Wednesday, October 14, 2009

"The long reach of cold hard cash"

I just wanted to link this op-ed piece by Marie Cocco, "The long reach of cold cash."

The corruption of our government is, I think, the most important story of our time, bar none, and one of the most underreported. And no citizens seem to care -- they keep electing the same old corrupt politicians (on both sides) who all take large amounts of money from special interests. And no one ever seems to ask about it. The few groups who do track it don't get much attention. More data than ever is now available via the Internet and no one seems to care.

Supposedly 45K Americans a year die for lack of health insurance. That's 15 times 9/11, and not just one year, but every year. But the country isn't going to get much reform, even though most Americans support it. The only reason is special interests -- any plan has to satisfy the health insurance industry and the hospital industry and the AMA and all kinds of other special interests, and then if anything is left it will be presented to the public.

It's the same on all kinds of other issues -- climate change, energy legislation, even campaign finance reform itself.

It's a vast corruption and those visions of America -- and probably the world -- turning into a corporatocracy have already come true. Have you read any of the recent articles lately about the close, close connections between Goldman Sachs and the financial arm of the federal government?

1 comment:

rhhardin said...

Special interests are just interests in general.

You get more official corruption the more the officials in question control.

What you want is not higher ethics but smaller government.

Or consider that Coleridge could write in 1800 (Coleridge was a blogger of his day) that a conflict of interest is the pulley on which good character is hoist into public view, government offering fewer temptations in those days so that that was a suggestable possibility.