[Amazons efforts to manipulate Seattles city council race show
that wealthy individuals and companies are threats to democracy.]
[[link removed]]

RICH AMERICANS ARE INTERFERING IN OUR ELECTIONS  
[[link removed]]


 

Libby Watson
November 8, 2019
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Amazon's efforts to manipulate Seattle's city council race show
that wealthy individuals and companies are threats to democracy. _

,
[link removed]?


 

Imagine this: One of the largest companies in Russia and the world,
with billions of dollars in contracts with the Russian government,
dumps $1.5 million into an American local election with the intent to
shape the outcome to be more favorable to its interests. It donates or
spends this money on the candidates it knows will vote for policies
that keep its taxes low. We would have to imagine that the disclosure
of such a scheme would touch off outrage, congressional hearings,
wall-to-wall coverage on MSNBC and CNN, perhaps even special counsel
investigations or the sanctioning of elected officials. It would
dominate news cycle after news cycle.

Before you fire up Twitter and sound the dezinformatsiya alarm, this
did not happen. What did happen is that Amazon, headed by the
world’s richest man and armed with $230 billion in revenue last
year, spent $1.5 million on an attempt to mold the outcome of the
Seattle city council election. The effort wasn’t particularly
successful—their candidates failed
[[link removed]]
to win a majority—but the company may have succeeded in toppling
some of their loudest opponents, including socialist councilwoman
Kshama Sawant, though many ballots that may tip in her favor remain
uncounted.

Regardless of the result, the episode should serve as a reminder of
the utterly insane state of campaign finance in America. It is bonkers
that a corporation of any national origin, including America, can
openly spend money with the intent of manipulating an election to
their liking, whether or not it works (and it often does). It is wild
that we are even talking about “Amazon-backed candidates” in any
setting outside of a bribery hearing.

In the case of Seattle’s elections, Amazon dropped a tiny bit of its
vast resources into trying to purchase a council that would prize the
company’s interests over the interests of Seattle residents, and to
quiet progressive critics who have credibly accused Amazon of
worsening the homeless crisis. Last year, for example, the city
council almost passed a “head tax” of $275 per employee to fund
affordable housing, but repealed
[[link removed]]
it just a month later after Amazon launched “a well-funded and
vicious campaign.” (There are 11,000 homeless people
[[link removed]]
in Seattle.) The company threatened to sublease space in its new
building instead of occupying it itself, which it later did anyway.
[[link removed]]
In 2019, Amazon
[[link removed]]
donated $1.45 million to an organization called Civic Alliance for a
Sound Economy, which backed six candidates. Sawant’s Amazon-backed
opponent, Egan Orion, “garnered personal donations from at least 18
Amazon executives,” according to _Bloomberg_
[[link removed]].


It is true that Amazon, or any domestic company, interfering with
elections is not the exact same thing as a foreign company or
government spending money in American elections. But how different is
it in practice? The logic of rejecting foreign influence in our
elections—down to the point of banning any foreign national without
a green card from buying a t-shirt from a campaign—is to prevent
foreign governments from influencing electoral outcomes for their own
potential gain. Again: How significant is the difference between a
foreign government seeking to shape our government to its liking, and
a huge, multinational corporation that happens to be located in the
United States trying to do the same? Or, for that matter, a single
billionaire?

The specter of outside influence over our elections is threatening
because it undermines the ability of the American people to decide
their own fate; the delicate project of democracy rests on the voters
choosing the government, that old “by the people, for the people”
idea. If that process doesn’t function well, whether it’s because
voters are disengaged and turnout is too low or because a small group
of wealthy people make sure their opinions are heard far more than
everyone else’s, then the sanctity of our democracy can be called
into question. Thanks to voter suppression and the aforementioned
campaign finance madness, there is already significant cause for
doubt.

