America’s real democracy crisis is this: corporations use a system of legalized bribery to buy public policy, which prevents popular progressive policies from passing and erodes Americans’ faith in their government.

In 2014, Northwestern and Princeton researchers published a report statistically documenting how lawmakers do not listen or care about what most voters want, and instead mostly care about serving their big donors. Coupled with additional research documenting the discrepancy between donor and voter preferences, they bluntly concluded that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.”

Seven years later, America is witnessing a very public and explicit illustration of this situation in real time — and Tuesday’s off-year election results are the latest confirmation that the country seems pretty ticked off about the situation ahead of the 2022 midterms.

In America’s nationalized politics, those off-year elections were dominated by headlines from Washington, where President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers have spent months agreeing to whittle down their social spending reconciliation bill at the demand of corporate donors and their congressional puppets.

The cuts almost perfectly spotlight the democracy crisis. Indeed, the specific initiatives being slashed or watered down in the Biden agenda bill share two traits: 1) They would require the wealthy and powerful to sacrifice a bit of their wealth and power, and 2) They are quite literally the most popular proposals among rank-and-file voters.

Read more …