from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 02 Nov 2009 08:07 PM PST

Mike Bloomberg's mayoral races have become a quadrennial farce
in which an outmatched Democratic party hack, whose only virtue is having
done enough favors for those above and below is pounded to pieces by a
billionaire with virtually the same political views, but a virtually
unlimited amount of money and a great deal of cunning and determination.
New Yorkers who do not like Bloomberg and have never liked him, are likely
to go out once again to vote him in, mainly because the alternative would
be worse. And the sad thing is they are right.

But what is interesting about this specific race in the great
quadrennial farce that underlies so much of modern urban democracy, is
just how dirty a race in which the main candidate neither needs anyone's
money, nor expects to gain any money from his victory, really is. The
proponents of campaign finance reform told us that by limiting campaign
donations, a cleaner and uncorrupted breed of candidate would emerge. In
fact just the opposite has happened, campaign finance reform instead made
candidates beholden not so much to individual donors, but to organizations
and 527's, who took on the outsourced campaign work on their behalf. But
Bloomberg does not need any of those 527's, instead he's spending up to
200 million dollars of his own money on the campaign. But does that make
Bloomberg's campaign any cleaner?

Money as the root of all
political corruption is often cited in terms of campaign donations, but
eliminating campaign donations does not eliminate corruption. Not even
eliminating the politician's own financial profit motive does, as
Bloomberg has repeatedly demonstrated for us. Because while Bloomberg may
not need to take anyone's money and does not expect to profit financially
from winning, the financial corruption is still very much present in the
real root of all evil, the exchange of taxpayer money for political
influence.

While Bloomberg uses his own money to buy campaign ads
just about everywhere, he uses city money to dole out grants and programs
in a strategic manner to groups likely to support him, as well as to
specific organizations. One of the worst examples of that saw Bloomberg
providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Newmanites,
best exemplified by the deranged bigot Lenora Fulani, who had hijacked the
Independence Party in exchange for their support. And despite a long
history of hatefilled statements, Fulani and Bloomberg are
still campaigning together. But Fulani is only the ugly tip of a
mostly hidden iceberg.

Attacking campaign donations only targets
the most visible leg of a much bigger horse. Money is only the crudest
form of support that politicians solicit. The subtler forms involve
endorsements from organizations and big names willing to come out and
campaign, groups who will run phone banks, hand out leaflets and throw the
weight of their support behind a candidate. And there is always a price to
pay for that sort of support, usually at taxpayer expense.

While
campaign contributions are itemized on the bottom line, the billions of
dollars of taxpayer money spent buying political support can never be
enumerated. There are only glimpses here and there when they reek of
obvious corruption, a politician's spouse suddenly getting city work
thrown to her small business, a union bigwig appointed to a new position
created just for him or an obscure community center no one ever heard of
before suddenly receiving an open ended multimillion dollar grant. But
these are only a handful of pebbles in an ocean of corruption and
waste.

Because the real root of all evil is not in the campaign
donations that politicians solicit or the money they hope to gain from the
right politician connections. Those are all major parts of politician
corruption, but even when they are eliminated, the corruption does not go
away. The Bloomberg effect demonstrates that the real source of the
corruption is not a profit motive for the candidate, but the profit
motives of his supporters.

The ugly truth is that city, state and
federal treasuries are coinage minted to buy political support and
political favors. They can be used to build up some organizations and
destroy others, to elevate the careers of some politicians and give back
to core constituencies. This money feeds the chain of graft and kickbacks,
the backroom deals and political machines that define local and national
politics. The same system that all too often become synonymous with
democracy in America ever since 1800 when a clever sociopath named Aaron
Burr rigged a city corporation meant to provide water to New York into a
scheme to create a bank and an entire voting base for Jefferson, in the
process helping to turn Tammany Hall into the political monster it would
become.

And at the root of all that evil is the money. Not campaign
money, but the great treasure chest of taxes and revenues that the
political vultures base their careers on fighting their way to and then
doling out piece by piece to their supporters. And the more political
support they need to buy, the more the taxes have to go up to pay for it.
The more corruption tears at that treasure chest, the more the revenues
have to be expanded. And when businesses flee or collapse, and inflation
rises... the only solution as ever is more taxes.

Bloomberg is far
from alone in this practice. Every major and minor city, town and village
runs on some variation of the same scheme. As does the Federal government.
Bloomberg's lack of a profit motive only exposes the system itself for
what it is, a political practice that hinges on taking public money to pay
for political support.

Since it virtually impossible to get elected
without the support of groups and people who will want political favors at
taxpayer expense in return, and once elected to any legislative or
executive position virtually impossible to get anything passed or done
without in turn signing on to budgets and bills that use taxpayer money as
payback for political favors-- the same system has continued growing out
of control. Reformers may try to step in and cut back spending a little,
but the head of the spending hydra always grows back, because the purpose
of American politics has come down to getting your hands on some of that
money, and the definition of political power has come down to the ability
to distribute that money.

Politicians run against each other promising to bring back a
larger share of that money home to their district. Naturally a sizable
portion of the money brought "home" will go to those who supported that
politician, in one way or another. It's how the game is played. Campaign
finance can no more fight this problem, than it can make your teeth shine
and your shoes fit, because the problem is not so much in the private
money that the politician gets, but the public money he gives away. If
politicians did not have public money to give away, campaign finance would
be a minor problem, because there would be a limited incentive to buy
their favor in the first place.

Bloomberg may spend 200 million of
his own money running for office, but he has probably spent at least 10
times that amount in public money on buying political support. But to buy
political support, it has to be worth something in the first place. The
hodgepodge of organizations who deliver the vote only have power thanks to
the money and services they can distribute by way of government grants.
ACORN is a typical example. If those organizations could not exploit
government money, then their own profit motive would not exist and they
would not have any votes to deliver.

It's not money that is at the
root of political evil, but the power of politicians to expropriate and
redistribute increasingly unlimited amounts of it from the people, for
their own political ends. At the heart of all that corruption is the
ability of local and national governments to amass vast sums of money
through both taxation and deficit spending that are not strictly necessary
for the function of government. That is the root of all evil, and until it
is dug out, its poisonous sap will flow into every branch of politics and
human life.