Cenk Uygur: If you think I am outraged about that, wait till you get me talking about campaign finance reform. The real problem in politics is all the money that is pouring in. In fact, there is a new report out about the Super PACs. As of May 71% of the money coming in is from donors above $500,000. That is not their income; that is not their wealth. That is the amount of money that they have given.
Okay, do you know how rich you have to be to give $500,000 or more to a politician? And 71% of the money is coming from them. Do you know that it is less than 100 people that are giving two thirds of the money? Basically less than 100 people are buying the election! The rest of us are fairly irrelevant.
“Voters? That’s a good one. Let’s just buy more ads.”
Do you think that they give $500,000 out of the goodness of their heart? No, they give that money so they could buy them, so that if you are Sheldon Adelson, giving $71 million, and you might be brought up on charges on the Corrupt Foreign Practices Act, and you give a little bit of money, my guess is those charges are not coming if his guy wins. Our system has become legalized and obvious bribery.
Now the most important judicial case of this week was actually not the healthcare law, the one that everybody went nuts over. Understandably it was really, really important. But actually the most important one was about Montana.
In Montana they said, wait, this is corruption. We cannot have corporations buying our local politicians. And all those conservative justices talking about state’s rights—oh my God, Arizona has got state’s rights that target Latinos and immigrants, etc.—turn around to Montana, you have got no state’s rights. Forget state’s rights. We did not mean state’s rights. We meant corporations rule us all.
And they said in a five to four decision, where Chief Justice John Roberts was with the conservatives, with the corporations, said even on the state level, corporations can buy any damn politician they like. And they said, there is not even an appearance of corruption.
Are you kidding me? 100 guys have bought the election, and there is no appearance of corruption? On which planet. As you can tell, I am a little bit worked up about it, as I have said.
Unfortunately, in a lot of ways, we have lost our democracy. Those guys are the ones that get to determine who is going to win and who is not going to win, and it is sickening.
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The Barefoot Accountant
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