Your elected officials at work
In 2011, the CEO of Star Scientific, Jonnie Williams Jr., bought W. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell a $6,000 Rolex watch, took McDonnell’s wife on a $20,000 shopping spree, and paid $15,000 to cater the wedding of the McDonnell’s daughter. All in all, Williams spent $177,000 in gifts and loans of the governor.
He didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart, no more than Wall St. moguls paid the Clintons millions for making speeches. No, what he was after was to get the Governor to “push state university researchers to produce studies that could help secure Food and Drug Administration approval for the dietary supplement Anatabloc,” according to the Wall St. Journal (4/27/2016). (So much for “scientific studies”.)
Now, McDonnell is up on corruption charges. His excuse? It’s “commonplace,” he claims, and sending him to prison for this would “radically reshape politics in this nation.” As the Wall St. Journal reports: ‘“Gov. McDonnell was convicted in part for taking actions that, in the main, are indistinguishable from actions that nearly every elected official in the U.S. takes nearly every day,” the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee said in a brief.’
Yes, we have the best democracy money can buy.
Oh, and as far as the “Citizens United” Supreme Court ruling, the ruling that corporations can spend unlimited amounts in political campaigns because they have the same rights as individuals: Cases like the one of McDonnell – which “nearly every elected official… (does) every day” — these would continue, Citizens United or not.
So, contrary to all calls to “get the money out of politics,” and contrary to the claims that this is something new, it’s not. It’s how capitalist democracy has always functioned.
Categories: politics, United States
As you (and the Governor) point out, this is indeed “every day” business as usual in Capitalist “Democracy” where everything is potentially for sale, especially the public sector. But how do we think about what a real democracy would look like under Socialism? How do we put the idea of workers power and control into practical terms to deal with the crisis of the public sector in the US?
Liberals call for more regulation-which even seems like a radical demand that unless I am missing something is not even attainable at least in the US at this moment. Every government agency has been so throughly permeated by the revolving door between corporations/lobbyists and Neoliberal policies that the idea of “reform” seems absurd at this point. How do we begin to build alliances of workers, the community, the unemployed, marginally employed to develop a anti capitalist transitional program for these times?