Buddy Roemer, outcast candidate for the Republican nomination, rails against the way money buys power in politics on a daily basis. It’s easy to make such claims, but I’ve always wondered how much stock to put in them. I’ve heard people say the data doesn’t show such a strong correlation between money and election winners. And there were some wide disparities in the “money per vote” average of the results of the Iowa caucus.
Sometimes, however, things happen that just seem, well, pretty convenient. A couple weeks ago I read about millionaires pouring money into a pro-Gingrich PAC. Now Newt is surging in South Carolina polls (the primary is tomorrow). Could these events be related?
But even if it’s dubious as to how money effects people trying to get into Congress, I’m beginning to think it’s much more obvious how money effects people once they’re there. It’s common to complain about how lobbyists practically buy Congress, but I’ve never seen it so blatantly as I have following the SOPA and PIPA laws, which, as you may know by now, are being pushed by the entertainment industry to try to give government control over the Internet in an attempt to reign in piracy.
Now, at first, that just sounds like run-of-the-mill lobbying, rent-seeking by entrenched corporations to try to maintain their dying business models, yada yada yada. But it’s been getting worse. As the public opposition to the bills mounted, the MPAA’s tech policy chief conceded that “DNS filtering is really off the table” – as if the MPAA has the direct ability to dictate the provisions in these Congressional laws. After the big web protest blackout on January 18th, a lot of Congress members learned about the dangers of these laws from their constituents and switched from the “support” column to the “oppose” column. But there was something very interesting about the thirteen Senators backed away from PIPA on the 18th: eleven were Republicans and only two were Democrats. Why were almost 90% of the changed senators from the Republican party when previously the parties were almost equally supportive? Maybe it’s just a coincidence that almost 90% of donations from the movie industry go to Democrats.