America - For Sale, SOLD. Bill Moyers

http://billmoyers.com/2014/11/14/zephyr-book/

The Citizens United decision was not merely bad law; it was bad for politics, and displayed an even worse understanding of history. Americans from James Madison onward have argued that it is possible for politicians and citizens alike to try to achieve a kind of public good in the public sphere. The traditional view is not naive — it does not assume that people are generally public regarding. It assumes that the job of government is to create structures to curb temptations that lead to exaggerated self-interest. It certainly recognizes the power of self-interest; but instead of endorsing it, the traditional American approach makes it government’s job to temper egocentrism in the public sphere. The traditional conception implicates difficult questions: What is self-orientation and public orientation, and what is the public good? But it does not discard these distinctions because they are difficult ones to parse. A classical American approach engages the complexity. Like liberty, speech or equality, corruption is an important concept with unclear boundaries. It refers to excessive private interests in the public sphere; an act is corrupt when private interests trump public ones in the exercise of public power and a person is corrupt when they use public power for their own ends, disregarding others.

Like liberty, speech or equality, corruption is an important concept with unclear boundaries.

Corruption in America is my effort to fill in the history that Citizens United ignored. It provides a previously neglected story of the use of the concept in American law and a much-needed account of the different kinds of meanings attached to it throughout the political life of the country. I show that for most of American history, courts remained committed to a broad view of corruption. The book draws primarily upon the texts used by lawyers: the Constitutional Convention, cases and statutes. It shows how, starting in the late 1970s, everything began to change around this issue.
The Supreme Court, along with a growing subset of scholars, began to confuse the concept of corruption and throw out many of the prophylactic rules that were used to protect against it. This rejection has led to an overflow of private industry involvement in political elections and a rapid decline in the civic ethic in Congress and the state houses. The old ideas about virtue were tossed out as sentimental, but the old problems of corruption and government have persisted. Interest-group pluralists who reject these ideas do not, I believe, have an answer to the problem of corruption and in fact have been part of the problem.