Yet the discourse around foreign national involvement in American
elections never really seems to interrogate the reason it’s illegal
in the first place. We are supposed to understand instinctively why
“foreigners” shouldn’t have a role in American elections, even
though American elections affect the rest of the world to a
frightening degree. (Reading these takes as a foreigner in the United
States, I am also supposed to agree that it is outrageous for me to
want to donate to a candidate whose policies will directly impact my
life.) This is an outdated and false notion of what kinds of influence
and interference truly are nefarious. It is a vestige from a
pre-globalization world in which foreign governments were the greatest
threats imaginable. It also underestimates how great the threat from
the rich is.

If Russia packed up the Internet Research Agency tomorrow, American
elections would still be incredibly vulnerable to manipulation,
because foreign governments are not the only actors with an interest
in screwing with our democracy. A billionaire like Tom Steyer can
spend a trifling amount of his net worth, akin to your average
American spending a few hundred bucks, to replace actual politicians
[[link removed]] on stage in
the Democratic primary, all while his aides allegedly bribe
[[link removed]] local officials
for endorsements with the promise of campaign contributions—which is
all legal, as long as it’s disclosed. An organization like the
United States Chamber of Commerce, representing most of the biggest
corporations in America, can spend $10 million on elections
[[link removed]]
(or $94 million on lobbying
[[link removed]]
for that matter), in order to ensure the favorable status quo is
maintained.

The defense of a system in which rich individuals and corporations can
spend what they like on influencing democracy is always the same: Free
speech. Think back to the sunny days of 2012, before covfefe and Big
Structural Bailey
[[link removed]], when Mitt
Romney defended the _Citizens’ United_ decision with the legendary
admonishment
[[link removed]]
that “corporations are people, my friend.” This notion, as
ridiculous as it sounds, underpins the ability of corporations to
spend money on elections. In the case of _Citizens’ United_, it was
to allow them to spend unlimited amounts, as long as they didn’t
coordinate with candidates—because limiting what they could spend
would be limiting their speech. Yes: Money is speech. One dollar
equals one speech.

The trouble with this is that not everyone has the same amount of
money. Every American citizen by rights ought to have an equal amount
of speech available to them, but if money is speech, an American
citizen with a thousand times as much money as their neighbor is able
to make a thousand times more impact.

This is not theoretical. In 2014, Joshua Kalla at Yale University and
David Broockman at the University of California, Berkeley conducted an
experiment
[[link removed]]
to see if politicians were more likely to respond to the needs of
donors, versus the needs of ordinary citizens. With the assistance of
CREDO Action, the pair “embedded the experiment into a real lobbying
effort,” in which CREDO fellows sought audiences with
Congresspersons and their staffs over a bill that would ban the use of
certain chemicals. Kalla and Broockman discovered that the emails sent
from “local campaign donors” ended up yielding “a more than
three-fold increase in access to senior officials,” than the same
requests from “local constituents.”

“When the attendees were revealed to be ‘local campaign donors,’
they often gained access to Members of Congress, Legislative
Directors, and Chiefs of Staff.” Kalla related in an interview with
_The Washington Post_
[[link removed]].
“But when the attendees were described as only ‘local
constituents,’ they almost never gained this level of access.” And
these are just the benefits that attach to “local donors.” Members
of Congress spend as much (or more) time
[[link removed]]
contacting big-dollar donors as they do at the tasks their
constituents nominally sent them to Washington to do in the first
place.

These are among the reasons why the United States should ban all
private campaign contributions and force candidates to fund their
campaigns with public money. The question of how to stop outsize
wealth from influencing democracy does not end there—and is much
better answered by ending outsize wealth altogether—but it sure
would be a start.

It is good that we have laws designed to prevent foreign governments
influencing our elections—it would be an awful nightmare for the
future survival of our planet to have candidates, backed by
petrochemical dictatorships, promising to go easy on their
benefactors, for example. As it stands, we have candidates who are
instead backed by petrochemical companies that promise to go easy on
their benefactors. Always look for that “Made in the USA” label,
folks.

Libby Watson is a staff writer at _The New Republic_.

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]