On our radio program a common theme we stress is teaching the history of the transfer of power worldwide from monarchs to a small handful of powerful bankers. This is the core problem with how history is deceptively taught in most educational institutions. We are taught to believe that the power has shifted from Monarchs to individuals.

Two areas that show this steady shift of power are Campaign Finance Reform and the 17th Amendment. Starting with the 17th Amendment, most people have never even heard of it. What this amendment did was to fundamentally change the way Senators are elected. Before the amendment the state legislators would be the ones to vote for the Senator, thus proving the United States to be a Republic. The fundamental difference between a Republic and a Democracy is that in a republic elected representatives make decisions whereas in a Democracy direct voting, or mob rule, wins the day. It is interesting to note that some of the founding fathers of the United States referred to a Democracy as “two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner”.

What's For Dinner?

So, in the creation of the Constitution the Senate was put in place to make sure that somewhere in the process there would be representatives with cool heads, so that when the mob would be angered about something and the House of Representatives knew they were all up for re-election in less than 2 years, then the House would be respond to the whim of the people but the Senate would have cooler heads since they were elected by state legislators creating a level of abstraction between them and the mob. Then these two houses would come to some agreement so that the will of the people would be expressed but it would be tempered. In this way they referred the Senate to being like the saucer that a cup of tea sits on. Apparently people used to pour their tea on the saucer if it was too hot to cool it down, and this was the intention of the Senate.

While the founders expounded on the various benefits of this arrangement it does create a problem. The senators were hard to manipulate. If you think about it, the senators answered to one or two hundred of their counterparts in the state legislatures. If a company, bank, or other financial interest wanted to get the senator to do what they wanted they would have to curry the favor of hundreds of state legislators in order to put the pressure on the senator that would answer to the state legislature at the next election.

This was tedious for the banking elite, or for anyone wishing to manipulate legislation, and discouraged consolidation of power by dispersing it to hundreds of state legislators. Also, as the country expanded and new states joined the union the decentralization of power spread. For every 2 senators came another couple of hundred legislators that divided up the nations power.

A Different Sort of Senate

The solution to this problem for the bankers, and other moneyed interests, was the 17th Amendment. This 17th provided for direct election of senators. Sounds good to some; why should the state legislators decide? Why not let “the people” decide for themselves, was the argument. But understanding the nature of people the banking elite knew that the number one determining factor in most elections is name recognition. After the 17th amendment the banking elite could inject huge sums of money into any election where they wanted to decide the outcome. Most campaigns are determined by small sums of money in comparison to the wealth of the most powerful bankers. For example in the last presidential election the winning candidate raised 700 million in campaign contributions, mainly from large corporations filtered through the 527 groups. In the banker bailout alone the bankers are walking away with over 700 billion! And that is truly just the tip of the iceberg. One of the most powerful banking families are the Rockefeller family who, by some estimations, may have as much as 11 trillion (thats trillion with a “T”) under their control. In this light, the money to determine even the top election is tiny. Senators come even cheaper.

The next major change has come with “Campaign Finance Reform”. Now I know when people hear that they think “McCain-Feingold”, but lets take it back to the much more significant Campaign Finance Reform that took place in the early 1970s.

Before discussing the reform we should take a moment to see how elections worked and why they wanted to reform it in the first place. The way most congressional races worked were that they were determined by local or state party bosses. The way it would work is this: say you had a democratic stronghold like Chicago, for example. In Chicago whoever is run by the democrat party for congress is going to win (because most districts are either predominately democrat or republican). So if you can choose who will run in the general election you choose who is going to be elected. Unlike today, before the reform in the ’70s, there was not always a primary to decide who would be the Democrat candidate (or Republican). In fact, in most cases it was up to the local party boss. So if you were head of the Chicago Democrat party you essential got to decide who would be the congressmen representing the districts that fell in your city. This is the problem they were trying to fix when the put in the reforms of the early 1970’s that forced a primary if an appropriate amount of signatures were collected by more than one primary candidate.

However, as is the case much of the time the cure was worse than the disease. We see again that the pre-1970’s system, while having its problems for sure, spread power to local and state party bosses. Therefore if you are trying to consolidate power it is more difficult because you need to curry favor with hundreds of party bosses around the country. Also, the amount of corruption was limited since the congressman only had to please one party boss. Of course the party boss would have all his family members in plush government jobs, he would likely have business interests that would receive lucrative government contracts, along with various other favors. But the point is that the congressman only had to please one local party boss who was satisfied with a relatively small amount of privileges.

Transfering Power to Whom?

Campaign Finance “Reform”

Now with the 1970’s campaign finance reform a few things changed. As mentioned, it made it much easier for candidates to force a primary election to decide who would be the party’s candidate. Now money could be injected into campaigns to determine who would come out on top. With this change came the creation of Political Action Committees (PAC) which created the “Special Interest Groups” that everyone has been beating up on. It also shifted power from the local party bosses to the national parties who could receive an almost unlimited amount of “soft money” that could be spent to elect their candidates.

Now a congressional candidate needs to please every special interest group, not to mention every corporate and banker interest that provided the soft money through the national parties.

We hardly have time to get too deep into the most recent Campaign Finance Reform, McCain-Feingold, but suffice it to say that it has not “taken money out of politics” nor has it returned the “power to the people”. What it has done is drastically increase the power of the 527 groups that are not as restricted as the PAC’s. It took this power from the national parties that were the brokers of the large corporate and banker contributions of the past.

Their Names Were Known

So by all this power is even more consolidated. Those flush with cash, mainly the small banker elite and the companies that are under their control, can directly inject money to determine the outcome of elections. The power has slowly shifted from state legislators, to local party bosses, then to national parties, and now directly to the wealthiest banking elite. While bankers have been the dominate holders of power since the demise of the Monarchs, never before in history has so much power been so consolidated in the hands of a few than it is today. And unlike the pharaohs, the Caesars, the kings and emperors, most people don’t even know their names.

By

Jordan Kaufman

Jordan is host of the Las Vegas based radio program Corruption Radio, on KDWN 720 AM and is editor and main contributor of CorruptionRadio.com

Send Jordan your comments at Jordan@CorruptionRadio.com (VM: 702-560-1948)