This structure is Roman-republic-style populist-election-veneer oligarchy. An upper 99% – have no actual decision power, but are thrown a populist-veneer bone: mass popularity-contest elections which select or ratify the oligarchs who make the actual decisions.

A high officer gets power for a long term over many key decisions. This power he can, with de-facto impunity, in effect sell out to the highest-bidding corrupters. Unlike today’s naive ‘reformers’, earlier folk – democrats in ancient Athens and Lord Acton in 1887 – perceived that oligarchic concentration of political power inevitably promotes government corruption: ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.

By the way, this structural incentive to corruption – sell-outs by powerful officers and payoffs by their corrupters – is independent of election and campaign costs. Corruption is promoted and will exist whether campaign costs are high, low or nonexistent. Of course, insofar as they are legal, campaign donations serve as one useful pathway – among many – for paying off officials.

In any event it pays to win a mass-election contest to gain office. And prevailing ‘civic’ and ‘patriotic’ rhetoric insists that the most marginal voters – those who perceive (sometimes correctly and sometimes not) little to be at stake, and those who rarely or never heed public affairs – have an unconditional duty to vote and at all costs should be persuaded to vote.

Given these facts, a popular theory infers that – contra what actually happened in California in 2010 – it pays to spend enormous amounts of extra money in hope of swaying the whims of those marginal voters. According to the theory, the Citizens United decision will promote such spending. The theory then infers that therefore Citizens United is a nasty threat to ‘democracy’.

But ‘democracy’ does not correctly describe the USA’s usual political systems, past or present.

I also agree that “Democrats, liberals, centrists, independents, populists, the Occupy Wall Street movement and the large majority of voters” who oppose the Supreme Court decision should do all they can to return our electoral system to some semblance of sanity, one in which elections cannot so easily be bought.

With all due respect, we can make a far better system. Based on what little data is actually available on AA, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly effective program, and that makes perfect sense because AA doesn’t change or adapt with new information. With the better understanding we have today of substance abuse and psychology, we can make a better program, a program based on double-blind-tested processes that can be independently verified and that are predictive. We can go back and test the program periodically and make necessary changes as our understanding of the human mind and substance abuse go forward. We can help a lot more people. We can make a far better system.

Anyhow currently agitated politically correct stances of liberals and progressives on campaign finance are quite misguided. Genuine get-out-the-message campaigning costs very little these days, thanks to Internet. In our Roman-republic-style populist-veneer elected-oligarchy system, excessive campaign spending owes instead to two factors: (1) We promote voting by civically passive mental couch-potatoes who couldn’t care less about who or what they vote for, so long as they are wowed by cute ads on their favorite couch-potato program; and (2) It really pays to get elected to high office: you become part of an oligarchy which is given plenty of long-term power to make – at virtually unchecked whim – many public decisions – and thereby can sell out the public good for lots of bucks.