The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey D. Sachs Page B

politics of America’s corporatocracy, a political system in which powerful corporate interest groups dominate the policy agenda.
    We can see how the corporatocracy arose as the confluence of four big trends. First, the American political system has weak national parties and strong political representation of individual districts. This allows special interests to have a great say in politics through local representatives. Second, the large U.S. military establishment after World War II created the first of the megalobbies, the military-industrial complex. Third, big corporate money finances America’s election campaigns. And fourth, globalization and the race to the bottom have tilted the balance of power toward corporations and away from workers. Add up these trends, and we have the perfect political storm, in which Washington has been overrun, andovertaken, by the lobbies. The wealth/power spiral has continued to amplify the political disaster.
    The main aim of this chapter is to explain how America’s money-drenched political system works today. Another is to shake us from a lazy habit: the unexamined notion that decisions made in Washington reflect the will of the American people and the public’s underlying values. The public has its main say on one day every two years: election day. The choice is between two political parties that cynically ignore their constituencies the very next day in order to carry out policies aimed at the rich and powerful rather than the voters.
    The voters have a significant unmet responsibility, to be sure, in pulling Washington back to a true democracy. Yet most voters are poorly informed, and many are easily swayed by the intense corporate propaganda thrown their way in the few months leading to the elections. We have therefore been stuck in a low-level political trap: cynicism breeds public disengagement from politics; the public disengagement from politics opens the floodgates of corporate abuse; and corporate abuse deepens the cynicism.
    America’s Weak Party System
    Political scientists distinguish between majoritarian and consensus electoral systems. Majoritarian systems tend to have just two or three major parties, and elections generally produce a clear winning party at the polls. The winning party (or perhaps a two-party coalition) governs while the losing party is out of government. Consensus systems have electoral rules that produce a large number of parties, and several parties generally govern as part of a broad coalition. 1
    The main reason for America’s majoritarian character is the electoral system for Congress. Members of Congress are elected in single-member districts according to the “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) principle, meaning that the candidate with the plurality ofvotes is the winner of the congressional seat. The losing party or parties win no representation at all. The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger’s Law. 2 Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.
    There are two major implications of America’s FPTP system. First, in a two-party system, the swing votes are near the center of the income distribution and political ideology. Both parties attempt to woo the middle class and independent (nonparty) voters. The poor are typically not wooed and are often not even mentioned in the campaigns, since they are rarely the swing votes. During the three presidential debates in 2008, the words “poor” and “poverty” were not uttered a single time (neither by the candidates nor by the questioners). The opinions and needs of the poor are represented only in districts that have a high rate of poverty.
    In European proportional systems, on the other hand, winning more national votes among the poor means winning more parliamentary seats overall. The poor may be represented by their own party or may have a strong hold on a