2012: An election post-mortem

Technically Barack Obama got 50.5% of the national popular vote last week, against 47.9% for Mitt Romney. What does a virtually dead-even presidential election say about a country whose wealth and power are skewed to Third World levels of concentration?

To me, it reflects a political system that produces major party candidates virtually indistinguishable from each other, whose function is to manage the status quo. So that great sucking sound you heard Tuesday evening was the air going out of a meaningless exercise pumped up by $6 billion of legalized bribery.

The biggest economic news of the past half-century is the success of corporations in off-loading their tax liability onto the middle class. That's a reality neither Obama nor Romney was prepared to touch, except to tilt the balance further.

Mitt Romney said he wanted to cut corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%. Barack Obama said he'd cut it to 28%.

Many major corporations pay nothing at all. Companies that pay anything approaching 25%, if there are any, ought to fire their accountants.

Romneycare vs. Obamacare

Romney liked Romneycare until it became Obamacare, and then denounced it all the way up to the last presidential debates— when, tacking to the always-illusory center, he decided he liked it again after all, sort of, as long as he could put his own brand on it again. Neither candidate mentioned a single-payer system like Medicare.

So health care costs will continue to rise, and for-profit medicine will persist. So will America's employer-based insurance system, a drain on international business competitiveness and a crapshoot for workers who face the double whammy of losing their health care when they lose their jobs.

Obama likes drone warfare. So did Romney. Obama kept the Guantanamo gulag going. Romney would have done the same. Obama attacked Libya without Congressional authorization. Romney thinks that was just fine. Obama deported more immigrants than any other president in American history. Romney suggested they simply deport themselves. Tweedledee, tweedledum.

Sheldon Adelson's money

The only transformative aspect of the 2012 elections was the injection of unlimited, unaccountable money into them. Some observers contended that Obama's victory showed that money can't buy elections, and that when all was said and done, rich people like Shelly Adelson and the Koch brothers had spent their money in vain. To me, this argument completely misconstrues the impact of the Citizens United decision and the money it has shoveled into our politics over the long run.

In the first place, Obama and all other Democratic candidates had to raise obscene amounts of money to offset the cash flowing in on the other side. Many big donors, of course, bet on both horses and contribute to both sides. The more money that goes into the process as a whole, however, no matter which side it goes to, the more access and influence it buys.

Maybe the donors themselves perceive a diminishing rate of return on their investments, as the same number of candidates must be bought at higher and higher prices. But candidates must court them that much more assiduously in order to be competitive, since the cost of achieving office or remaining in it continues to rise for them too. Needless to add, those candidates dare not offend their patrons, so that money effectively muzzles new ideas and guarantees campaigns that are a rehash of market-tested clichés.

Right-wing judges

It's a mistake, too, to look merely at national or statewide races to judge the impact of money in the election process. The more money that's in elections as a whole, the more even local races are affected by it.

Most ominous, though, is the prospect of monetizing judicial races. Obama supporters often argued that the next Supreme Court appointments couldn't be left to Romney and the Tea Party. Of course, Republicans have been seeding not only the Supreme Court but the federal bench with deep-dyed conservatives since Richard Nixon's presidency, producing a court system far to the right of the country as a whole. The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision of 2010 was the ultimate windfall of that investment, opening up the entire judiciary to cash-and-carry politicking.

Jefferson's vision

The Occupy movement of late memory left us with the slogan of the super-rich 1 percent who lord it over the 99 percent of us poor peasants. That's a catchphrase and a gross oversimplification, of course, but it stuck for a reason. The richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country's wealth. The bottom 50 percent of the population owns exactly 1 percent of all wealth. This is, roughly, the 47 percent who, as Mitt Romney complained, pay no federal income taxes (though, for many, their effective tax rate may well exceed his own).

Thomas Jefferson called on Americans to build a country where all men could be free and equal. We've been arguing over the meaning of those terms ever since, but it's a fact that we've evolved the most inegalitarian society of any in the industrialized world, and it's a mockery to say that people without property are in any genuine sense free. However one wishes to account for this state of affairs, any meaningful politics must start from it.