Book by Arianna Huffington. (Regan Books, New York, 2000)

Arianna Huffington describes a crisis in America. "American politics is broken - under the thumb of a small corporate elite using its financial clout to control both parties' political agendas."

Danger signs

Huffington points to some signs that America is in a state of clear and present danger. Almost two out of three Americans didn't even bother to vote in the elections of 1998. Only 20% of Americans 18 to 24 voted. Fewer than half of eligible voters are even registered to vote -. According to a University of Michigan's National Election Studies poll, 64% of voting-age Americans s say that the U.S. government is run, not "for the benefit of all", but by "a few big interests". There appears to be a lack of faith in our elected leaders to do anything about our failing health care and education systems.

The chicanery of the elections of 2000 - in which thousands of votes weren't counted and the conservative-dominated Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush - can only add to this cynicism.

Personal debt and resulting anxiety has skyrocketed. This has turned our economy into a "ticking time bomb". One family out of every 68 filed for bankruptcy in 1998 - more than saw a child graduate from college. And this was written before the onset of the recession.

From 1997 to 1999, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington, DC grew by 37% to more than 20,000. That's roughly 38 lobbyists for each member of Congress, which means that corporate influence over U.S. politics dwarfs citizen influence. Many lobbyists are former holders of political office, who use their insider's knowledge of how DC operates to work for special interests.

Nine of the top ten Senate recipients of Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions from the Health Benefits Coalition, which represents health insurance companies, voted against allowing patients to sue their HMOs. Big banking, tobacco, communications, casino, meatpacking, and other corporate interests also exercise considerable power over the legislative process. Corporate campaign contributions are rewarded by billions of dollars in subsidies, tax breaks, and other legislation favorable to them. It's not a bad deal for the corporations: the average return for every half-million dollars in contributions yields $300 million in tax breaks and other forms of corporate welfare.

"The correlation between special interest payoffs and public policy takes many forms", says Huffington. "Sometimes it kills good ideas, and at other times it paves the way for indefensible decisions." She goes on to offer some examples of both. This book was published before the ENRON collapse, an experience that provides a glaring example of what Arianna is referring to. In this case, campaign contributions bought energy de-regulation which hurt most people, while enriching a few.

"American politics is becoming a sewer, the stench of which is driving voters away from the political process," Huffington writes. "Once an intellectual battlefield of opposing beliefs and agendas, the modern political campaign has come to resemble a demolition derby. Both major corporate-financed parties steer clear of discussing the real issues, but instead offer sound bites and shallow PR, and take cheap shots at each other. The Democratic & Republican Party conventions have likewise descended into debate-free PR fests, where there's "no integrity, no principles, and no truth." The contempt all this shows for the public only deepens our cynicism with politicians, deepens voter alienation, and lowers voter turnouts.

What's the cause of all this? Huffington points to an "unholy trinity": cynical campaign consultants, tabloid media which elevates sex and scandal to prominence, and the corporate elites of both major parties. Corporate media, in an effort to compete with TV and supermarket tabloids, too often emphasize sleaze over issues. Vigorous and spirited reporting of corporate misdeeds against the public has been replaced by "smut-raking". The mass media - the dominant shaper of public opinion in America- has become dangerously concentrated into a few hands, and this has lead to a "dumbing down" and rightward shift.

The differences between the two major parties have become so narrow that they should consider changing their names to the "Pro-life Corporate Party" and the "Pro-Choice Corporate Party".

As one example of how this is corrupting America, Arianna compares the hypocrisy of the government's well-publicized "War on Drugs" vs. the reality of the legal drug corporations' peddling of Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, and Luvox, and other anti-depressants to children. Use of these drugs by children is growing, even though no anti-depressant has yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for pediatric use.

Luvox was found in Eric Harris' bloodstream, after he opened fire on his Littleton, Colorado class-mates, killing 12 students and a teacher before killing himself in April 1999. The previous summer, Kip Kinkel, the Oregon school shooter, had been on Prozac when he killed his parents, two school children and wounded 22 others. Anthony "TJ" Solomon, the Conyers, Georgia school shooter, took Ritalin the morning of the shooting.

"In the aftermath of the Littleton Massacre, President Clinton proposed new laws to restrict the marketing of guns to children, and hosted a conference to examine the entertainment industry's marketing of violence to children, but no one planned any conference or introduced laws to deal with the marketing of mood-altering drugs to children." Few, if any, politicians of either major party has had the courage to publicly question the failing "War on Drugs" or the DARE program, or challenge the peddling of "legal" drugs and their corporate pushers. The situation cries out for better approach.

Solutions

Ms. Huffington has some modest proposals for cleaning up the political campaign cesspool, including:

"Clean-money" campaign finance reform. She discusses some ideas that would help take big steps toward reducing the corrupting chase after campaign financing, and reduce the influence of special interests.

Measures, such as California's "Oaks Project", to ban public officials from accepting contributions for five years from any private interest they took action to benefit through legislation.

Arianna has some advice to anybody considering running for public office: When confronted with the press' illegitimate probing of your personal and sex life, don't even dignify those questions with an answer. Once you get started down that path, "Nothing you say will ever be enough".

She stresses the importance of volunteering more time to help our less fortunate fellows, and recommends programs like Jimmy Carter's Habitat for Humanity, or Colin Powell's America's Promise campaign. Arianna's heart is in the right place, yet this is all a bit like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I wish she would have spent some time talking about the root causes of the problems she so well described, and what we can do to clean up the underlying sources of the mess America is in. Problems like the corporate dominance over the media, a weak labor movement, and the social, economic, and spiritual decay of capitalist society cry out for attention. Ms. Huffington doesn't address these root issues.

She writes about the need for same-day voter registration, and other ways to make it easier to register and vote. After raking corporations over the coals so thoroughly, I would've thought she might have a good anti-corporate "third" party to recommend. Some party that seeks to bring the monsters under popular control. But she doesn't mention the Labor Party, the Greens, the Socialists, nor any other party except for the Demopublicans & Republocrats - the twin corporate parties which she does such a great job denouncing.

She calls for a boycott - an "Intifada" - against the scandal-mongering corporate media outlets. At this point, I was hoping she would say something about non-corporate, anti-capitalist media, but she didn't. There are some excellent examples of lively, issues-oriented alternative publications, but she makes no mention of them. As a regular columnist in the Progressive Populist herself, her oversight on this issue puzzles me.

In her "Call to Action Directory" (Appendix B), Arianna offers a list of about 50 non-governmental service agencies and moderate reform groups that are certainly worthy of some support. Few, if any, however, have a program that would lead us to the sort of systemic overhaul of the government that the title of her book suggests. Most of these groups take a band-aid approach to curing America's ills, not the sort of radical surgery that the name of her book implies, and that we truly need.