The rapidly multiplying White House funding scandals won't change how people in capitols raise capital; question the very purpose of national governments in the late 20th century. But they will provide endless months, if not years, of entertainment as politicos explain why their activities were legal and/or ethical.

The legal effort to nail Clinton is widely assumed to be silly and hypocritical--and doomed--because, of course, The [other] Republicans Do It Too. Tweedledee investigators focus on narrow issues of legality (especially the ones germane only to the White House and not Congress--let's face it, sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom makes infinitely better copy than sleeping in the Senate Office Building).

Despite the comedy, and the high ratio of noise to substance, any spotlight on the endless creative ways corporations and high-ranking politicians of both parties grease each others' futures has at least the potential for raising all sorts of useful related issues. Here are eight to start with:

Size of donations: Pundits agree, "Everyone does it." But leaving it at that obscures just how much everyone does, and how much more they've been doing recently. Between $1.6 and $2 billion was spent on the Presidential and Congressional races in 1996--three times the 1992 amount. TV ad rates didn't triple during that time. But the free market value of buying government officials did.

Cheapness of donations: At the same time, those donations--$50,000 here, $100,000 there--are tiny next to the benefits a donor may get. A policy break like the 1996 Communications Act gift of public airwave space to Microsoft may, over the next few decades, might be worth hundreds of billions. So why not buy Congress to make sure it happens? It's actually amazing how little an enterprising transnational like, say, Archer-Daniels-Midland needs to pay to sew up the democratic process (with enough left over to buy public broadcasting).

Office-holders as full-time fundraisers: Congressional incumbents won 95% of contested races in 1996 for one simple reason: they had more favors to sell, and more staff with which to do it. The bogus outrage over Clinton, Gore et al actually (gasp) raising funds from their offices in public buildings, with public facilities, practically begs for the question: WHAT ELSE DO THEY DO?

Four months after the last election, would-be Presidential candidates for 2000 are already lining up donors. High public office has become a full-time quest for money and power, with occasional breaks for image control, key votes, and lunch. With rare exceptions, virtually all public policy decisions are hostage to the quest for money. And even more staff budget can be freed up for fundraising when bills are being researched and written by the affected corporations in the first place.

Correlations between donations and policy: Notably missing from media coverage of the funding scandals is a careful examination, over the last several years, of the relationship between corporate support and politicians' stances on related issues. Instinctively, we know what such a study would reveal; the anecdotes are everywhere. A full compilation of bills whose outcome was determined on the basis of electoral funding sources would read a lot like the Congressional Record.

Donors to both parties: It's not just that both major parties in the U.S. rely on big corporate donors. In many cases they rely on the same corporate donors. For example, the extended infomercials--er, conventions-- conducted by the two parties last summer, fell outside campaign spending law; as a result, no fewer than ten corporations, including ADM, Lockheed Martin, Phillip Morris, and Browning-Ferris, gave over $100,000 to both conventions.

The result? There is no meaningful, high-level political opposition to the corporate state agenda.

Free trade: NAFTA and GATT didn't just earn Bill Clinton support from a grateful Wall Street. It also enabled him to solicit funds from all sorts of global business interests that suddenly had a new stake in U.S. domestic policy. The U.S. is not only the world's biggest financial market and most lucrative consumer market, but also represents an attractive combination of somewhat (but not overly) educated citizens, miserable working conditions, and pliant government officials unthinkable in Europe or Japan. Who wouldn't invest?

Welcome to the Third World: Nor are outsiders investing in a country's democratic process a new thing. Coverage of contributions from Djakarta or Beijing has ignored the U.S. role as the master of foreign electoral interference.

Every year, Congress appropriates and the White House authorizes huge sums of money, overtly and covertly, to influence or prevent elections in dozens of foreign countries. Usually, it's in support of military-backed and/or anti-democratic forces willing to suppress human rights in favor of international business. Last year's purchase of another term for Russia's Boris Yeltsin (an American fave despite, or perhaps because of, his record of economic collapse and genocide in Chechnya) is a representative example, but almost any Third World country (and more than a few in Europe) will do. What the U.S. routinely invests to buy its version of democracy far outstrips what Indonesians or other non-citizens gave to Clinton (and Dole) last year.

Mind you, that's just government support--never mind what U.S.-based private corporations will do to get political control of favored fiefdoms.

Voter apathy: The 1996 election was the lowest voter turnout in a Presidential year in generations, in a country whose turnouts are already the lowest of any Western democracy. Major reasons included the policy similarities between candidates on substantive issues; the focus on idiotic issues to define their differences; and the correct public intuition that global business was running a race for CEO, a race from which common citizens could not positively benefit (let alone have any input into).

The answer is not to despair because of the hopelessness of reform--it's to get more ambitious. The massive wealth changing hands isn't being conjured from thin air; it's coming from our pockets. We'll keep getting robbed, regardless of the headlines, until there are literally millions on the streets demanding we dismantle the system of private funding for public policy decision-makers entirely.