British East India Company notoriously corrupted the English Parliament and foreign governments; its “nabobs” were officers who had enriched themselves enormously in India, returned to England, and bought themselves seats in Parliament, threatening to turn England into “a sink of Indian wealth.”5 The South Sea Company collapsed in a spectacular bubble, in a rancid combination of what Sir Isaac Newton reportedly called “the madness of a multitude”6 and what parliamentary investigation called the “most notorious, dangerous and infamous corruption.”7 The Founders may have thought that determining a political role for corporations was an issue for another day. Were Congress ever to charter a national corporation, safety measures could then be addressed in the charter. (When Congress did charter a national bank in 1791, the debate agitated our politics for fifty years.)8 

They may have attributed the power of those English corporations to the rotten political system in England, which the Founders were rejecting to build a better world. In any event, these scandals were far enough away that they did not provoke the Founders’ concern and caution in the drafting of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers saw no specific threat to our government from corporate entities, so they built in no specific defenses to protect against them. Nowhere in our Constitution or in our Bill of Rights does the word “corporation” even appear. In the eighty-five lengthy articles that together constituted the Federalist Papers, the word “corporation” appeared only three times, one of those times referring to municipal corporations.9 

We have one pretty solid way to deduce how the Founders would have felt about a political role for corporate entities, had they considered that at the Founding: we know what two of the principal Founders said and wrote about corporations afterward. The genius of the Founding Fathers was perhaps most concentrated in the tiny form of James Madison and in the lanky frame of Thomas Jefferson, and their views are likely illustrative of what might have happened had the Constitution addressed the problem of corporations in our politics. James Madison grew to see the dangers of corporations by 1817. That was far too late for our Constitution, but Madison’s warning of two hundred years ago is plain:

“There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”10

Similarly, in 1816, Thomas Jefferson had urged that we “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”11

 Twenty-five years earlier, when our great American constitutional effort concluded with the Bill of Rights, that threat to our country of a “trial of strength” was not yet present. As corporations blossomed in the booming 1790s, the traditional road, bridge, and canal monopolies remained of little concern.12 But the 1790s also brought banking corporations.13 These new entities caused new concerns, and the Founders’ worries about them are instructive. 

Banking corporations were beyond the familiar mold for American corporations. They had no fixed, tangible purpose, and there were no obvious limits to their wealth or power, their reach, or their duration—they had no natural end. These characteristics rang alarm bells in the Founders’ minds. Looking back on this time through the lens of scholarly history, Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens summed up the Founders’ dim view of the corporation: “Members of the founding generation held a cautious view of corporate power and a narrow view of corporate rights.”14 And it was not just the Founders who came to see these new, emboldened corporations as a threat to popular self-governance if unleashed in the political arena. The American people long have as well. As Justice Stevens wrote, Americans “have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding” and “have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”15 Indeed, at the Founding, most states prohibited any political contribution by a corporation, and punished it as a criminal offense.16 The early restrictions on corporations in the nineteenth century were so limiting that building major enterprises such as Standard Oil required quite a bit of lawyerly ingenuity. The Rockefeller trust, for example, was created to work around laws restricting corporations from holding stock in other entities. That’s why it was “trusts” that had to be busted.17 Economically, a corporation can be a great boon. 

The business corporation aggregates capital with unprecedented efficiency of both cost and purpose. Neither death nor illness interrupts it. It allocates liability and risk in ways that encourage investment. It is probably safe to say that the corporate form has allowed the creation of more wealth than any other invention. As an economic actor, it is without peer. 

As a political actor, however, the corporation is a dangerous entity. The valuable characteristics of the corporate form as an economic tool are dangerous when pitted against humans in the political sphere. It was these characteristics of a modern for-profit corporation that members of the Founding generation came to perceive with such distress. First, for-profit corporations are dedicated exclusively to profit-making, by law. That is their solemn and sole duty to their shareholders.18 In business, this is an estimable characteristic, ensuring loyalty and diligence. 

