By Jack E. Lohman
Imagine that you’ve invested in a private company with a conflicted board of directors, where some are taking cash on the side from the area’s most expensive accounting service, ABC, and your CEO is in on the deal.
And they are giving contracts to ABC instead of the cheaper and better XYZ service, because ABC gives kickbacks and XYZ doesn’t. They are stealing from you and driving your company into bankruptcy, all while padding their own pockets. Nice.
And it’s not just ABC they’re in bed with, it’s every vendor your company deals with! Cash and profits going out and flowing back to the decision makers! And your company has to pay higher prices because some of the money must be kicked back to your leaders.
Wow!!! In the criminal world, that’s bribery, payola and theft. It’s corrupt and illegal. People actually go to jail for this kind of thing.
But this isn’t only happening in the criminal world, it’s also happening in your government. Your trusted politicians (directors), receive campaign contributions (payola and kickbacks), and give away taxpayer assets in return.
Think… “road contractors, travel contracts, and voting software contracts.” Politicians award taxpayer-funded contracts and policies and tie it into this thing called “freedom of speech.”
The U.S. Supreme Court did that for you, but as blogger Clyde Winter writes, money is not speech. It is a possession, like your house or car. You use cash to buy things and services and, sometimes, political favors. If you don’t have money, you are out of luck.
Politicians claim you can also buy speech, and if that’s all it bought and none went into their pockets, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the very politicians who serve as your state’s and your nation’s board of directors are taking this cash and giving away taxpayer assets in return. They are on the take, and getting away with it!
It began with Ronald Reagan, led to the 1994 Gingrich takeover of congress, and culminated with the election of George Bush. I voted for Reagan and both Bushes, but I’m a lot smarter today.
I ask conservatives repeatedly: How are you liking it so far? I never get an answer. These wiseacres started out to drown the government in the bathtub and hit the toilet instead, and now they are wallowing in the results.
Tax cuts for the wealthy turned our $300 billion surplus into a $600 billion deficit, trashed the dollar bill, drove housing prices down and fuel and food costs up, sent jobs overseas, and transferred our country’s assets to the Asians, Europeans and Middle Easterners.
I ask again, Are we having fun yet?
There is but one solution, and that’s to totally replace our government. Not incrementally, all at once. But the Republican party is still filled with the garbage that got us to where we are today. Let’s see if the Dems are willing to give us back our democracy. And if not, they will get ousted too.
In fairness, there’s a handful of decent politicians who don’t like the image of the corrupt system and deserve re-election. The voters know who they are.
Only a handful? See the nine best legislators: Democracy Defenders at WDC
September 14, 2008 at 9:45 am
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