The days when you could spend $17.09 for a statewide political campaign in Vermont - the sum that U.S. Sen. George Aiken reportedly spent on his last campaign in 1968 - are long gone.
Republican Brian Dubie and Democrat Peter Shumlin are throwing around enormous sums of money in the governor's race, at least by Vermont standards.
VTDigger.org recently reported that, as of mid October, the Dubie and Shumlin campaigns have paid out $1.98 million on advertising, campaign payroll expenses, mailings and web sites development and research. Their surrogates have spent an addtional $1 million, mostly on the barrage of negative campaign ads we're seeing and hearing on our radios, televisions and web browsers.
Much of the money comes in this campaign comes from groups such as Green Mountain Prosperity - a conservative political action group which is an arm of the Republican Governors Association - and Green Mountain Future - a newly-formed liberal PAC that gets most of its money from the Democratic Governors Association.
In all, it's estimated that more than $3 billion will be spent nationally on this year's midterm elections, or roughly double what was spent in 2006.
And, according to the Center for Public Integrity, financial, energy, and health-care companies are pouring money into independent, nominally nonprofit political groups that are exempt from what few campaign finance laws remain.
Democrats are getting outspent by a 5-to-1 margin by these groups in this election, according to the Center. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce alone plans to spend $75 million to support Republican candidates. Another group run by Republican operative Karl Rove, called American Crossroads, has pulled in about $32 million as of mid-September and is spending freely on conservative candidates it favors. Another group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity, plans to spend $45 million in this election.
This money - some of it possibly coming from foreign sources - is funding a barrage of attack ads almost exclusively directed at Democrats. Under current campaign law, these front groups don't have to reveal who is funding their ads, and naturally, Republicans in Congress are blocking legislation that would require this.
Conservative businesspeople throwing money around to advance their cause of lower taxes and less regulation is nothing new. But what we are seeing this year is nothing short of a corporate coup d'etat.
This is the fruit of the Citizens United v. FEC decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in January. In the name of preserving free speech, the court granted corporations the right to spend unlimited sums of money in political campaigns.
As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent of the Citizens United decision, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” He warned that removing limits on corporate money “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”
The cure for this corporate money usurping democracy is public financing of elections, legislation that would regulate the anonymous funding of attack ads and a constitutional amendment that would reverse the perverted idea that corporations are legally entitled to the same rights as an individual and that would prevent them from raising or spending money on federal, state, or local elections of any kind.
These small, but important, steps are the only way we can stop the complete transformation of our democracy into a government of, by, and for the corporations.