Selling Out [Hardcover]

Mark Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 2002

With CEOs and corporations currently under fire for years of outrageous deception and fraud, the time is long overdue for an accounting of just how grievously special-interest money has infiltrated our political process. Now, longtime political watchdog (and recent political candidate) Mark Green offers just that.

In Selling Out, Green exposes the truth about the poisonous role money has come to play in our political culture -- a role that has too long been conveniently overlooked. The practice of trading campaign donations for political favors, he reminds us, is as old as the nation itself. And yet in recent years the American political landscape has become an open market, where influence is bought and sold wholesale, with little accountability and no apparent shame. How did Enron and so many other corporations buy political protection? Why do legislators pay more attention to contributors than to constituents?

"Our textbook system of checks and balances," answers Green, "has devolved into a system of checks, checks, and more checks-and few politicians bite the hand that funds them." Government today, he argues, is a system that produces loopholes and subsidies for the 1 percent of Americans who can afford to be big donors -- and produces exorbitant health-care costs, uncontrolled pollution, and underfunded schools for the rest of us,

As a candidate who himself raised $16 million in his campaign for mayor of New York City, Green has seen the political process as both critic and participant. Drawing on interviews with dozens of other major players and his own lifelong crusade for better government, he highlights an array of eye-opening case studies linking money and results-from how senators favor big-industry polluters over their own constituents to how the wealthiest have won big tax breaks even as CEOs' salaries have increased ten times faster than their employees'. And the solutions Green offers are both bold and practical, and in some cases are already working, at the local, state, and national levels, to return power to the American people.

Fast-paced and impressively researched, provocative in its commentary and conclusions, Selling Out is sure to inflame anyone who's stunned by the latest scandals-or who's curious about how so many have gotten away with so much for so long.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Onetime New York mayoral candidate Green lashes out against the government's tradition of selling access to politicians to the highest bidder and pricing practically everyone-besides millionaires-out of the ability to participate in our democracy. Although it's easy to detect the scent of sour grapes in Green's screed (he lost the election to business information tycoon Bloomberg), dismissing his words for that reason alone would be foolish. Fortunately eschewing the pervasive idea that American democracy was once a virginal paradise unsullied by as base a thing as money, Green provides a quick but thorough overview of the history of money and influence in national politics (during the post-Civil War era, most legislators openly sold their votes). After showing how we got ourselves into this mess, Green paints a portrait of how exactly the millions of dollars sloshing around the corridors of power shades and corrupts the system. Green does not cover much new ground, but he admirably collects all the usual jeremiads about this subject into one propulsive narrative. Although a Democratic bias creeps in here and there, for the most part Green blames his own party as much as the Republicans, naming names in plenty of embarrassing instances.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Mark Green's first book on campaign finance, Who Runs Congress?, was a number one New York Times bestseller in 1972. After working with Ralph Nader for ten years in Washington, Green served for twelve years as New York City's consumer affairs commissioner and then as its first elected public advocate. In 2001, he was the Democratic nominee for the office of mayor of New York against Michael Bloomberg. Currently a distinguished visiting lecturer at the New York University School of Law, he recently founded the New Democracy Project, a national and urban affairs institute. Green and his family live in New York City.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (October 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060523921
• ISBN-13: 978-0060523923
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,000,430 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading, December 9, 2002

By 

ostawookiee "ostawookiee" (Winston-Salem, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Selling Out (Hardcover)

People recently have been lamenting the low voter turnout and general apathy of the american voter. I think Green is dead on when he suggests campaign financing is a big culprit. Politicians accept monetary donations from corporations and PACs that grossly shadow donations from individuals, leaving us feeling that our say or vote doesn't make a difference, and that all candidates are lousy; it's just a matter of which is more tolerable.
Green lays it out in this well researched book. If you have any faith in the US government, it will be gone after reading this book. The "good guys" are few and far between - and it's more and more difficult for them to get elected to office to make a difference.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Area of Vitally Needed Reform, October 17, 2002

By 

William Hare (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selling Out (Hardcover)

Mark Green has spent his entire adult life in consumer interest reform politics. He began by working for Ralph Nader and eventually became New York City's commissioner of consumer affairs. He became more intimately connected than ever to the dangers posed to democracy by the influence of big money when he ran as the Democratic Party's candidate in the last New York mayoral election against multimillionaire Michael Bloomberg. The amount of money spent on both sides was staggering, prompting Green to pick up his talented pen and write this tome dedicated to awakening citizens to the dangers of a democracy perilously close to drowning in a cesspool of excessive funds.