In politics, where moral issues and public goods are so often at stake, such single-mindedness is a flaw. Second, corporations have no soul or conscience. Courts have said they “have no personal attributes”19; a corporation is “without either mental or moral powers,”20 is “without power to think, speak, or act, except as live sentient human beings may think, speak, and act for it,”21 and “lacks capacity for numerous abilities of a natural person.”22 An artificial being without conscience or remorse, it is kept from misconduct not by an internal moral compass but by specific laws or by the adverse business prospect of gaining so bad a reputation as to interfere with its profit-making. Third, corporations have no loyalty to any flag or nation. Mostly this is true of modern multinational corporations, which move assets, jobs, and intellectual property around the globe at will. Exxon’s former CEO is quoted as saying, “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what is good for the U.S.”23 They have only a simple fiduciary loyalty to their shareholders. Some have revenues that exceed those of countries in which they operate. Fourth, corporations do not rest, retire, or die. They are persistent and unrelenting. The legal term is “perpetual succession,” meaning “artificial life extending beyond the natural lives of the incorporators, directors, and officers.”24 A corporation “does not die in the sense that a person dies.”25 Nor does it rest in the sense that a person rests. Fifth, there is no natural limit to corporations’ size; they can hold preposterous sums of money. In politics, where “money is the mother’s milk,”26 those sums can be used to acquire influence for the corporation, so as to promote policies that enrich the corporation well beyond the cost of buying that influence. 

Indeed, given the corporation’s fiduciary obligation, it has some natural economic obligation to use its power to that end. Finally, there is no natural limit to their appetite. No corporation says, “You know, I think I’ve made enough money,” and pushes back from the table. No corporate lobby says, “You know, I think I’ve acquired enough political influence,” and goes out to play with the grandchildren. The continuity, single-mindedness, relentlessness, and efficiency that these characteristics permit are valuable qualities in economic enterprise. In the political arena, they present risks, which become acute if a corporation makes the fateful decision to pursue political influence as a moneymaking strategy. It is a voracious spiral: the more money the corporate entity can make through political influence, the more money it can justify spending to acquire that influence. The more money it spends, the greater its influence, the more it can use that influence to make more money, and so on, once acquiring political influence becomes a corporate profit-making strategy. Rare is the human being who desires to pursue, or is capable of pursuing, this influence-purchasing enterprise with such relentless and single-minded determination. 

We humans ordinarily have families and churches, illnesses and distractions, hobbies and responsibilities of various kinds that get in the way. We may be passionate about our politics, but we need our sleep. The United States Supreme Court of the twentieth century summed up the political role indicated by these corporate characteristics thus: “That invisible, intangible, and artificial being, that mere legal entity, a corporation aggregate, is certainly not a citizen.”27 As described by legal scholar Burt Neuborne, the “for-profit business corporation [is] an artificial state-created legal fiction vested with unlimited life, entity shielding, limited shareholder liability, negotiable shares, and highly favorable rules encouraging the acquisition, accumulation, and retention of other people’s money.”28 Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens reminded us that “corporations are different from human beings,” because unlike us, corporations “have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.”29 Putting these observations into a political context, Justice Stevens noted that corporations are not “members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”30 “Certainly not a citizen,” “different from human beings,” not “members of ‘We the People’”—all these descriptors imply little or no political role for corporations. Once let loose in the political sphere, however, the sum of these corporate characteristics is a political creature with momentous natural advantages over its human competitors. 

The Framers simply would not recognize the constitutional alien that is the modern corporation operating in our democracy; of course they didn’t design limits on the political activities of an entity they couldn’t even imagine. Add to these characteristics the twentieth-century advertising and marketing skills corporations have developed to sell their products, which apply well to the task of manipulating human voters. Add on size sufficient to dwarf many sovereign nations, and the massive profit that political ventures can provide. Then add the twenty-first-century technologies of constant communication. 

Finally, add secrecy. The result is a power that could turn our popular democracy into high-tech corporate feudalism if we don’t learn how to restrain it. This book addresses how corporations have grown to a size and power and political role unimaginable to the Founders of our country; how the modern corporation has exploited the gap in the Founders’ constitutional foresight; how corporations now win the “trial of strength” against our democracy that Jefferson warned about; and what political prizes are sought and seized by corporate power through its political victories in that “trial of strength.” Finally, this book looks at the restraints the Founders did build into the system, from the civil court system to an independent press to citizens’ right to vote—restraints that can and must be employed to reclaim and reinvigorate our American popular democracy and restore to its proper preeminence the office of “citizen,” the one office all Americans occupy. James Madison is said to have warned that “the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A republic can not stand upon bayonets, and when that day comes, when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.”31 I believe that the day has come, and that readjustment is needed to reclaim the power that has slipped away from the hands of regular American citizens and into the grasp of corporate concentrated wealth. The big, politically active corporations love having us sit on the couch watching ads paid for by their front groups and deciding which of those ads appeal most to our opinions, fears, and prejudices. But that is being a consumer of their political product, not being a citizen. A citizen is more than a consumer. However much the tentacles of corporate political interference may coil around and through our democracy, at the end of the day the survival of our democratic experiment depends on the active participation of the people. Citizens need to get up off the couch and set things right. We’ve gotten off the couch before. When the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, Americans woke up to the environmental damage we were doing, started Earth Day, and passed a wealth of environmental laws that have made American life better and safer: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, hazardous waste laws, chemical safety laws, and laws protecting endangered species.32 What had happened? The creeping reach of pollution’s effects on all of us had reached a point where it sparked a reaction. Our reaction changed the country and made it a much healthier place to live. When we realized our diets were killing us, many Americans left behind the Wonder Bread, the canned vegetables, and the TV dinners. 

