Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
- In Arkansas, Exxon Is Threatening to Arrest Reporters But Otherwise Telling Nobody Nothing
- It’s Official: A Democratic President Proposes to Cut Social Security
- Exxon's Unfriendly Skies: Why Does Exxon Control the No-Fly Zone Over Arkansas Tar Sands Spill?
- The Corporate Betrayal of America
- Why Would Anyone Celebrate the Death of Margaret Thatcher? Ask a Chilean
- The Corporate Betrayal of America
- The Elephant in the Room: Militarism
- Why Would Anyone Celebrate the Death of Margaret Thatcher? Ask a Chilean
- Global Wealth Inequality - What You Never Knew You Never Knew
- Exxon's Unfriendly Skies: Why Does Exxon Control the No-Fly Zone Over Arkansas Tar Sands Spill?
Popular content
Today's Top News
It's Official: Money Now Governs America
The rich are different from you and me, but the really, really, really rich are also different from the merely rich.
Sheldon Adelson, the moneybags who's pumped $11 million so far into Newt Gingrich's right-wing run, made $3.3 million dollars per hour last year. (File).
For example, the rich can buy caviar and Champagne, but the Triple-R Rich can buy entire presidential campaigns.
Take Sheldon Adelson, the moneybags who's pumped $11 million so far into Newt Gingrich's right-wing run. He has single-handedly kept Gingrich's White House ambitions alive. Without this one guy's money, The Newt would've been long gone. Thanks a lot, Sheldon.
But Adelson can easily afford to roll the dice on a far-out candidate. This global casino baron hauled in $3.3 million in pay last year. Not for a year — that's what his hourly take was. In other words, his $11-million bet on Newt, which altered the Republican presidential race, was nothing — less than three-and-a-half hours of one of Sheldon's workdays.
Even Rick Santorum, who's so far to the right that his left brain has entirely atrophied from lack of use, is actually in the running for the GOP nomination. He insists that people are flocking to him because of the power of his ideas. Sure, Rick — and the power of Foster Friess' money.
This little-known Wall Street multimillionaire has long been a partner in the Koch brothers' plutocratic cabal and a steady funder of right-wing Christian politics. Friess modestly claims that God is "the chairman of my board." I doubt that, but Friess definitely is Santorum's guardian angel, having kept his campaign of wackiness afloat with untold infusions of cash. When Friess was told that Santorum's recent caucus wins would prompt Mitt Romney's Triple-R Richies to counterattack, he was thrilled. I think that "is so exciting," he warbled.
So there you have it — American politics has developed into a game for the fun and profit of a few super-rich narcissists.
And, that's why Barack Obama was right on target two years ago when he denounced the Supreme Court for allowing unlimited corporate cash to flood into our elections, calling it a "threat to democracy."
But, where did that guy go? Now that gushers of that money are pouring into this year's Republican presidential campaigns through super PACs, he has pivoted adroitly from condemning such corrupt funds ... to creating one of his own. Savvy, or cynical?
I call it sad. Not because Obama wouldn't stand on principle, but because his switch affirms that special interest money now governs us, too powerful for even the sitting president to resist. These super PACs, all of which are creatures of a handful of rich Americans, were already the biggest power in the Republican presidential contest. Front-runner Mitt Romney's last name is even an anagram that spells M-O-N-E-Y, and a $30 million super PAC financed chiefly by Wall Streeters is what has powered him to the front. They want to buy a president who'll undo Obama's financial reform law that restrains some of their greed. That's what our "democracy" has become. Sad.
Rather than taking the high road and rallying a public that's thoroughly disgusted by this, Obama now joins Romney, et al. on the money-slicked low road. His super PAC, named Priorities USA, is as corrupt as the Republicans'. All of them perpetuate the ludicrous legalistic fraud that the secretive funds operate independently of the candidates. Come on — hand puppets act with more independence than super PACs! While Obama piously says he won't work directly with the PAC, he has directed Cabinet officials and White House aides to rustle up big donors to fund it.
What we're getting this year is not a presidential election, it's an auction! And it'll keep getting worse until we — the people — repeal the Supreme Court's money rule. To help, go to www.united4thepeople.org.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
48 Comments so far
Show AllIt's not Obama's fault that he has no principles. The republicans made him do it! He couldn't compete with them ... they just raised too much money.
.
