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reform that focuses on renewing democracy and that takes as its foundational premise an understanding that the essential act of democracy, voting, must be protected and made meaningful by legislation, statutes, and amendments. Nichols and McChesney are not doctrinaire; they recognize that many reforms can and should be entertained and that not every American will agree on every proposal. But, they argue, the energy thathas been seen in popular protests on behalf of labor rights; in campaigns to defend public education and public services; in the movements to save Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; in the Occupy movement’s challenge to income inequality; and in the town meetings of my home state of Vermont, which have called for amending the Constitution to address corporate abuses of the political process constitutes evidence of a rising call for reforms that will allow American democracy to work for all Americans, not just a privileged and powerful few.
    This is an exciting prospect and one with deep roots in American history. The wisest of the founders recognized that America would evolve and change with time, and they rested great power in the people to assure that the evolution might serve the common good. With this book, John Nichols and Bob McChesney invite Americans to examine in new ways the challenges facing America and to fully recognize the threat that the combination of Big Money and big media poses to the promise of self-government. They paint a daunting picture, rich in detail based on intense reporting and groundbreaking research. But they do not offer us a pessimistic take. Rather, they call us, as Tom Paine did more than two centuries ago, to turn knowledge into power. And they tell us that we can and must respond to our contemporary challenges as a nation by rejecting Dollarocracy and renewing our commitment to democracy.
    BURLINGTON, VERMONT
FEBRUARY 2013

PREFACE
    ----
    O, let America be America again—
    The land that never has been yet—
    And yet must be
    LANGSTON HUGHES, “LET AMERICA
BE AMERICA AGAIN,” 1936
    T here comes a point, sometime after the last election campaign, when a politician becomes a statesman or a stateswoman. And it is at that point when he or she begins to speak the deeper truth, what Walt Whitman described as the “password primeval” of our American experiment. 1
    The truth these statesmen and stateswomen tell today is a harrowing one.
    Bemoaning “a dangerous deficit of governance” that has left critical issues unaddressed, former vice president Al Gore argued in his 2013 book, The Future , that “not since the 1890s has U.S. government decision making been as feeble, dysfunctional, and servile to corporate and other special interests as it is now.” 2 From across the aisle, 2012 Republican presidential contender Jon Huntsman decried deficits of leadership and confidence and declared that, corrupted by special-interest money and corroded by the crude cynicism of negative politics, “the system is broken.” 3 But the most damning delineation of the Zeitgeist came from the most senior of our nation’s former presidents, Jimmy Carter, who looked out across the American political landscape in the midst of the 2012 election campaign and saw a political process “shot through with financial corruption” and witnessing “a total transformation of America into a negative campaigning process.” 4
    Describing the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. FEC as “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans,” Carter declared—as the planet’s most famous election observer—that “we have one of the worst election processes in the world right in the United States of America, and it’s almost entirely because