1115.org

Despite multiple rounds of tax cuts, deregulation at every opportunity, and policy literally written by the very corporations it is meant to govern, the Standard & Poors 500 index is down more than 4% over the last four years.

While the Republicans are undoubtedly the party of big business, one might wonder how their major donors feel about losing ground during the first period of total Republican control in five decades.

Except, of course, they didn’t lose ground at all, they saw huge gains:

The 50 companies that most favored Republicans with their political donations delivered an average 44 percent return on investment over the last four years…

44% vs -4.1%

Of course there could be an innocent explanation to this statistic, one as simple as smarter management making better business decisions leading to higher profits and coincidentally expressing a preference for Republican candidates. But that seems to violate Occam’s Razor by being based on too many assumptions.

In the above Bloomberg story reporter Michael Forsythereminds us of examples of these corporations directly benefitting from legislation rammed through congress and happily signed by the President.

Union Pacific, which has returned 29 percent since the end of 2000, benefited when the Republican-controlled Congress eliminated a 4.3 cent a gallon tax on diesel fuel in October. That will help the biggest U.S. railroad save $60 million a year.

Cigna, the fourth-biggest U.S. health insurer, has posted a 45 percent gain since Bush signed the Medicare bill last year that created a $410 billion drug benefit administered by insurers. Since 2000 the company is down 35 percent.

Notice that Cigna was way down until the exact time that the Medicare bill was passed.

In past posts, we have discussed how campaign contributors asked for and received favorable changes in overtime regulations, and corporate lobbyists’ memos were taken verbatim and turned into law.

Courts have consistently held that campaign contributions are protected as free speech with the lone exception being the Supreme Court upholding the McCain-Feingold bill.

I’m not a Constitutional scholar, and I’m not in a big hurry to change the Constitution or have it interpreted in new or radical ways. But it’s clear what is going on here. Corporations are buying the government and making a huge profit in the process.

In many cases, companies are simply “voting with their dollars” for policies that would benefit their industries, said Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has published statistical analyses of campaign donations. “There are public policies, such as those concerning minimum wages, health insurance, or decency over the airwaves, that affect whole sectors,” Ansolabehere said. “These laws may be quite different under unified Democratic control and unified Republican control.”

Left unsaid is the fact that the vast majority of Americans don’t belong to a political action committee (PAC), nor do they have the kind of money that would allow them to “vote with their dollars.”

What part of “We The People”, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” or “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” contains a provision for “voting with dollars?”

Thanks to Bloomberg’s publication of Forsythe’s reporting we now have quantitative evidence of what happens when companies wish to buy and politicians wish to sell the government in this country. The downside is that now, so do all the companies who haven’t yet tried to buy their own piece of the pie.

In the mean time, maybe we can convince Munee Cashilini to put together and manage a mutual fund comprised of companies that donate to Republicans. No reason we shouldn’t profit on the debasement of our country too.