When I was young, a health food store was a rarity, even an oddity. In 2015, Americans spent an estimated $37 billion on organic food.33 We are living nearly ten years longer now than when I was born. What happened? The creeping effects of an all-processed-foods diet reached a point for us where it sparked a reaction. Our reaction changed our diets and made us a healthier and more vigorous people. A similar reaction is due with respect to our democracy. Too much of our democratic debate today is the political equivalent of pollution and junk food. Other generations solved other problems; it’s our turn to solve this one. We can take example and heart from the fighting spirit of the bipartisan Roosevelts. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the powerful forces of “organized money” (as dangerous, he said, as an “organized mob”) arrayed against him.34 Here is how he responded to what he had called “this resolute enemy within our gates”35 in an address to the nation: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. 

They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”36 Republican Teddy Roosevelt saw a similar enemy: “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”37 His call was clear: “Our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests…. 

We must drive the special interests out of politics…. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.”38 Ever the optimist in a fight, Teddy Roosevelt concluded: “To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.”

~~~

Since I've retired and moved into a single residence, I've had more problems with corporations than I had in my previous life! I've shared my grievances on the most blatant corporations, but there were many more. Companies these days care nothing about the "old adage"--so old, I've never heard it repeated since my school days-- "The Customer is Always Right..."

There have been presidents of our country who have helped monitor what has been happening, as referred to by Whitehouse, as he shared about the two Roosevelts who enjoyed being hated by corporations at that time... Then, I remember in the 60s that IBM was at a near-monopoly on office equipment, computers, etc., and was forced to allow competition to routinely occur. That, for me, was the one and only time that I saw that government took action to deal with the corporate entity that was causing problems. The DOJ had started looking at the company and went on from there...

For me, it was an easy connection to make when I thought about IBM and of the one time that Jesus became angry... It was the entire "temple" money operation that spurred him to speak against how they were using religion to make money... And, with the blessing of the pharisees who also had a major issue with Jesus... Remember?

Now, people across our nation are once again seeing religion and corporate owners/Boards, merge in an unprecedented manner in which a former president has become so immersed in working with large corporations that the first chance he got, he reduced the taxation for corporations... The lie that was told was that the corporations would use a trickle down process where all people would ultimately benefit. We all know that never happened... Not only did it never happen, but when Covid changed lives of so many, it was the corporations who took advantage of the pandemic to, in any way possible, make a "killing" on what the scarcity of supplies, routine, and medical, was supposed to have resulted in a loss...

Many small businesses did indeed face a crisis; few large corporations were negatively affected in the long-run... Yet, years later after, supposedly all things are or should be back to normal, Americans continue to face high prices for anything and everything. The difference between the two political parties in dealing with a nation-wide problem was and is still apparent!

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse begins the book talking about what he has been seeing in Congress and he has chosen to not only fight for right within Congress, but has written this book to inform. Noting that it is because We The People are the only ones who can overturn what has now become a crisis nation-wide.

While pointing out that in the 1700s when the Constitution was being contemplated, there were no major world-wide corporations. Thus there are no constitutional restrictions or even guidelines upon which legal action can easily occur. One party has continuously supported the freedom of corporations to make as much money as they can, and, in return, getting "paid" for that action...

By Chapter 2 we have confirmation of what we've seen happening... Corporations and Politics has been merged so fluently that is hard to separate out exactly who is doing what... And Why... One of the ways that has become, in my mind, a real problem, is the deletion of regulations that have been implemented over decades... For water, for construction, for land use limitations...These have been created for the safety of those who work in the areas. It is easy to have them eliminated by just one president who cares more about money than about the workers of America!

One major corporation, albeit referred to as an association, is the National Rifle Association. We are know that money crosses hands to ensure that gun sales continue to thrive and expand... During the former administration, both the president and vice-president spoke each year at a national conference of this group. And, of course, that administration ensured that the second Amendment was blown out of proportion of exactly what...it...means...

Whitehouse points out the history of the connection, noting that year after year it has become more and more a threat to popular democracy. Democracy has won big victories in fighting against these agencies. But the clarity of connection between a major political party, the law, and the corporate entities in control has become overwhelming... There is much more that can be found as to how these things are happening...

