Just when you thought that money has corrupted our political system as much as it possibly could, the Republicans are here to the rescue to prove you wrong and show you how much more it could be corrupted.
The man in charge of this effort is a lawyer named James Bopp. If you are familiar with the corrupting influence of money, he’s actually an old school corrupter. He’s been doing this for a long time.
He’s the guy who came up with the 527s back in the beginning of 2000, 2001, etc. At the time, the Democrats fought it. Now everybody does 527s: that’s outside money that pours in to basically buy our politicians. He came up with that. Of course, he did that for the Republicans. And he’s the one who pushed the Citizens United case. So this guy has been a disaster for the country.
And he’s got a brilliant new idea: it’s called a Super Duper PAC. It’s not just a political action committee, a PAC, it’s a Super PAC that allows not only to raise outside money that is unlimited as Citizens United allows for but he wants to bring in politicians to do the fund raising, and he wants to earmark the money if they want to for that specific politician.
To give you a sense of how this works. If John Boehner wanted to raise money from an executive at JP Morgan Chase or at Exxonmobil, he could only get $2,500 from him. Under Citizens United, they still can’t give money directly to John Boehner above that, but they still could spend it on their own in that race or they can give it to a different group because of Citizens United.
But what this proposal does is if John Boehner says to that JP Morgan executive, instead of giving me $2,500, give me $250,000, but don’t give it directly to me, but give it to the Super PAC, and the Super PAC will then say, if you want, spend it only on John Boehner’s race. The only thing is because of the law, you are not allowed to coordinate with John Boehner. Who cares.
So the Republican Super PAC would come in and say, we are not coordinating with John Boehner, we just happen to spend all of the money pulverizing his opponent, ran like a million negative ads against him. Basically all of the rules that exist right now, the very little rules left, are obliterated. They can spend unlimited amounts of money raised by politicians for politicians, and then a guy like John Boehner knows that I’m not just getting $2,500 here and $2,500 there, I know that that company is putting in a million bucks or ten million bucks to make sure I get re-elected.
Now what do you think John Boehner is going to do? He’s going to work for them. He’s going to do whatever they tell him to do. He always does that to a large extent anyway but this makes it even bigger and more grotesque and with absolutely no check out.
Some are complaining that this would be, parts of it, would be illegal. James Bopp says we cannot coordinate the spending but we can coordinate the fundraising, and he might have a decent argument there, given Citizens United and given we have a completely right-wing Supreme Court that’ll say yes to any unlimited money case. But there are other aspects of it that might be wrong in terms of how they spend the money, and it cannot really be unlimited money that goes into these campaigns, etc. That gets into the details of the law.
But here’s what Bopp says: what difference does it make? First of all he says, I’ll just do this anyway and we’ll win the election and then we’ll worry about it later, and that part is implied. The second part is just flat out what he says, I would love to take it to the Supreme Court. Let’s go to the Supreme Court. They will rule for me anyway. They’re conservatives. They’re in my back pocket. Although he doesn’t say this, but why do you think we filled the Supreme Court with all of those conservative corporate judges but that they will rule in favor of the corporations.
And the corporations will spend this money and they will buy our politicians for a very cheap price and they get billions and billions as they do now in subsidies, loopholes, they won’t have to pay their taxes, etc., and then they’ll cut your medicare, your social security, they’ll increase your payroll taxes, etc., and make the middle class pay and make sure that the corporations are untouched. If you thought it was bad before, wait till they unleash the Super PAC.
We’re in massive trouble. The only answer is a full-scale rebellion. I don’t mean physically, I don’t mean with arms like the right wingers, I mean politically. We have got to get together, a merry band of men, that is going to rebell against this, and go state by state. If we have to, we have to pass an amendment that corporations are not human beings, they should not have the freedom of speech that human beings have, they should not have special rights.
Right now they have special rights. A corporation is a legal fiction, it is an entity created by the government, funny enough. And it says that the people that run the corporation or even the shareholders are not even responsible for the actions of the corporation so that is a special right that they have. So if they pollute a river and somebody dies from that pollution as an example, they are not criminally responsible, not the shareholders, not necessarily the executives, etc. That’s the special rights that they have.
On top of that, they get all of your rights and more. They get freedom of speech, so-called freedom of speech to spend money to buy politicians and they have the gobs of money you don’t have to buy those politicians.
These corporations are the Borg. They think resistance is futile. They are taking over. And their complete conquest is nearly finished. That’s why we need a rebellion. And we need to get together and fight against this big money otherwise we will have entirely lost our democracy.
Accountants CPA Hartford, LLC