Forget the fact that according to the NYT Obama has raised more money than all the republican candidates combined. Forget the fact that in 2008 Obama took more money from Wall Street than any other candidate in history. Forget the fact that for several years Obama has been talking about his desire to be the first candidate in history to rake in a billion dollars.
.
Good for Hightower for calling Obama corrupt ... but the fact is that O has been on the "money slicked low road" a long time before his decision to use a super pac.
No President will ever fundamentally change the USA. The last one to try that was taken out and every President since then knows they are merely a mouthpiece for the Military-Industrial complex that now runs America. If 'the people" do not bring about change by force, it will not happen.
Well, yes, but I think Hightower's point is that Obama probably couldn't have resisted the tide even if he'd wanted to. Trying to stand on principle in this matter would be like bringing a custard pie to a gunfight.
We must always make sure that no one ever stands on principle. Winning is all that matters. Snark!
Well, it's certainly easier to remain "pure" in opposition.
i disagree. if obama for instance had used his legislative majority when he had it, people wd now respect him and supply the money and campaign support. he's cut himself off from the base he had following an enormously successful campaign MADE POSSIBLE BY THE 99%, and now he's got to act like the other fat-cat properties. i campaigned for him and a lot of my friends did, but we have come with great sadness to the view that the guy's a wimpy fence straddler.
It is going to take a massive struggle. BIG MONEY is doing everything it can, on every front, to keep the population dumbed down and infighting and to own the political parties. This is a classic example of what humans do in the face of looming catastrophe, they get greedy, trying to ensure that their people survive. It's in our genes. That's why the uber wealthy are building walled communities and hiring private armies...deep down inside they know what's coming.
Hmmm
I wonder if the elite are actually paying attention here. History has usually been a reliable guide to future events. As a species we tend to repeat patterns of behavior over and over. And if history is any guide there will come a tipping point where the very very few have taken so much of the fruit from the labor of the many. The result will be that the many take back what was stolen by the few. It is always done at the point of a gun because the very very few always refuse to give back what they have stolen. I do not advocate violence, in fact I condemn it whole heartily. But consider this: when a very very few take everything from the many that in itself is an incredibly violent act. When the very very few create and then profit from multiple wars that are fought and paid for by the many that is an act of hidious evil and violence by the very very few. When the very very few poison our water, destroy our seed groups with terminator seeds and GMO concoctions that is an act of violence against the many. When political elections are bought and paid for by the very very few that is an act of violence against the many. When women and children are strip searched in airports while the rich come and go without inspection on their private jets this is a an act of violence. When the justice system allows the very very rich (think the mortgage scandal that just was "settled") to walk away scot free after committing major felonies for decades while the working class lose their homes, this is an act of violence. This violent assault by the very very few in the their lust for power and money all at the expense of the many will eventually run its course and be stopped. "our" supreme court has legalized the use of unlimited amounts of money by very very few to legally wage violent war against the many.......... It bears noting here that the members of the "supreme" court are part of the very very few........
This explains the true domestic aim of the phony "war on(OF) terror;" all of the various anti-democratic legislation abolishing Habeas Corpus and civil liberties, the massive police$tate infrastructure in place to monitor everyone, the militarization of local police, the vagueness of the 'necessity' for the Halliburton/FEMA camps that have been built, the recent NDAA bill, etc (many even suspect the recent horrible Youtube design, due to be imposed March 1st, is tied into allowing for more effective NSA monitoring/classifications) ...so, yes, it's obvious The Few Big are planning for MASSIVE revolt from The Many as the fog of pro-American propaganda dissipates, revealing the mass murderous empire for what it actually is and represents to humanity.
You are so right, but unfortunately it will be the many who suffer the most in the revolt to take back what was stolen. Just as it is the many who suffered the most in the thefts in the first place.
I haven't read through the entire thread, yet....but wanted to thank you for an excellent post, ddearborn! Concisely and well articulated observations of a nation in serious decline. We look to be in for a very rough ride out of this current repetition of history.
I suspect that eventually the Republicans will start supporting "gun control" as a means to keep the people from arming themselves. There is a delusion that the US military could crush any revolt based upon experiences in Middle East. However it may be noted that the military didn't do that well in South East Asia and that drones and such technology are the most effective in parts of the world where there is very little "cover" from aerial observation. Would our present military be much more effective refighting the Vietnam War? As an Israeli general observed at the time, there is a big difference in fighting Arabs and fighting a foe like those we fought in South Vietnam. And the war in Aghanistan has been going for ten years now...