The movement of power corporations soon began to view the laws of the land as those that could be perhaps manipulated... If money was used to hire a judge at any level, but certainly at the Supreme Court level... In fact, there has been significant investigation regarding that Court and Senator Whitehouse is the leading force in the Senate to spotlight these relations. Included in this book are extensive reviews of the legal cases related to corporations... And that research is footnoted and then provided for reference in the back of the book... This is, in my opinion, a significant non-fiction book useful for all those interested in legal and practical administration of justice.

Whitehouse begins historically and then moves forward, noting the addition of lobbyists that have the jobs of influencing, often through exchange of money.

And then, it was the McCain-Feingold Act in the 1990s which began reform:

Its key provisions were 1) a ban on unrestricted ("soft money") donations made directly to political parties (often by corporations, unions, or wealthy individuals) and on the solicitation of those donations by elected officials; 2) limits on the advertising that unions, corporations, and non-profit organizations can engage in up to 60 days prior to an election; and 3) restrictions on political parties' use of their funds for advertising on behalf of candidates (in the form of "issue ads" or "coordinated expenditures").[7]

The Bottom Line for me was that, yes, there are issues surrounding prices, size of products, etc., that hits most of our daily needs and as shown above, these are the promised issues to be addressed during the next term of office in 2024. We know that this Administration has already started with pharmaceutical corporations which previously forced many, especially the elderly to choose between medicine and food. These are all so needed...

However, I have become appalled about how political parties not only seek financial support from us--who pay their salaries through taxes--but after learning just how financial laws have been manipulated so that there is now total freedom for "dark" or unidentified money can be used to support a political party... Now we see ads that are being shown and it lists a company we have never heard of! Additionally, when I put a stop on emails, then another agency just starts the contacts! I don't even know if they represent the people they are talking about!

Further, in my opinion, I refuse to accept that Freedom of Speech can allow one candidate to tell lies about the other, or threaten those who do not comply with decisions of a political leader are sacrosanct! The level of disinformation arising from the last president has opened the gates for those who will do anything and everything to gain some small bit of power or financial gain... This has got to be stopped. Voting is our only recourse. Let's make it that We The People are able to override and provide new constitutional laws to ensure that corporations are regulated!

If you, like me, have been caught in contracts with corporations who will then not provide repair, or have problems during a job being done, I recommend you start looking toward which political party is doing something about it... If you want to know more about the details, I highly recommend this book as a must-read for many Americans who are shaking their heads, wondering what has happened to America... If you don't already know, start reading! Start watching credible news stations. Personally I chose MSNBC at this point. I like the diversity of their news agents as well as their commentators... But most important, realize that you have the right to seek help, to not be ripped off by corporations... Let's ensure that those in office work on OUR behalf to do the right thing, at the lowest possible cost for the buyer... Reading this book has made me realize just how bad it has become!

GABixlerReviews

Now Reading: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's CAPTURED: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy - Preface/Introduction

Quite recently, my great niece started talking about her research about the highest level of corporations, explaining that there are only three major owners of most of our country's controlling everything!

Biden has also started campaigning about what he plans to do with corporations who are over-pricing basic family needs, including that packaging is getting smaller, or, even, potato chips are air puffed and fewer chips are provided per package...

I had not known the first information above. But, I was gratified to learn that Biden already knew what was happening with America's producers, especially, for foods. I've seen it--we've all seen it... And we all know that Covid can no longer be blamed for this price gouging! Action is required...

I've watched Senator Sheldon Whitehouse many times on MSNBC as he shares about what he's been doing at the congressional level. I've recently gotten his two books, the first of which I am now reading...

But, it is important enough to share, at least the Preface Introduction, because these issues are bound to be a part of the 2024 Presidential Election. You may want to check out his two latest books for your own reading. I'm impressed with the author and his future in America's Democracy!

By the Way, I am also reading James Patterson's fiction novel, Blowback: An American President Goes Insane... As you may have known from previous blog posts, I routinely am reading a fiction and non-fiction book at the same time... it works for me...

In the meantime, I have a number of books already read which I'll be reviewing... A couple which I'll be reviewing for Author Den's members...

