GET MONEY OUT OF POLITICS?
by John Spritzler
November 2, 2020
The URL of this article for sharing it is https://www.pdrboston.org/get-money-out-of-politics
Some people advocate "getting money out of politics," either with a law or a constitutional amendment. Here's the problem with making this our goal.
Implicit in the goal of "getting money out of politics" is the idea that money (meaning, of course, Big Money, the concentrated wealth of billionaires) will be removed ONLY from politics, but will otherwise remain in society as a huge power just like before. But as long as there is an upper class, which is what there is of course when a small number of people have vast fortunes in the billions of dollars range, this upper class will continue to treat people like dirt in order to keep ordinary people--the have-nots--in their place at the bottom of a very unequal society.
The upper class will NEED to treat people like dirt to maintain the class inequality; read here about some of the many ways that the upper class today routinely treats us like dirt and why it MUST do so, and consider this key fact: the upper class could continue to treat us like dirt in most if not all of these ways even if there were some law or constitutional amendment that "kept money out of politics." Why?
Because the upper class would still be the employers and we would still be their employees; the upper class would still own the banks (including the Federal Reserve); the upper class could still exert enormous control on what governments could do. Remember how lots of city governments bent over backwards to offer Amazon Corporation everything imaginable in order to persuade Jeff Bezos to locate his second Amazon headquarters in their city and thus "provide jobs"? Jeff Bezos's power comes from owning about $100 billion of wealth, and this power would not vanish no matter what law or Constitutional amendment "got money out of politics."
Furthermore, it is not actually possible to "get money out of politics" as long as there is an upper class that has enormous amounts of money compared to ordinary people. Whoever has a multi-billion dollar fortune has enormous power because in a society based on money, in which money can buy things and also the services of people, money is power. There are a zillion ways that a multi-billionaire can use his or her money to get what they want from "politics." Corporations routinely threaten to move unless local or state governments do their bidding. A multi-billionaire can offer a politician all sorts of bribes, such as a cushy job for when they leave politics, or a cushy job for their child, or favorable media coverage; these things can get around any "no money in politics" law. Billionaires (and their hired clever lawyers) are exceedingly skilled at getting around such laws. It is simply naive to believe otherwise.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
The moral of the story is this. The only way to stop an upper class from treating us like dirt is to abolish the class inequality that makes the existence of such an upper class possible in the first place. To abolish class inequality means to make an egalitarian revolution, as discussed here. Let's aim to do that!
By the way, the billionaires understand everything I've written here. That is why they LOVE it when people, instead of aiming to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with NO RICH AND NO POOR, instead aim merely to "get money out of politics." The rich know that as long as people are only aiming to "get money out of politics," the rich will remain a rich upper class, fully in power as always.