Wow, I have a lot of money

Two periodicals that I read, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, always have full page ads for wealth management firms and private banks. Some of them are very annoying, even for ads. One has a photo of an avuncular, trimly-bearded and bespectacled gentleman, one of the private bankers whose phone numbers are included, above what I can only guess is some phony Q & A copy:

"Q. Is wealth always a burden for the next generation?
A. It doesn't have to be."

Well, thank God.

One ad that I saw in the New York Times this week for the Bessemer Trust includes the tag line that their services are for those families with a minimum of $10 million in liquid assets to invest.

I used to wonder, how many wealthy people must be out there for these ads make sense for the companies to run them? Then I found out.

The number of Americans with $30 million or more in investable assets is about 30,000. I think we can assume that a good number of these people read the New York Times. So there's the customer base.

Legalized Bribery

I don't have to bribe people very often. In Maine, it's just not part of the culture. As far as I know. Maybe there's a lot of bribery going on, and I'm one of those poor chumps who is standing in the long line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, paying full price for brand names, and having the muffler on my car fixed instead of slipping the mechanic a twenty to get an inspection sticker.

So maybe a bribe gets us in the right line. But most of us here, I think, would be outraged at the thought of having to pay an official to get something done.

I started thinking about this when I met my congressman in October. Well, I'm not sure if he's my congressman; I live right near the district boundary. I volunteer on the board of the local chapter of a national nonprofit (you've heard of them). Out of the blue, a few weeks before the election, I heard from a national-level committee that our group's PAC was sending him a check for $1,000.

He hadn't asked for the money and didn't need it. The congressman was sailing to re-election against an unknown opponent who had raised less money than a church bake sale. Apparently some of our staff in Washington, DC had decided that an issue might be coming up before his congressional committee in which we had an interest. And I didn't need to be told that a $1,000 contribution would help us get a meeting or otherwise raise our profile to this member of Congress.

One of our people suggested that I find an opportunity to meet with the congressman and hand the check over personally. Good idea. I called his local office and made an appointment for me and one of our local staff people to meet with him in the nearby city of Watertown.

Now, we had planned to meet at his local district office, not his campaign headquarters. So that is technically federal property, and as you West Wing fans will remember, you can't fundraise on federal property. So after a few friendly handshakes with his staff, we toodled across the street to the coffeeshop. I presented the check and related our pleasure at endorsing his re-election bid, and we started talking about the upcoming elections. He asked us what we were working on in Maine. It was a great meeting. The congressman is a super guy, more on the ball and articulate in person than he appears on TV. This month, I got a personally signed Christmas card from him.

I'm really glad this guy is in Congress, don't get me wrong. But when you hand someone a check for $1,000, you can't pretend it doesn't make a difference in how you will be treated.

Members of congress and other elected officials will always aver that campaign contributions don't matter to them, that every constituent's call is as important as another's. Don't believe it. It matters 100%.

I spent a lot of this fall poring over election laws, political guidelines and nonprofit regulations. I researched PACs in Maine, contribution limits, Maine's Clean Election system, how I could tell our nonprofit's members what candidates we endorsed and what money I could use to pay for it. I found a complicated mishmash of state and federal regulations on nonprofits, candidates, and Political Action Committees, all of it finely calibrated to keep the billions spent on our elections from corrupting our elected decisionmakers. At that goal, it fails. It's simply window dressing that has codified a system of legalized bribery.

(For tales of countries with real bribery problems, visit Transparency International at www.transparency.org.)

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