• AS THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS BOOK WAS published, Trump had just been elected. In the postscript I wrote back then, I expressed the hope that he might be somewhat independent, possibly working with both sides, possibly even disruptive in some good ways; I had hopes he might be honest and fearless. Boy, was I wrong. We have seen from the Trump administration stunning levels of corruption, flagrant and constant lying, and low appeals to racism and hatred. Our country stands for lasting principles, but is tarnished by Trump as a messenger of our own principles. Our ambassadors are ashamed to challenge misbehavior in foreign governments, with such flagrant misbehavior in our own. But even when—in the fullness of time—we are rid of Trump and his whole comic opera of misrule, we will still face the problem described in this book: the insidious creep of special-interest influence throughout our government. In fact, inchoate public frustration with the government’s capture by those interests may well have led to Trump. Not every corporation or industry is involved in this scheme. Many want no part of it. But the big influencers who are working to quietly capture American government, particularly those in highly regulated or polluting industries, have been disturbingly successful. This insidious power crept in on many separate fronts: •  the steady, years-long effort by Republican appointees on the Supreme Court to give corporate interests a dominating role in our politics;
• •  the legislative lobbying dominance of corporate and industry interests, who outgun all other comers in Congress by massive multiples of spending; 
• •  the evil of unlimited and dark money now dominating our elections (thanks to the Citizens United decision by five Republican appointees on the Court); 
• •  the overwhelming advantage in administrative agencies of the regulated industry, leading to the well-researched (and oft-experienced) problem of “agency capture” when an industry dominates its regulatory agency;
• •  the growth of a complex web of industry-funded, false-front organizations who inject deliberate streams of falsehood and anti-science propaganda into popular debate;
• •  the slow strangulation of the civil jury, to spare big influencers accustomed to dominance in other branches of government the indignity of equal treatment in a courtroom;

and •  the steady partisan packing of the judicial branch with judges who will reliably rule in favor of gun interests, polluting interests, corporate interests, dark money, voter suppression, and a far-right social agenda (they may call themselves “conservatives” but this has nothing to do with being judicially conservative and everything to do with wins for big-donor interests). There’s one additional power that has become more notable: the power of weaponized fake news to manipulate the public. Not too long ago, fake news was for fun: the National Enquirer announcing that JFK and Marilyn Monroe’s secret love child was living in a salt cave in Utah, or that aliens ran a grocery store in Idaho. Weaponized fake news is different; weaponized fake news is the election day cover of the National Enquirer screaming, “HILLARY: Corrupt Racist Criminal.” This vast armada of influence can be deployed quietly, covertly, surreptitiously. The control of government by wealthy influencers is camouflaged behind webs of phony front groups and deployed through channels of anonymized dark money. Spending big money to support this apparatus is not an issue; for these big interests, the work of secret influence is a hugely profitable enterprise. The result is a campaign finance system described as “even more ethically unmoored than the one obtained before Watergate.” We are now closing in on one billion dollars in dark money spent in our politics since Citizens United. That’s a lot of powerful political artillery, packing a lot of influence. And understand this: it’s not just the dark money spending. Surrounding the direct impact of that political spending artillery is an even darker zone of influence, where the mere threat or promise of a spending barrage can achieve the desired political result. There’s not even the vague trail of an anonymous media buy to chronicle the deployment of that influence. This is the dark money double whammy: both secret spending and secret threats or promises. It’s big, and it’s wildly unbalanced in favor of big Republican interests. The three largest dark-money operations are run by the Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. A recent report by the bipartisan reform group Issue One shows them spending $130 million, $110 million, and $59 million, respectively, since Citizens United. The top Democratic operation comes in at $18 million. I’m what you’d call a climate hawk. I saw years of Senate climate bipartisanship before Citizens United. Now I see these immensely powerful, climate-denying, dark-money front groups, all likely funded by fossil-fuel interests. And I see no Republican senator willing to cross them. It reeks. Look also at how dark- and unlimited money can influence party leadership. Consider the 2016 contest for the Senate. Three Democratic Senate candidates stood a good early chance of winning Republican-held seats in 2016: Russ Feingold, a former senator, in Wisconsin; Ted Strickland, a former governor, in Ohio; and Evan Bayh, a former senator and governor, in Indiana. All were solid, experienced candidates; all were ahead in early polling. But then the big influencers came in, early and hard. The attack on Feingold began with $700,000 spent against him between July and September of 2015—more than a year before the election. That’s like strafing the other side’s fighter planes while they’re still on the airfield. Feingold got through his primary in April of 2016; over $2 million more in TV and digital spending was launched that month against him. From October up to election day, the bombardment was $11 million more. In August of 2015, the barrage began against Ted Strickland, to the tune of over $1.3 million—again, well more than a year before the election. When he won his primary in March 2016, another $1.7 million was launched, and from April to June more