Yes, ddearborn, your analysis is very accurate. I'm afraid things are about to get very ugly - or I should say, about to get very much uglier than they already are.
I think things have actually gotten considerably better than in previous election years, and it's mostly thanks to Citizens United. Why? because the rich have bought our elections for decades if not from the start. Justice has been unequal for a long time, although that is getting very rapidly worse. But most people were very naive; activists were regularly diverted every four years into pouring all their money, energy and time down a rathole. Now, the reality is so obvious, the corruption so blatant, that anyone who imagines our elections equal democracy either has rose colored glasses welded to his or her cheekbones, or is simply mentally challenged. Which means that now at last we can beginthe conversation about how to actually change things.
Oh no! Our politicians are all bought and paid for? I am shocked! How did it come to this? Is this something that has just happened? Or does it go back a ways...like maybe to the founding of the republic (well, it was, once upon a time) when some disgruntled local aristocrats decided they didn't care for the ratio of taxes to benefits that the evil Empire was giving them.
Wow. It took HIghtower this long to come to that conclusion? That's because he's been brown nosing the Dems for so long, riding on the gravy train with his "commentaries." (You didn't think he was writing his column for free, did you?). And you gotta love the folksy cowboy hat thing. Give us a break! Why do we give these guys any attention or credibility at all? He'll be beating the Obama drum come election time. That's where his paycheck comes from.
Jim Hightower is not enamored of Obama - and he's been a strong voice for a real progressive populism for decades now. I subscribe to his newsletter and can vouch that if he had his way, both the Democratic and Republican parties would be thrown into the dustbin of history.
I was sitting near Hightower a little over a year ago when he stated he is a proud democrat.
From whence do you speak?
It is somewhat surprising that Hightower did not mention the fact that independent third party candidates are unable to compete with the two major parties because they do not possess the same huge war chests that the GOP and the Savage Mules have.
Erroll...Thanks for saying that. Now I won't have to.
Sadly, 90% of the voters have been duped by the PAC issue. The debate is based on the belief that money controls the minds of the voters... I guess that is true, but it doesn't have to be. Would you vote for any candidate based on a TV commercial? Well, maybe voters are more stupid that even I thought.
I will vote again for NADER, as I have for more than 30 years. No TV ad could change my mind. The only thing that could change my vote would be if Ralph joined the D or R Party.
Hightower is such a fraud!
To paraphrase,
It is "sad" that Obama represents the same people as the republicans and it's the fault of the people.
Reject ALL of the criminal politicos.
Hightower is a sort of dumbed down local yokel version of John Nichols. He's like the Jethro Clampett of d-crat politicos ... except not as smart.
A couple points:
This is another of the many underreported stories by Corp media. Even when they report it, they focus too much on the PACs and not enough on the relatively handful of people funding the PAC's (buying the election) and what they will get out of it. As this article so well stated, Gingrich is essentially a bought candidate who exists because of money, mostly Sheldon's, and doesn't exist because of public support.
The rich using the PAC's generally aren't buying the elections for the same reasons the candidates are trying to incite people to vote for them, ie., the driver for the rich spending millions isn't abortion, government's overspending, government's so-called attack on religion, immigration issues... That is all fodder to incite voters to go to the polls.
Here's a short article about the top five regrets of the dying. Money isn't mentioned in any of them:
www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying
Thank you very much for posting that link! I think its a bright light for all of us to remember and help with such a depressing article. How one person can make 3.3 million dollars an hour is disgusting! I have posted the top 5 regrets from the article linked by barred owl.
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."
As to number 5 on the list you reference, these are NOT ordinary times.
Let's note the following, before I make my point:
1. Torture has become another banality of evil
2. the NDAA means ANY one of us could be held for merely the suspicion of aiding a crime against the state without right to a trial, etc.
3. Nature is in so many places dying
4. Due to foreign wars and bailing out criminal bankers, the apparent lack of $ in the treasury is being used as a pretext to cut back on the very real services that make for a modicum of comfort in our communities.
5. The amount of $ owed, in the U.S. debt is beyond what can EVER be paid back.
6. Cancer rates are rising, and it's very likely linked with trace particles of radiation escaping any number of nuclear plants, added to the awful debacle in Japan
7. Species are dying every hour
8. Obesity, depression, and addiction are some of the social coping mechanisms to lives of quiet desperation
9. Our economy--as in jobs--will never return as was the case in the surge that followed WW II (because the industrial base has been off-shored to nations with cheaper labor pools and slack environmental protection standards)
10. Karmic blowback for wars of choice (like Iraq) is long overdue
11. In many very real ways, the quality of life is fast fading for many
So in the face of these, and other truly CALAMITOUS things, certain interests wish to turn the subject to individual happiness. Now? It's beyond Orwellian.
