Political Sugar Daddies

In the April 30, 2012 New York Magazine there is an article called Sugar Daddies – The old white rich men who are buying this election. The article said – if you want to appreciate what Obama is up against in 2012 forget about the front man who is his opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80 year old Texan who told the Wall Street Journal “If we had run more ads we could have killed Obama”. It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time.

When the Supreme Court handed down its 5 to 4 Citizens United decision in 2010, pre-vetting Romney’s credo that “corporations are people”, it allowed sugar daddies to give as much as they want to newfangled super-PACs. (The court’s decision held that portions of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act §203 violated the first amendment-it reversed those provisions that prohibited corporations and unions from spending on ‘electioneering communications”; it overruled the 1990 Austin v Michigan Chamber of Commerce decision and partially overruled the 2003 McConnell v Federal Election Commission decision; the case did not involve the federal ban on direct contributions to campaigns or political parties which remain illegal in races for federal office.) 

The article said that Karl Rove’s Crossroads report to IRS last week reported that nearly 90% of its first $76.8 million haul from June 2010 through December 2011 had come from 2 dozen donors giving $1 million or more. I didn’t know who Rove was so I looked him up. Rove has been in politics for a long time and more recently was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to former President George W. Bush until he resigned on August 31, 2007; he headed the Office of Political Affairs, Office of Public Liaison and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives. Since leaving the White House, Rove has worked as a political analyst and contributor for Fox News, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. Because of all the money flowing into Republican super-PACs, on February 7, 2012 Obama reversed his decision and urged fundraisers to support a Democratic super-PAC.

The article said that what these sugar daddies specifically want from Mitt and his party, besides the usual conservative bullet points codified in Paul Ryan’s tax-cutting government shredding budget, is clear enough; the widest possible regulation-free berth for any vulture businesses they have a hand in, from nuclear waste to ‘health’ nostrums (quack remedies), from new houses to financial products created from those homes’ subprime mortgages. It defies rationality that the current crop of sugar daddies is in such a rage at the country that has done so well by them. The Wall Street Journal this month summarized the lay of the land “Big US companies have emerged from the deepest recession since World War II more productive, more profitable, flush with cash and less burdened by debt.” It is workers whose jobs were shed by those companies and remain unemployed who have a right to be enraged, not the sugar daddies. Economic inequality remains at nearly pre-recession levels as 99%ers struggle to hold their ground, let alone move up the economic ladder.

Much of the government is on the sugar daddies’ side - not just the radical Republican House. A 2010 Times study of some 1,450 modern Supreme Court decisions prepared by scholars at the University of Chicago and Northwestern, among them the federal appeals judge Richard Posner, found that the Roberts court has ruled for business interests 61% of the time - up from 46% in the last 5 years of the Rehnquist court and 42% for all courts since 1953. The notion that Obama is anti-business remains a canard (a piece of false information put out as a hoax). The administration has approved fewer rules proposed by federal regulatory agencies than its predecessor did; Obama’s Security Exchange Commission has been lax in policing Wall Street; his health-care bill, like Romney’s in Massachusetts, was in part modeled on principles originally proposed by Koch-backed Heritage Foundation; the surviving too-big-to-fail banks are all bigger than they were before the crash and the bailout; and the so-called Jobs act with ample Republican support that was signed this month was a deregulatory bill further loosening already weak protections for investors. Yet to sugar daddies like Simmons the president is “the most dangerous American alive” because “he would eliminate free enterprise in this country.” Obama arouses this kind of violent emotion because of who he is, emphatically not one of them, and what he says. In December 2011 in Osawatomie, Kansas he attacked those who practice the philosophy that “we are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules” which is the vulture capitalism evident in both the careers and public pronouncements of many of the sugar daddies. In talking with the Associated Press in Washington this month Obama said they “legitimize their success and confirm their virtues” which likened their ethos (character) to the Gilded Age creed of social Darwinism that appealed to late 19^th century corporate buccaneers because its vulgar application to the market-place – that the fittest are destined to survive and flourish. It also eased their guilt about the plight of the poor since the poor had only themselves to blame for “their own laziness, stupidity or carelessness” – sentiments regularly echoed today by Chris Christie and Paul Ryan. As Mark Twain summed up their credo “What is the chief end of man - To get rich. In what way - Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.”