than $9 million more bombarded him. A further bombardment of nearly $13 million came in from July to September. Evan Bayh declared late, in July of 2016; in the next two quarters, $24.35 million bombarded him. The total “outside group” spending against these three Democratic candidates totaled almost exactly $70 million. All three lost their races. Their losses made the difference for Republicans to retain majority control of the Senate. So back to leadership. If you are the Senate majority leader because big influencers spent $70 million—often very early in the races—well, you won’t forget that. And you will certainly be aware of what that means for the future. I cannot prove the majority leader coordinated that 2016 bombardment to protect his majority, but it is by far the likeliest scenario. If that’s true, it creates a Senate leadership deeply beholden to the interests behind that bombardment, particularly if the leadership team believes that bombardment can be called in again whenever needed. That $70-million-on-demand alliance buys influence for those donors, perhaps even controlling influence. Perhaps even climate-change-denying influence. This is happening mostly behind the scenes. All the public sees is a Congress that won’t even consider addressing climate change, or fair pharmaceutical pricing, or banning dark money, or investigating whatever financial ties our president has to foreign interests, but that will pass sleazy midnight tax bills that pour money to big political donors. Think I’m kidding? The recent Republican “donor rewards program” tax bill added $1.5 trillion to our national debt and showered the bulk of it on wealthy and corporate interests of the sort most likely behind those hundreds of millions in dark money. That’s a big payback. Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson gave a $30 million political check; his interests received a reported $700 million windfall from the tax bill. A Texas oil refinery company gave $1.5 million; it received a reported $1.9 billion tax windfall. These two small examples in a flood of donor payback represent what one academic researcher calls “a vicious cycle in which growing economic and political inequality are mutually reinforcing.”* You use your money to buy the power to loot your country to get more money to buy more power to loot your country more … The people of America from coast to coast smell that something is out of whack; we smell a rat. So this machinery then plays a game of misdirection, to focus elsewhere those well-founded resentments. We are led down paths of anger, division, resentment, and scapegoating. And that gives us Trump. Getting rid of Trump and his creepy minions will help heal our body politic from the injury the Trumps have done to our country. But heal that injury, and this virus of surreptitious influence will still lurk, and will still cause frustration and mischief, until we also cure that disease. Like a patient with both a wound and a virus, our democracy will not return to good health until both the injury is healed and the disease is cured. The disease isn’t new. For as long as there have been governments, powerful private forces have tried to bend the power of government to their purposes. We think now of great political battles as Republican versus Democrat, or progressive versus conservative. We think of specific fights: polluters versus environmentalists; security hawks versus civil libertarians; tax cutters versus big spenders. But threaded through and behind those familiar fights is the long, quiet, persistent effort by forces who seek to turn the power of government to their own private advantage. When they succeed, their victim is the non-predatory majority who just want to go about their business without being robbed through their own government. Distracted by Trumpian theatrics, or by the clash of specific fights, we pay too little attention to this battle over government itself. Distraction is just what the big influencers want for us. They want to win this battle silently; no end-zone antics by them when they capture another agency or judge or policy. They just want the lucrative proceeds of winning. And they have been doing a lot of winning lately. My thesis in this book is that many of the things that frustrate Americans today about our government are the result of losing this ancient contest to the modern big influencers. This is not new. It is as old as corruption. It’s just the latest inning in a long, long game, and now it’s “game on” for us to fight back. Understand the problem. Get mad. Join the fight. We need a gentle revolution now in this country, because if the distraction, corruption, connivance, and misrule continue, we will get a not-so-gentle one later. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse December 2018 * Thomas B. Edsall, “After Citizens United, a Vicious Cycle of Corruption,” New York Times, December 6, 2018. * Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

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Introduction IN THE SENATE, I SEE EVERY DAY how power works in the political sphere. I see who’s got it. I see who uses it. I see how they use it. I see the devices by which that power is applied. I see the schemes used to obscure who’s pulling the strings. I see the smokescreens put up to distract people so they don’t notice the string-pulling. This is my world; it is the ecosystem I inhabit as a United States senator. The legendary, Pulitzer Prize–winning author William S. White observed, “A senator of the United States is an ambulant converging point for pressures and counter-pressures of high, medium and low purposes.” What I see all around me these days is immense pressure deployed by the corporate sector in our government. Some of this corporate power is deployed in traditional ways. For as long as there has been government, there have been efforts by powerful forces to bend government to their private advantage, and to evade or prevent