Forum Post: Never Mind Super PACs: How Big Business Is Buying the Election

Never Mind Super PACs: How Big Business Is Buying the Election

Tuesday, 04 September 2012 09:46 By Lee Fang, The Nation | Report

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11305-never-mind-super-pacs-how-big-business-is-buying-the-election

On January 27, 2010, one year into his term, President Barack Obama used the occasion of his State of the Union address to issue a warning. The Supreme Court had just opened the “floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” He was speaking about the ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Court struck down nearly a century of law, granting corporations vast new leeway to influence the outcome of elections.   In the months after Obama’s speech, the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade association that represents hundreds of multinational oil and gas companies, would demonstrate just how prescient the president’s warning was.

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How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted

Tuesday, 04 September 2012 09:12 By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co. | Interview

http://truth-out.org/news/item/11304-the-party-is-over

After a tremendous response to his commentary on Truthout, Mike Lofgren has released a new book, "The Party Is Over." In it he explores what he calls the "company town" of Washington DC, where "the company's products are politics and military hardware."

Bill talks with Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican who describes the modern dysfunction of both the Republican and Democratic parties. In Lofgren's view, Republicans have become overly obsessed with obstructing President Obama, and the Democrats suffer from political complacency. Lofgren's new book is The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.

Transcript

Bill Moyers: The growing power of the religious right is one reason my guest left the Republican Party and became an Independent. "The mixture of politics and religion," he says, "debases both, and has turned the GOP into an apocalyptic sect." He has his problems with Democrats, too. For one thing, he says, both parties "are captives to corporate loot."

Others may share those opinions, but what gives Mike Lofgren more clout than the rest is decades of insider experience on Capitol Hill. He was a Fulbright scholar with two degrees in history when he went to work in Congress and became a senior staff member of the House and Senate Budget committees. His specialty was the cost of national security. After 28 years of government service, Mike Lofgren retired and sat down to write a powerful manifesto that took off like a rocket when it was posted on the website Truthout.org.

It's now a book: "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted." As you can tell from the title, he spares no one.