The unregulated energy hucksters behind the infamous Enron scandals of a decade ago created an array of dummy financial funds to evade public scrutiny and perpetrate fraud. To disguise the scams, they dubbed these phony funds names like Chewco and JEDI.
While Enron's house of cards did of course collapse, "Enron accounting" lives on in corporate America today. It's also infesting an endeavor that should never be tainted with such financial gimmickry: America's democracy. Corporate hucksters, intent on political profiteering, are setting up dummy funds with such star-spangled names as Make Us Great Again and Restore Our Future.
These are Super PACs, created to amass millions of dollars in unrestricted corporate cash to back the candidacies of particular presidential wannabes. These groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money — something the candidates themselves are barred from doing. Already, the dummy funds are becoming larger than the candidate's' own campaigns, allowing a few big money interests to pervert our democratic process into their plutocratic plaything.
How few? As of August, more than 80 percent of the money in Super PACs backing Republican candidates had come from only 35 people writing six- and seven-figure checks.
Technically, these dummy groups must not coordinate their actions with the candidates they back, but this "ban" is a fraud. For example, Rick Perry's Make Us Great Again PAC is headed by a corporate lobbyist who had been Perry's chief of staff and is now both a major fundraiser and political advisor for Perry. Hello — the front group, the lobbyist, the fundraiser, and the advisor don't have to "coordinate" — they're all the same person!
What these Super PACs represent is the Enronization of our politics — a legalized corruption that's tantamount to a corporate takeover.
1 comment:
Well, now you know that the price increases on food and energy are NOT all due to higher commodity prices....where's the guy who keeps insisting that the "system" is working? The average citizen has NO pull, NO influence, NO chance of having ANY effect on our representatives. They (Congress) will not even return your call unless you tell the receptionist you have a chunk of money you want to "contribute" to his next campaign. And notice how Perry is being lauded (by the media) as the no-nonsense pistol packing Texan who can "tame" the out-of-control government. The media should NOT be picking the candidates to shove down our collective throats. EACH and every one of these dirty, bribe-taking, thieving, cheating scam artists need to be run out of town, by whatever means necessry. Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and so many others would have instant heart attacks if they saw what we are today.
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