The billionaire brothers just hired
former Senator Don Nickles to lobby against campaign finance measures.
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The
beauty of our country’s present system of government is that anyone is
perfectly free to buy a member of Congress. Isn’t that what democracy is all
about?
Take
the Koch brothers. Of course, these multibillionaire industrialists prefer to
buy everything in bulk, and they’ve spent millions of dollars to purchase a
whole flock of Republican Congress critters.
In
fact, they’ve spent so much on so many elections (from Congress all the way
down toschool board races) that they’ve made themselves the poster boys
of Big Money corruption. By huge margins, polls indicate that the public wants
Congress to terminate the infestation of our democratic system by the Kochs and
other plutocrats.
How
have the brothers responded? By buying another senator.
Now, Nickles is
pulling the Koch’s plow. He’s using his Capitol Hill contacts to try
to defeat reforms that would shut off the gusher of secret, unlimited amounts
of corporate cash that the Koch network funnels into our elections.
What
we have here is a perfect example of Big Money looping full circle to strangle
the people’s right to self-govern. The Koch boys write huge checks to
candidates and front groups to elect lawmakers who serve their interests. Some
of those lawmakers, like Nickles, later slide into lucrative lobbying slots,
getting paid a bundle by Koch & Co. to fend off anti-corruption reforms.
Thus,
the Kochs can keep making bulk purchases of lawmakers…and the circle is drawn ever-tighter
around democracy’s neck. To help pass a Constitutional amendment to ban this
corrupt money, go to www.united4thepeople.org.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is
a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the
populist newsletter, The
Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org