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(The following is the text of my speech at the Personal Democracy Forum on Thursday June 3, 2010, in New York City — jh)
Thank you to Andrew and Micah for inviting me to be here today, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak on today’s topic: “Can the Internet fix politics?” Which raises the obvious question –- who broke it?
I guess this is the appropriate moment to mention what an honor it is to follow Newt Gingrich.
Moving right along –- well, whether the Internet can “fix” politics does depend on what you think is wrong with politics. And as someone who has spent the past several years working in online activism, I would say that the problems in our political system are monumental and spin out from what I call the Cycle of Decay:
Not to be overly melodramatic, but at the moment, it’s becoming more and more apparent that corporate America and political elites of both parties are locked in an embrace that threatens to scuttle the world economy, the environment and our system of representative democracy.
And we don’t even have a language to talk about it. We measure every political debate along a right-left axis, with rhetoric left over from the culture wars of the '90s. But in doing so, we’re firing past the true villains —- the Masters of the Universe who skillfully manipulate tribal prejudices to insure that it is their interests, and not those of the public, that are the ones always being served.
So how does this system work? Well, it starts with crony capitalism –- defined as “an economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between businesspeople and government officials.”
And are they ever close. During the past decade the most hotly contested political battle in Washington D.C. has not been over gay rights or abortion or taxes or the war –- it’s been the battle for PhRMA’s money.
When George Bush was in the White House, Congress passed Medicare Part D, with the caveat that the government couldn’t negotiate for pharmaceutical prices. Now how does a Congress obsessed with “fiscal responsibility” pass a law forcing the government to pay whatever price an industry want to charge them?
And yet, they did.
So when the Democrats took back Congress in 2006, they made a big show of passing drug price negotiation, championed by Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. But since George Bush would never sign it, there was no danger of it actually passing.
And when Barack Obama could sign it, the Democrats cut a deal with the pharmaceutical companies that guaranteed there would be no prescription drug price negotiations –- in exchange for the low low price of $150 million in political advertising.
At the time, my blog FDL was engaged in an online campaign to provide competition and control health care costs by passing the public option –- something that 80 percent of the country, the president and a majority in both houses said they supported. But as I watched the debate on the Senate floor with my colleague Jon Walker, we shook our heads in dismay and realized the problem was much bigger than we’d ever imagined. It was clear that there was nobody on either side of the aisle who was willing to tell the truth and speak up for the people they were elected to represent, and that overwhelming popular support is not a factor in passing legislation.
The public never heard about the true struggle that drove the health care debate because the national media and the political dialog is incapable of much above the level of demagoguery. And in the end, the blogs that had been powerful independent voices during the Bush era became largely subsumed by partisan dynamics.
But the deal that drove $300 billion into PhRMA‘s coffers is not an isolated example. They are the rule, not the exception. And what do companies do when they know their profits are thus guaranteed?
That their markets are protected from competition?
That no matter what kind of a mess they make, they can just take those profits and plow a small fraction of them