government oversight. For as long as there have been legislatures, there have been efforts to acquire influence over them. For as long as there has been regulation of industries, there have been efforts to control the regulators and to condition them to the interests of the industries they are designed to regulate. But some of what I see is new. I’ve had a close-up look at government—as a prosecutor, as a regulator, as a government staffer, as a reformer, as a candidate, and as an elected official. Never in my life have I seen such influence in our elections from corporations and their managers and billionaire owners. Their presence in American elections has exploded, indeed become dominant, as the campaign finance world has become virtually lawless. Never in my life have I seen such a complex web of front groups sowing deliberate deceit to create public confusion about issues that should be clear. The corporate propaganda machinery is of unprecedented size and sophistication. Never in my life have I seen our third branch of government, our courts, the place in our governmental system that is supposed to be most immune from politics, under such political sway. The track record of the Supreme Court in particular shows patterns that are completely inconsistent with disinterested neutrality. It’s always been tough to go up against the big guys. But for most of my life I felt we had a fighting chance. American politics has deep traditions of honor. There were always pockets of government that could be counted on to do the right thing. And there was such wisdom and safety in our American system of separated powers that corrupting influences could never take over completely. As a lawyer, and as a student of our Constitution, I believed that our American system would always protect us—maybe not right away, maybe not every time, but ultimately and for sure. I’m no longer so sure. Huge segments of the American public think things have gone badly wrong. Indeed, nearly three of every four Americans—71 percent—reported in a February 2016 poll that they were “dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time.” We see these numbers in action as voters across the political spectrum offer enthusiastic support to candidates pledging to change the status quo. How could this be? We’ve persevered through a revolutionary war, a civil war, and two world wars. We’ve endured massive expansions and great depressions. We’ve overturned slavery, brought women well toward full equality, pushed racism back, and recognized gay relationships. We invented automobiles, airplanes, telephones, TV, the atom bomb, and the Internet. Ours has been a tumultuous 240 years. What now, after all that tumult, has gone wrong? Abraham Lincoln reminded us at Gettysburg, over a field that covered the decaying remains of thousands of soldiers, both Union and Confederate, that it was our American destiny, and the prize of our Civil War sacrifice, that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.” The thing that has changed the most in our government, and the thing that to me best explains what has gone wrong, is that our politics is no longer “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Corporations of vast wealth and remorseless staying power have moved into our politics, to seize for themselves advantages that can be seized only by control over government. Organizations of mysterious identity have moved into our politics, as screens for the anonymous power and “dark money” behind them. Political campaigns are now run by new and alien organizations, super PACs and 501(c)(4)s, bizarre creatures unknown to our politics until recently. When I speak of corporate power in politics, let me be very clear: I do not mean just the activities of the incorporated entities themselves. The billionaire owners of corporations are often actively engaged in battle to expand the influence of the corporations that give them their power and their wealth. Front groups and lobbying groups are often the ground troops when corporate powers don’t want to get their own hands dirty or when they want to institutionalize their influence. So-called philanthropic foundations are often the proxies for billionaire families who want influence and who launch these tools to professionalize their influence-seeking. I count them all as faces of corporate power—just as they do themselves. The internal coordination behind the scenes between the politically active corporate entities, the billionaire funders, the right-wing “philanthropies,” the front groups, and the lobbying organizations is constant. The structure of this enterprise, with common funders, interlocking directorates, and overlapping staff, is emerging as a result of academic and investigative studies. From my perch in the Senate, I see it all as one coordinated beast. That is how it behaves, and that is how I’m going to treat it in this book. This apparatus may seem like a very complicated and unwieldy way for corporations to exert influence, but it allows them to give the public the old razzle-dazzle, running intricate plays with what appear to be many independent voices. It’s smart strategy. These forces are everywhere, and they are dominant in every area where their influence on government can be brought to bear. They are right now, as a practical matter, our unseen ruling class. When you are running for office, they can quietly back you—or your opponent—with literally unlimited funds, depending on how comfortable they are with how you’ll vote. (The cudgel of secret spending need not even be swung to have its desired effect; merely brandishing it can be enough to get the attention, and obedience, of a politician.) Once you’re elected and in office, corporate influence comes in the form of corporate lobbying—the behemoth on the legislative stage, drowning out all other lobbying competition by a spending ratio of more than thirty to one.4 As a bill moves through Congress, corporate lobbyists exploit procedural