Money in Politics

As a society, Americans don’t seem to be too concerned about (or even aware of) the corruption that big money is injecting into our law-making on a daily basis; otherwise, we wouldn’t have the U.S. Supreme Court decision “Citizens United,” granting corporations the freedom to spend as much as they wish to control the outcome of our elections.

As shown here, almost 2000 years ago, philosopher, historian, biographer,  and essayist Plutarch had already experienced this exact phenomenon, and saw how destructive it was.

The main challenge is how insidious and how difficult it is to eradicate corruption once the process begins.  Whom are we counting on to eliminate it?  Well, it’s the people who benefit from it.  It’s like asking bank robbers to write the laws that apply to robbery.

There needs to be a groundswell of people who work hard to muster massive numbers of voters to remove dirty politicians, but look at how far we are from that. We have 56 million voters who bought the “Big Lie” as it’s now called, i.e., the stolen election, a narrative that would have required the collusion of judges in 60 different court rooms.  If there are that many Americans who are stupid enough not to see that they are being conned, it’s hard to have any belief that their mental acuity is sharp enough to get the job done here.

FWIW, it wasn’t that long ago that the United States had a reasonably decent handle on all this, as one can see based on what Teddy Roosevelt said.