Just as so many think-tanks and libertarian organizations go to work making the seminal issues of our day, not the result of the elites that conjured them, but rather attributable to the nearest scapegoat population... a sinister deflection device, fforts to make the abundant discontent (presently felt by so many, for very real reasons) not about the ways government has foreclosed on its contract to protect the public's interests, but rather in an alleged focus on what makes the individual happy.
Anyone else note how this type of assessment puts the focus on individual adaptation, rather than state policy? It's quite a clever deflection! It also suggests the makings of a rationale to implement something along the lines of Huxley's SOMA.
Interesting that a poster who pushes the idea that the public is responsible for the election results would push this "Don't worry, be happy,"individual "choice" meme.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30525.htm
The fact that the media and liberal democrats have come down so hard against citizens united while they ignore the corrupt congress who have been making themselves rich at the expense of the public shows just how stupid or insincere they are. Eliminating citizens united and leaving the corrupt congress as it is complete with the system that encourages personal enrichment over public service would be a travesty. The corruption also extends to the president who even without citizens united collects a fortune in corporate sponsorships which he starts paying back immediately after he is elected as we saw with Obama.
Is all this money being poured into political campaigns stimulating the economy? generating any jobs?
You have raised an interesting question, who is profiting from the hundreds of million dollars spent on all this TV propaganda? Well sorry to say here in the northwest our radio stations are mostly owned by Bi-Coastal media, owned by republican Greg Walden, a career politician, most of our television is owned by who else, Murdock, so most of the big bucks just stay in the same one percent circle, that is our free market system.
"Rather than taking the high road and rallying a public that's thoroughly disgusted by this, Obama now joins Romney, et al. on the money-slicked low road."
I could see that disillusion--maybe--if it had been said 4 years ago when BO was supposed to be a different kind of candidate who then took vast sums from the corporations. But now, when he's been presiding as a flat-out corporatist-warmonger for 3 years, saying that he's now "joined Romney" is verging on the ridiculous. And I like Jim Hightower; now Molly Ivins has gone to her just reward he's my favorite fellow Texan.
Does this writer, do any writers over 50 dare say it; "America is not a democracy"
America's democracy was hijacked at its inception by slave holders, usurped in the early twentieth by imperialists and militarists, now what little is left is swamped by people with too, too much money.
American citizens, to establish a democracy we need to downsize inequality and that happens with worker owned workplaces and the restoration of individual economic enterprise. (Small business)
We started out as a country ruled by the rich. It was the rich who started the revolt against Great Britain over "taxes". You don't find this in American written history books of the sort you probably read in school. But the information is out there for anyone who cares to do the necessary study. The 18th Century version of today's Republicans were the ones responsible. A "rich man's war, a poor man's fight". Originally only the "men of means" were allowed to vote once we achieved independence from Great Britain. Much like what Republicans of today are attempting to do with "Voter Picture ID". Keep the poor, minorities, students, seniors from voting. "Because they will vote Democratic"! The mindset of the "Founding Fathers" was the same as those who run the Republican Party today. They'd feel right at home in the Republican Party. This is also why these same people were so terrified of the French Revolution of 1789. That was a "real revolution", and directed against the "rich" of the time. Our Founding Fathers were terrified that it might happen here. They passed all sorts of laws, censored the press, did everything they could to keep it from happening here including jailing people for what they said or wrote in the newspapers. Much like the way those in charge of this country reacted after the Russian revolution, crushing the small "socialist" party of the time, jailing its leadership. Joe McCarthy attempted to do the same, seeking out "Communists" in Hollywood. everywhere else. The US leadership has always been terrified of a "real revolution" that might shift political power away from a small wealthy political "elite".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10MyrfoYrA
Amen, Jim, Amen. This country no longer belongs to "us"; it belongs to "them"- the highest bidders for those prostitutes disguised as politicians
"This country no longer belongs to "us""
Since when did the country EVER belong to the people... It's always been governed by the Rich.
