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President Dwight D. Eisenhower
The nation first heard about power alliances between governance institutions and special interests when President Eisenhower warned against the developing military-industrial complex in 1960. In his last speech to the nation, Dwight Eisenhower, America’s senior European commander during World War II, warned his nation about an evolving sub-culture that conjoined Pentagon procurement and defense contractors. Nearly fifty years later, military procurement is out of control to the point where just one F22 Raptor fighter costs $ 137 mln. Today, Washington is consumed by dozens of chummy complexes. One of them, the political-media complex substantially controls what you know, who you vote for and who’s rich and who isn’t.
Robert W. Butche
Publisher Newsroom Magazine
Washington
Governance By Complexes
Our nation has changed. Our institutions of government have been corrupted. In only thirty years our national system of governance has moved away from the individual and toward the corporate state. Our political system has turned polarized and dysfunctional. Certain truths about where we are as a nation today are difficult to accept and even more difficult to understand.
Banks no longer make loans, they prefer to originate them. Newspapers are no longer owned by people who’s life’s work is journalism — but large media organizations who run newspapers entirely for their own wealth enhancement. Television has turned inward, the networks have abandoned their prominence by managing for short-term earnings while ignoring long-term survival. What ties banking and finance to media and governance is that they are interconnected through a shadow government unknown to most Americans and unaccountable to voters.
Political-Media Complex
No matter your political inclinations, party affiliation or intellectual capacity what you see and know about politics is heavily influenced by the single most powerful alliance in Washington — the Political-Media Complex. To exist, power alliances have to benefit both parties. In what is becoming a corporate state national government, the real power and agenda is controlled by a concealed shadow government answerable largely to the rich and powerful. For most of us such ideas seem far fetched, or the byproduct of unsubstantiated rumor, or wild-eyed conspiracy theorists.
But the reality is that money and power is what drives our national government. One need look no further that President Eisenhower’s admonition about the military-industrial complex to see how Washington’s power alliances impact policy, executive decision making and legislative agenda. The most effective power alliances maintain their power by a revolving door between the advocates and the governors that offers office holders a second, often more lucrative career as an advisor, board member, or lobbyist.
The rise of power alliances has changed us as a nation. Thanks in large measure to the political-media complex, our nation’s 80 years old regulatory system was effectively disassembled during the last thirty years by both parties, both legislative houses, and five presidents.
America’s Voter: Money
Because of the political-media complex we don’t have free elections anymore — certainly not in the sense that earlier generations knew. Today, electioneering in American comes at immense cost. The more visible is the immense escalation in electioneering expenses. Those who seek national office must pay an immense toll to the media side of the political-media complex. In our most recent presidential election, the winning candidate had to raise $ 800 mln – half of it to buy television time. Together, the Obama and McCain campaigns spent about $ 1 bln on media strategy, production, staging and airtime.
Campaign expense is only one way the political-media complex narrows candidate choices and controls the national, state and local agendas. To reach and maintain office, politicians must pay the price of admission by spending half or more of their time fundraising. The bad side of political-media complex is that the need to raise money has become the sole determinant of who can run for office. The good side is that once in office, there are immense new opportunities for enrichment — as advisors, intermediaries, lawyers and lobbyists.
Big Money Begets Big Power
Money Drives Congress, Not The Voters
What we don’t know as a nation matters to our livelihoods, culture, political stability, economic power and the freedoms we take for granted. Yet in the last three decades what the ordinary American knows about what’s really happening in our nation has been slowly slipping away. While it’s true that the best of our journalistic institutions are as good today as they ever were, the overall probity of news content assimilated by most Americans has fallen well below any rational definition of what matters most.
The reasons are complex — and not entirely the fault of either big media or inadequate education of today’s journalists. But the demise of probative journalism correlates to the emergence of big money and big power in American politics. The reason is both clear and unsettling — for the demise of news quality can be laid at the feet of what has become this nation’s political-media complex. Since President Eisenhower’s 1960 admonition about the dangers of the then evolving military-industrial complex, the free-wheeling interchange of people by and between government, lobbying, think-tanks, business, industrial, banking, finance, and media has spawned a great many power alliances have emerged.
Jack Abramoff -- America's Most Notorious Lobbyist
Today the person who asks you to send them to congress, or who seeks political appointment, or chooses to serve the interests of the special interest organizations to which we all belong and support, is not looking to an isolated step in their career, but induction into an open system of working both sides of the street. Today dozens of former congressmen, Senators and former office holders are cashing in via Washington’s revolving door — better described as the well heeled and high-paying Governance-Lobbyist Complex.
Power alliances have slowly become a shadow government neither elected by, nor accountable to the sovereign citizens who own the American nation. They are caused by today’s media-driven polarized political establishment and empowered by massive political fund-raising. Both parties have been corrupted by easy to raise dollars solicited largely by single-issue thinking while concealed from public view by lax campaign finance laws.