The massive, student led protests in
Hong Kong were sparked by the fact that Beijing's political and economic
elites get to choose the candidates in its elections ("I don't care who
does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating" -Boss Tweed)
-- but is this really any different from America's big money primaries,
where corporate elites can spend unlimited sums fixing the race?Larry
Lessig's essay We Should Be Protesting, Too makes the connection:
"Democracy with Chinese characteristics" is starting to look an awful
lot like "Democracy with American characteristics," where the rich and
powerful get to rig elections to ensure a slate of pro-establishment
candidates who are guaranteed to support policies that reward their
paymasters.
Today there's no "white primary." Today, there's a
"green primary." To run in any election, primary or general, candidates
must raise extraordinary sums, privately. Yet they raise that money not
from all of us. They raise it from a tiny, tiny few. In the last
non-presidential election, only about .05 percent of America gave the
maximum contribution to even one congressional candidate in either the
primary or general election; .01 percent gave $10,000 or more; and in
2012, 132 Americans gave 60 percent of the superPAC money spent. This is
the biased filter in the first stage of our American democracy.
This
bias has consequences. Of course, we don't have a democracy "dominated
by a pro-Beijing business and political elite." But as a massive
empirical study by Princeton's Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page
published just last month shows, remove the word "pro-Beijing," and the
charge translates pretty well.
America's government is
demonstrably responsive to the "economic elite and organized business
interests," Gilens and Page found, while "the preferences of the average
American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically
non-significant impact upon public policy." Boss Tweed would have been
impressed.
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