By Robert Reich
“Without a border, we just don’t have a country,“ Donald Trump says repeatedly.
For him, the biggest threats to American sovereignty are
three-dimensional items that cross our borders, such as unwanted imports and
undocumented immigrants.
He’s wrong. The biggest threats to American sovereignty are
invisible digital dollars wired into U.S. election campaigns from abroad.
Yet Trump seems to welcome foreign influence over our
democracy.
Sovereignty is mainly about a government’s capacity to govern. A
government not fully accountable to its citizens won’t pass laws that benefit
and protect those citizens – not just laws about trade and immigration but
about national security, the environment, labor standards, the economy, and all
else.
To state it another way: Without a functioning democracy, we
just don’t have a country.
Trump’s recent public request that hackers connected to the
Russian government sabotage his opponent Hillary Clinton is the tip of a
Trumpian iceberg of foreign influence.
He’s also been actively soliciting campaign
funds from officials of foreign governments – in the United Kingdom, Iceland,
Australia, and elsewhere.
Terri Butler, a member of the Australian parliament member was surprised to receive fundraising solicitations from Trump at her official government email address, asking her to make a “generous contribution” to the Trump campaign.
Bob Blackman, a member of Britain’s House of Commons, who has
also received fundraising requests
from the Trump campaign, says "I did not sign up, these are sent
unsolicited.”
Another member of the U.K. parliament, Peter Bottomley, has
received three such solicitations.
"Neither [Trump’s] sons nor anyone else has answered my questions about
how they acquired my email nor why they were asking for financial support that
I suppose to be illegal for [Trump] to accept,” he says,
In Iceland, Katrin Jakobsdottir, chair of the Left-Green
Movement, a democratic socialist party, has “no idea” how she got
on Trump’s fundraising list.
Someone should let Trump know it’s illegal for candidates for federal
office to solicit foreign money, regardless of whether the donations ever
materialize.
In addition, foreign individuals, corporations and governments are
barred from either giving money directly to U.S. candidates or spending on
advertising to influence U.S. elections.
Why hasn’t Trump been held accountable? Because the Federal
Election Commission, charged with enforcing the law, is gridlocked by its
Republican appointees.
So we’re left with a presidential candidate screaming about
threats to American sovereignty from trade and immigration, who’s
simultaneously urging officials of foreign governments to compromise American
sovereignty.
The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Leading Trump supporters like
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary
committee, is quick to blame global American corporations for disregarding
American borders.
“There just seems to be this view, particularly in much of our
business community — they’ve already transitioned to a trans-national status,”
Sessions says. “They just see the
world differently. Borders are just impediments to them.”
Yes, but the only way Americans have a fighting chance of
getting trade deals that are in our interest – or, for that matter, any other
kind of legislation that helps the vast majority – is by restricting the flow
of global corporate money into American politics.
Yet Sessions is one of the staunchest defenders of the Supreme
Court’s “Citizens United” ruling, which held that corporations are
people under the First Amendment and can therefore contribute to election
campaigns. (He’s even favorably compared “Citizens
United” to “Brown v. Board of Education.”)
Not incidentally, “Citizens United” opened a back door
for global corporations to influence American elections.
Just last week “The Intercept” reported on two
Chinese citizens living in Singapore who own a U.S.-based firm called American
Pacific International Capital, on whose board Neil Bush (Jeb’s brother) serves.
Last year, the corporation donated $1.3 million to the Jeb Bush super PAC.
There’s reason to believe a lot more foreign money is being
funneled into American election campaigns, either through tax–exempt
entities that don’t have to reveal the identities of their donors, or via super
PACs.
So far in the 2016 election there’s been a surge of contributions to
super PACs by so-called “ghost corporations” whose ownership remains unknown.
The underlying problem is even larger, because almost all large
publicly-traded American companies have some foreign ownership. The Treasury Department estimates that
about a quarter of the total market value of public U.S. corporations is owned
by foreign nationals.
So whenever these corporations make campaign donations they
in effect funnel some of their foreign shareholders’ assets into American politics.
That wouldn’t matter so much if these global corporations cared
about America. But they don’t. They care only about their global bottom lines.
As an Apple executive told The New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s
problems.”
Donald Trump is right to worry about American sovereignty. But
the real threat to our sovereignty isn’t imports or immigrants. It’s global
money influencing our politics.
Protecting our democracy requires two steps that Trump and his
leading supporters oppose: First, enforce our laws against soliciting or
receiving foreign money in our election campaigns.
Second, reverse “Citizens United.”
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations,"
and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism."
He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of
Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and
co-creator of the award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
