Making No Sense of Nonsense
Politics depends on nonsense. It’s an essential element of all campaigns.
Some examples:
Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles promising to cut the state budget by 25 percent.
Democratic senatorial candidate Troy Jackson promising Medicare for all.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Hannah Pingree promising to build 1,000 affordable houses each year.
Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins promising to save rural hospitals.
All nonsense. Rest assured that nothing will come of any of that.
The same is true for campaign finance laws.
All those complicated statutes are allegedly designed to keep the process honest and transparent so voters can tell which nasty special interests are buying the candidates. In reality, that’s nonsense of the richest variety. If it were fertilizer, the corn would be as high as an elephant’s eye.
Thanks to U.S. Supreme Court rulings and incomprehensible legal language, it’s virtually impossible to tell what evil entity is pumping money into any given campaign. The only donations that are clearly spelled out are the smallest ones from earnest individuals with noble intentions, hardly any cash and even less of a clue. All the rest are cloaked in legally concocted mystery, including political action committees formed by the parties and dark money operations masking rich assholes who believe their exalted positions exempt them from any obligation to be open or honest.
That’s nonsense, but it’s the sort of nonsense our electoral system depends upon. Without it, we’d have more people running for Congress on a budget of 40 bucks and some grocery coupons (looking at you, Paige Loud). TV stations would go broke for lack of advertising. I’d have nothing to write about.
All this nonsense conceals an essential truth: Campaign financing is just a form of sophisticated bribery. All major contributions to political campaigns are made to buy influence. That means that when a dark money PAC drops big bucks on a candidate, you can be damn sure the candidate knows exactly where that dirty (but supposedly anonymous) money comes from. For it to be any other way would be a whole different kind of nonsense.
Except for that aforementioned poor sod running on 40 dollars and some discount script for laxatives (looking at you, David Costello), all politicians are bought and paid for. Those who vehemently protest otherwise (looking at you, Graham Platner) turn out to be even more dishonest than the average unindicted co-conspirator (looking at you, President Gildedbutt). Do not, under any circumstances, get drunk with them and visit a tattoo parlor or let them clean your pool.
Of course, there are frequent efforts to reform this process. Most of these rely on that other cardinal principle of politics:
Stupidity.
For instance, there’s public campaign financing. Great, say the millionaires, since the taxpayers are footing the bill, we no longer have to waste money contributing directly to candidates. Instead we can put all our cash into PACs we control that won’t hesitate to run negative ads based on outright lies.
But what about that Maine referendum that placed limits on how much anyone could donate to a PAC? It passed with the support of nearly 75 percent of voters. Doesn’t that inhibit the contributions of rich jerks?
Not if it’s found to be unconstitutional, which it likely will be once the lawsuit filed by the aforementioned rich jerks reaches the Supreme Court, thereby shutting off a simple fix the public might have employed to regain some control over the political system.
Doesn’t really matter. The jerks already have a work-around that allows them to keep their spending secret. Here’s how they operate:
Let’s say a few billionaires set up a PAC called Evil Motherfuckers for Bad Government. Nobody would want to be associated with such a nefarious outfit. But the law says such an operation has to disclose its donors, so EMBG dutifully files the required forms, which reveal that all its money comes from nonprofit entities such as Charitable Bastards Screwing Over the Public. CBSOP, being nonprofit, doesn’t have to disclose diddly squat. So the real source of the funding, likely the aforementioned evil motherfuckers themselves, remains hidden.
This is just one of many schemes wealthy creeps employ to keep the public from finding out who’s buying whom. It just happens to be legal, unlike the older and simpler methods such as slipping the candidate an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills. The only real difference between that and PACs is that if they get caught, the perpetrators of the latter variety don’t go to prison.
But it’s probably only a matter of time before the Supreme Court rules that actual bribery is being unfairly hindered by the law and recognizes the practice as an accepted form of free speech. After that we can dispense with public financing, PACs and all the other nonsense that undermines (that is, supports) our system of government.
Al Diamon doesn’t accept donations, but scrapes by on what he earns writing this column as well as one for The Maine Sportsman and another for the Bangor Daily News e-mail newsletter Maine Politics Insider. He can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