opportunities to accomplish the industry’s purposes out of view of the public. Once a bill becomes law, relentless industry pressure is brought to bear on the agencies charged with enforcement: appointment of industry-friendly administrators; visible industry “caretaking” of friendly administrators when they depart their posts (and visible “freezes” on those who weren’t so friendly); heavy lawyering of the rulemaking and enforcement processes, often as simple brute pressure to cause delay and cost; and sometimes direct kickbacks. All these avenues give special interests undue influence over administrative agencies, to the point of outright capture of the agency. When there is a legal challenge to corporate behavior, or a legal challenge to the way a law is administered, having business-friendly courts to hear the case becomes important. Here corporate influence in the selection of judges is brought to bear, business-friendly “training” for judges at luxurious resorts is offered, and corporate-funded entities that are not traditional litigants appear in court, sometimes in flocks, to amplify the corporate message. The Supreme Court can do more than tilt the balance in business-related cases: the Court can change the very ground rules of democracy in favor of corporate interests. And corporate forces are hard at work using their power to fix the judicial system to seize more power. Civil juries, the Constitution’s designated check on outsized power in the private sphere, have had their place in government shrunk to a vestige of their intended role, leaving corporate forces free to wheel and deal with the established, repeat players in government who are most amenable to their influence. Meanwhile, a vast corporate enterprise is busy constructing and marketing a pro-corporate “alternate reality”: climate change is an illusion; tobacco is not really that bad for you; lead paint only hurts poor children with negligent mothers; the ozone hole isn’t being caused by chemicals; various products’ association with cancer is unproven; pollution controls will cost way too much and hurt the economy; consumers should be free not to live in a “nanny state.” Corporations have become less willing to say these things themselves, so over the years they have outsourced the crafting and selling of this alternate reality to an array of dozens of front groups with innocent-seeming, respectable-sounding names. And corporate forces have acquired influence in an increasingly compliant and even corporate-owned media. What better way to propagandize the American public than through the “news”? It all adds up to massive tentacles of corporate power—particularly emanating from a few highly regulated sectors, including finance and fossil fuels—that are usually invisible or obscured but which are quietly and steadily having their way with government. Small wonder people are angry about a nonresponsive democracy. Contrary to the popular sentiment that government isn’t working anymore, government is working fine; it’s just working for the corporations. Congress today is working great at helping polluters; it’s working great at protecting hedge fund billionaires’ low tax rates; it’s working great at helping corporations offshore jobs, at letting chemicals and genetically modified stuff into your food, at creating tax and safety loopholes for industry. Congress is also working great at ignoring corporate misbehavior—until after a crisis has hurt or killed a lot of people. Even then, Congress has worked great at having taxpayers bail out the industry that caused the harm. And worst of all, government is now working great, in a vicious cycle, to change its own ground rules and lock in the control over government by big special-influence operators. People can feel like they are in a car that won’t respond to them, that the car is dangerously out of control, that the car is broken. But the problem isn’t the car; the problem is who’s now driving it. Regular people are no longer in the driver’s seat of American democracy. A corporation is not an inherently bad thing. In proper circumstances and within proper bounds, the corporate form is an immensely valuable proposition. But the economic ability to amass money can spawn a political desire to amass power. And at a certain level of political power, corporate forces can upshift into political overdrive and use their power to change the political system itself. Beyond just improving outcomes for their industry from the political system, they can make changes to the political system itself that lock in lasting advantages for them and protect their dominance. That overdrive is the most worrisome use of power. That’s where I believe we are now, and why I’m writing this book. Today there is virtually no element of the political landscape into which corporate influence has not intruded, and it is usually the strongest political force arrayed in any part of that landscape. You may not see it, because it is bad strategy for the purveyors of corporate influence to herald their victories; they are better off quietly pocketing their winnings than bragging about them, and they’d rather you not know how effectively they have rigged the game. But, visibly or not, our government has been captured. The “gradual and silent encroachments” that James Madison warned of have come in a corporate guise that Madison and his compatriots did not foresee and were not able to preempt.5 The big corporate interests now in control would like you to give up on government. The better solution is not to give up on the American government that generations of Americans fought, bled, and died to leave to us. The better solution is to take it back and put it to work for us. It will be a battle. Even if you do not now see a clean path to victory, remember the admonition of Rabbi Tarfon: “It may not be up to us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.” As citizens, this must be our work.

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