Change the Constitution? 'Have At It, Hoss!'

We have about 11 months before the 2012 elections, but New Jersey congressional candidates already have raised about $6.7 million in campaign funds—and that does not take into account the $10.3 million U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez has raised for the same election cycle.

That’s more than half a million per congressional district in a state in which only a few seats can seriously be considered to be in play.

It also doesn’t account for the millions likely to be spent by outside groups and corporations on the campaign—thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which treated money as speech and corporations as people and overturned much of the legal architecture that had been put in place to address campaign spending.

This is money that only the most naïve of observers can believe comes without any strings. Money begets access and access equals power and in a game rigged by cash, only the richest in our society get to play.

This is the central issue of our times—which is why Cenk Ugyur, host of The Young Turks satellite/web TV show, has started the Wolf Pac, a political action committee that has as its express goal breaking the stranglehold that money has on our government.

Ugyur, a 1988 graduate of , calls the push “essential to saving our democracy.”

“It is not the most important issue, it is the only issue,” he told me last week. “Until we solve the problem of all this money we will not have an honest debate in the country. Our democracy is in big, big trouble.”

Name an issue on which money was not the deciding factor, he says.

Health care? Insurance company money helped gut already weak reforms.

The economic stimulus? A filibuster-proof Democratic majority resulted in one that was far too small and an extension of the Bush tax cuts.

“It was not a mistake. It was not weakness,” he says. It is the way the system is rigged to work now. “They are the Washington Generals to the Republicans’ Harlem Globetrotters. They have been hand-selected to be rolled over.

“Any political analyst who does not realize that does not know what they are talking about,” he adds. “They missed the entire game.”

Ugyur is blunt in his assessment, as one might expect if he or she has seen his show. The Young Turks satellite show is a brash, unvarnished look at politics and culture—an approach he said is needed now more than ever. He is taking a version of his show to Current TV on Monday (Comcast channel 107, Verizon FiOs channel 192), where he will serve as the lead-in to Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

“We are not an old-school show where you pretend to be dispassionate,” he says. “That is the old format. We do the show because we care about the issues.”

The Young Turks started as a radio show in 2002 during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, at a time when he and his TYT cohorts felt that “another war or constitutional violation was just around the corner.” They took the show to satellite and cable in 2005 and now get a million visits a day on The Young Turks main You Tube channel.

Ugyur says that much of what passes for debate on cable currently is empty of content. They pretend to discuss the issues and politics but ignore the core problems facing the nation.

“If you don’t get that this is not an honest game, if you still think that politicians have an ideology and have honest debates and that they are listening to each other—I can’t believe that people would think that way, but they do,” he says. “The American people don’t think that way.”

He says that the way the mainstream media handle people like Joe Lieberman is symptomatic of the larger problem. (He also could have pointed to the failure of the mainstream media to call Mitt Romney’s attack ad against Obama the lie that it was.)

Lieberman, the senior senator from Connecticut and former Democratic vice-presidential candidate, changes his positions regularly to meet the needs of his chief campaign donors, Ugyur says.

“How many people call him out on it,” he says. “On TV people treat him as a serious politician. He is paid for his positions, and he does a good job for whatever corporations are paying him to be their spokesman.”

The only way to stop this kind of behavior is to strip corporations of their status as people.

“Everything else is paddy cakes,” he says.

The Wolf PAC—one of several organizations pushing to get money out of politics—will raise money to fund a campaign to pass a constitutional amendment overturning Citizen United.

“We can’t equalize the money on every issue,” Ugyur says. “We have to take out the money by addressing the core issue. Congress and the Supreme Court are too far corrupted—the courts back corporations on every issue. We have to pass a constitutional amendment and public fund every election.

“Have at it, hoss!”