The estimable CPP wrote about the Koch brothers. He's depressed. With reason aforethought.
... This is two guys -- TWO FREAKING GUYS! -- and they have more power within the American political system than a million earnest volunteers knocking on doors. They have more influence than millions of people writing letters to the editors, protesting outside school boards, or organizing online. This is two guys -- TWO FREAKING GUYS! -- whose politics were formed on what was still considered the Republican fringe in the 1950s and 1960s, and they have more power within the American political system than what's left of the entire infrastructure of organized labor.
Two freaking guys.
Amazing.
Two freaking unaccountable guys...
...Look at the facts. This is what Citizens United hath wrought. It has infested our politics with money-whipped italics.
Two freaking guys. One election cycle. This is the power or organized money. It has bought virtual plutocracy in state governments from Wisconsin to North Carolina. It has bought itself the single worst Congress in the history of the Republic. And it is growing in strength, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, because Citizens United was decided in such a way as to choke off any regulatory solutions, and then Shelby County came along as the hook off the jab and what electoral remedies could not be buried under the floodtide of money could be washed away by the state legislatures in those virtual plutocracies...
Read the whole damn thing, if you haven't just eaten. At least the brothers are doing exactly what they want for their own interests. Their enabling teabaggers, however, over whose eyes they've pulled the pashmina, are, by their willing ignorance, screwing themselves and everyone else; all while thinking they're the last vestige of defense against... something something something...
...Honest to blog, I don't know where we go from here. ... There aren't many avenues left by which ordinary citizens can effectively run their self-government any more, and the ones that still exist are narrowing by the day....
How pathetically sad.
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