Whereas America's founding fathers provided the nation's fledgling government with a system of checks and balances, in current times one can forget about the balances and concentrate fully on the checks. Checks and more checks are forthcoming from big interests, which translates into ultimate control, no matter how often this axiomatic truth is denied. As critics ask: If the strategy is not succeeding, why do the big money interests shower accelerating amounts on political campaigns?

The cancer on our democracy is abundantly clear to those interested citizens watching election battles in the current 2002 mid-term campaign. Rather than stepping forward and debating the merits of the major issues facing the nation, an increasingly helpless and turned off citizenry is bombarded by simplistic campaign negative ads highlighting half truths and sometimes outright lies. Post election studies reveal that excessive negative advertising disgusts many voters, who then become so turned off by the process that they do not vote at all. This was symbolized in the 1988 presidential election when George Bush the Elder prevailed on a highly orchestrated campaign of negative advertising highlighted by Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance. Less than half of all eligible voters bothered to go to the polls, an all-time high since such scientific studies began to measure voting tendencies.

This cancer on the body politic has been a festering wound for some time. A few years ago in California an election campaign specialist with an imposing track record for success proclaimed bluntly that when a candidate hired his services it was time for him or her to take a vacation. He did not want the candidate to get in the way as he put his big money campaign into gear, highlighted by advertising displays of catchy symbols and pithy comments, which were drummed ad nauseum into the minds of voters through television and radio.

Mark Green made a recent appearance on the Phil Donahue Show in which he made a dire prediction. If this cancer is not dissipated through corrective legislation very soon then we will reach the point where the only two types of candidates are independently wealthy moguls ready, willing and able to spend millions of their own dollars such as a Michael Bloomberg, or lackeys under the total control of the wealthy special interests bankrolling their campaign efforts.

Mark Green's is an important voice which needs to be heard. The voice is tuned into the major area that will make or break democracy as we have known it. Will the days of idealistic but far from wealthy candidates be truly a thing of the past? Will Jeffersonian town hall democracy be something the smooth talking kingmakers will dismiss with sarcastic laughter as relics from a truly distant past?

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nitty Gritty, Worth Every Penny to Any Voter, January 19, 2003

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Selling Out (Hardcover)

I've chosen this book, together with Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" and Greg Palast's "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" to end a lecture I give on the top 50 books every American should read in order to understand why America is not safe today and will not become safe anytime soon, unless the people take back the power and restore common sense to how we spend the $500 billion a year that is now *mis-spent* on the military-industrial complex instead of real capabilities for a real world threat.

Mark Green knows as much as anyone could know about the intricate ways in which the existing system provides for *legally* buying elected representatives away from the citizens' best interests. The details he provides in this book--as well as the moderate success stories where reforms have worked--are necessary.

The bottom line is clear: until the 60% of America that is eligible to vote but does not vote, comes back into the democracy as active participants who question candidates, vote for candidates, and hold elected representatives accountable *in detail and day to day,* then corporate corruption will continue to rule the roost and will continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of an unreasonably wealthy few at the expense of the general public.

Although I found the book inspiring, I also found it depressing. Absent another 9-11 (or two--or suicidal shooters in an elementary school in every state of the union, or cataclysmic failure in Iraq and North Korea) I see no immediate prospects for America's dropped-out citizens "awakening" and taking back the power. There is still time for corporate money to get smart, pump a little more down to the poor, and avoid a revolution at the polls.