The money is the story. The money is the only story. The money was not the only story ever since this campaign began, which was 15 minutes after the past one ended, but it became the only story on January 21, 2010, when the Supreme Court reversed a lower-court decision in the case of Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, thereby demolishing almost a century of state and federal laws aimed at controlling the system by which we finance our political campaigns. The decision deformed American politics to an extent almost unrecognizable to anyone who hadn't grown up in our previous Gilded Age, in which plutocratic influence and entrenched oligarchical corporate power rendered self-government a sad farce.

And the real problem is that everybody knows it.

The folks at Demos, working in conjunction with the Corporate Reform Coalition, released a report yesterday that illustrates quite clearly that the opposition to what the Supreme Court inflicted upon our politics with this decision, and the revulsion against the current election that is its most immediate product, is well-nigh universal. The survey discovered that over 80 percent of the respondents believe all of the following:

• Corporate money drowns out the speech of ordinary Americans.

• Corporations and their CEO's have too much influence in the political process.

• The increase in corporate money has made our politics more negative and our Congress more corrupt. These numbers hold fairly well at the state level as well.

In addition, no matter how you slice the respondents demographically or politically, none of the support for any of these propositions falls below 70 percent. And it's not like we don't know what's going on, either. Eighty percent of the respondents said they knew that corporations spend their money specfically to influence eventual legislation. As the report says:

The American people can see the reality of the corrupting influence of money in politics with greater acumen than the Supreme Court. Eighty-five percent of Americans call it corruption when financial supporters have more access and influence with members of Congress than average Americans — 57 percent say this is very corrupt. Americans believe that government is corrupted when a member of Congress does a business or individual a favor because they received financial support (90%), acts in the interests of financial supporters instead of in the interests of constituents (89%), or acts in the interests of financial supporters instead of in his or her best judgment (87%). Americans agree with these statements by margins of almost or just over 80%.

And yet our Supreme Court is supremely out of touch. In Citizens United Justice Kennedy wrote that "[t]he fact that speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt.... Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption." Justice Kennedy decided that "independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of quid pro quo corruption" and therefore the government's interest in protecting itself against corruption did not serve to justify laws prohibiting "independent" corporate political spending. Only a few years earlier the Court was far closer to the public's understanding that corruption of government is "not confined to bribery of public officials, but extend[s] to the broader threat from politicians too compliant with the wishes of large contributors.

Perhaps the most depressing part of the Demos report is the overwhelming support in the country for what ought to be common-sense reforms of the system, including greater transparency and small-donor public financing, as well as a demonstrable willingness of people to take their concerns into the marketplace by consumer action against corporations that contribute to politicians who act against the best interest of those same people. Says the report:

Seventy nine percent would refuse to buy a company's productor services to protest a company's political spending. Seventy five percent would sign a petition to the SEC for corporate disclosure. Two out of three people (65%) would sell stock in the company, and over half (53%) would ask their employer to remove it from their retirement account. Just over half of respondents (52%) would go to a meeting of the company's shareholders to ask for disclosure; 44 percent would be willing to go to protest.

This is a constituency looking for a leader. But, as you may have noticed both from the campaigns, and from the coverage of those campaigns, the story, the only story, has utterly disappeared from the narrative of this election. This is because, at this point, waiting for politicians to discuss the deformative effects of big money on the political system is like waiting for fish to talk about water.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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