Thursday, September 17, 1998

When the system isn't working for us

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN - As our grotesque national soap opera continues, the most important issue to be debated during this session of Congress appears to be dead on the Senate floor in a blizzard of indifference. Campaign-finance reform, the one shot we had at stopping the continuous purchase of our political system by corporate money, stalled again at 52-48, still eight votes short of the two-thirds required to break the filibuster engineered by Majority Leader Trent Lott.

Some die-hards are urging reformist Sen. John McCain to hang in until the last dog dies and keep re-introducing his bill, putting more and more pressure on at least eight Republican senators now up for re-election. Of course, the polls show that the people in their states overwhelmingly favor campaign-finance reform. For that matter, 58 percent of the people in Lott's Mississippi favor passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill.

In the House, massive persistence finally paid off this summer. The House leadership tried every parliamentary trick in the book. Speaker Newt Gingrich made a mockery of every promise he ever made to give the bill a fair hearing. And the reformers won out anyway (special credit goes to the Republicans who defied their own leaders).

But we are perilously close to the end of the session, with huge spending bills still to be passed. Of course, those very spending bills are simply larded with special-interest provisions, all of them payoffs to major campaign contributors.

Unfortunately, I know of no way to calculate the full damage done to this country by the legalized bribery that now masquerades as representative democracy. In theory, one could tote up all the special-interest tax breaks, loopholes and outright subsidies now going to corporations and come somewhere within the range of the hundreds of billions that alone costs taxpayers annually. That's a reachable sum.

Then, we could theoretically figure out the cost of letting the oil companies drill on public lands at a fraction of the royalties they have to pay to drill on private land. Ditto the mining companies; ditto the timber companies; ditto the ranchers who graze cattle on public land for a pittance. That can be figured out.

But the bulk of what this system actually costs us is not in the government budget at all; it's the license to steal in the private sector that Congress has granted so many campaign contributors. What's the total cost of allowing banks to rip off their customers, the credit industry to change the bankruptcy laws in its favor, the pharmaceutical industry to hang onto its patents and obscene profits, the cable industry to raise prices, the phone company to charge customers who do NOT use long distance, and so on and on and on?

How do we put a price on the fact that for three years now, Congress has frozen fuel economy standards for cars? The auto industry knows how to make cars and trucks that burn less gas - in fact, Toyota is about to market a gas-electric hybrid that gets 51 miles per gallon - but U.S. automakers know it would hurt their bottom line to change over. Global warming doesn't make campaign contributions; the auto industry does.

What is the cost of damage to the air, to the water? What is the price of lost wilderness? Does the market care if wood comes from a thousand-year-old redwood or a 20-year-old pine?

What is the price of not regulating the chemical industry (admittedly a task so complicated as to almost boggle the imagination, but at least we could start at "From here on out ...")? What is the price of ignoring mounting evidence that chemicals cause breast cancer, disrupt the reproductive system, affect developing fetuses? Developing fetuses don't make campaign contributions; the chemical industry makes huge ones.

I do not know how much damage President Clinton has done to this country by being unfaithful to his wife. But I do know the cynicism, disgust and apathy that mark the political life of this country have other causes. I do know democracy does not work unless citizens participate, and I know citizens do not participate when they know the system is not working for them. Hang in, McCain.

Creators Syndicate, Inc.