If you carefully study the so called "American Revolution" you will find that it was actually a revolt by the wealthy people against paying taxes to Great Britain. This is why after we become independent of Great Britain that the right to vote was restricted to "men of means". There was a "property requirement" which required you were at least upper middle class and a white male in order to vote. Those who led the "revolt" were afraid of the ordinary working people. Quite a lot like today's Republicans when you get down to it with their push for "voter Picture ID" and such.
We should change the name of the country to "The United States of Capitalism", or perhaps "The United Capitalist States of America" or "The United Capitalist Corporative Republic", or "The United Corporative Capitalist Republic" or "UCCR". All of these names would fit the reality of what the USA has now become. For all practical purposes the USA is no longer controlled by its people, but by its "Really Rich People" and the big corporations that they control. We are a "corporate state" maintaining a myth of being a desirable society when life for the people is better in Canada, northern Europe, Japan, than it is here. The only exception is that if you are a "gun bug", the USA offers you a better deal than anywhere else on Earth.
I like this article, even though the author's joke about Santorum's atrophied left brain, which I liked again, doesn't quite work for me. Money, petty meanness, deviousness always toward some lousy goal-- it's all left brain.
The terms left brain, right brain get thrown around a lot. But if anyone really wants to learn about the subject they should read THE ALPHABET AND THE GODDESS by the late Leonard Shlain.
By discrediting democracy with a tidal wave of plutocratic $$ the PTB are opening wide the door to other non-democratic actors to come.
What Jim Hightower failed to mention is that this man is Jewish, and I read somewhere that he said he was funding Newt because Obama was not supporting Israel. I guess he meant that Obama should go to war with Iran to please Israel, AIPAC and himself.
President Obama can mend some fences by helping to balance the free speech competition with these rich raging bull$ of the <1% by Executive Order removing the right-to-work provision in the Taft-Hartley Act (Labor–Management Relations Act --Public Law 80-101, 61 Stat 136, enacted June 23, 1947).
President J F Kennedy was the first to issue an Executive Order, 10918, related to the Taft-Hartley Act. Nixon was the second cancelling Kennedy's.
If the Supreme Court can give corporations an advantage in free speech via Citizen's United, then certainly President Obama can at least give us workers a measure of free speech to help balance the competition. The right to work provision is an unjust claw back on workers escaping peonage labor in the South, West and now Indiana. Deceptive in name, proponents tout it as freedom when it is actually a step back toward slavery and racism.
It isn't the money that controls the number of jobs. Its the lack of opportinity for entrepreneurs to get moving. This is due to high production costs associated with the fierce competition for access to land and natural resources. Without city land nothing can be made and without rural land nothing grows. Speculators in land are holding some of it out of use so that the prices for access to it rises. This is why the goods become so expensive that it is cheeper to import them from less land-exploitation countries. These speculators and land-owning monopolists are rich too, so it looks like money and control are united, but in fact by introducing a tax on land values these two effects can be seen to be different. Taxing land values makes their cost drop because it brings into use more opportunity due to its lower of land cost and its greater availibility. This means more business and less unemployment and crime. So its not money but land which is why we are in this condition.
TAX LAND NOT PEOPLE; TAX IMMORAL TAKINGS NOT JUSTIFIABLE MAKINGS!
There's nothing new or "official" about this much-beloved "American way of life." "Super PAC donations are just loose change compared to the ubiquitous money-charged plundering of trillions of dollars of our national treasure by those in both major political parties, plundering that has been happily endorsed again and again by most Americans for at least two generations now. As for me, my vote for the third way, again and again, has never been bought. Those who won it, earned it, and I gave it to them for free.
An Alternative to Capitalism (if the people knew about it, they would demand it)
Several decades ago, Margaret Thatcher claimed: "There is no alternative". She was referring to capitalism. Today, this negative attitude still persists.
I would like to offer an alternative to capitalism for the American people to consider. Please click on the following link. It will take you to an essay titled: "Home of the Brave?" which was published by the Athenaeum Library of Philosophy:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/steinsvold.htm
John Steinsvold
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."
~ Albert Einstein
Soooooo....you would rather have Obama LOSE?...to one of these Republican clowns...who would escort us into a four year Dark Age? Obama needs to do what he can do, not only to be reelected, but to get workable majorities in both houses of Congress, in order to initiate real change.
Oh Right. The old tired "Lesser of two evils" argument. You're already IN a "Dark Age". Obama is not the savior of the nation.
Doesn't matter if Oborat wins or loses ... either way .... we lose. And we've already seen how much hope'n'change O delivers when the democrats are in control of 2 chambers of congress and the white house.
.