Martin Berger – 9-18-2016
The previously sealed classified Wisconsin court documents that The Guardian has managed to get its hands on exposed the unprecedented extent of corporate influence on the so-called Western democratic process.
Now the staggering amount of influence that Western corporate circles have in the so-called US Presidential elections and the extraordinary lengths to which politicians, lobbyists and even judges go to solicit money, are available for anyone who would care enough to investigate them.
The John Doe files amount to 1,500 pages of largely unseen material gathered in evidence by prosecutors investigating alleged irregularities in political fundraising. These documents shed light on the behind-the-scenes world that is kept hidden from the public, in which millions of dollars are secretly donated by major corporations and super-wealthy individuals to third-party groups to sway elections. Those documents basically mean that the US Presidential election of 2016 has virtually been stolen by a wealthy few.
The former United States Secretary of Agriculture and Congressman Dan Glickman would note in his column for The Huffington Post:
More cash into more political arenas deepens and hardens public distrust in government and political leaders. I contend that many voters on both sides have a legitimate belief that our political system is irrelevant to the lives of everyone except those at the top. Voters are unhappy , and they are not being served by a government that is paralyzed by money, money that binds politicians to the views of a handful of Americans, stokes the flames of partisanship and keeps Congress and the president from doing anything truly transformational.
Jimmy Carter, the former US President, in an interview with a well-known American radio host and progressive political commentator Thom Hartmann claimed that “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of the US political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Carter is convinced that the Supreme Court cases like the 2010 Citizens United decision have turned America into an “oligarchy,” where wealthy elites wield the most power. “Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. and the same thing applies to governors and US senators and Congress members” he said.
Today, according to various American observers, the vast sums of money raised and spent by the Democratic and Republican candidates make a mockery of the claims that the United States is a democracy. It’s the big money that rules, dominating the entire process of selecting the candidates of the only two officially recognized parties and effectively determining the outcome of the vote.
The role of Wall Street’s vested interest in the so-called democratic process has become so great that even the corporate media can not hide it anymore. The Washington Post, for instance, published a report noting that “independent” expenditures by so-called super PACs – political action committees loosely linked to the candidates – would for the first time exceed the spending by the candidates and their official campaign committees.
Therefore, it is not surprising that 57% of all Americans demand to disclose the source of all contributions, which was shown by the poll that Rasmussen Reports carried out.
For every dollar the nation’s most politically active companies spent on political influence, they received $760 from the government in the form of federal business and support. The country’s top campaign donors spent 5.8 billion dollars on political lobbying and campaign contributions between 2007 and 2012 and received a whopping 4.4 trillion dollars in return. By comparison, the federal government paid the nation’s 50 million social security recipients 4.3 trillion dollars during the same time period.
The study examined the political spending of the 200 companies during the 2008, 2010 and 2012 election cycles. The $ 4.4 trillion that these companies received for their efforts represents two-thirds of the $ 6.5 trillion that American taxpayers contributed to the US treasury. Moreover, out of the 200 companies studied, the report identified 29 companies that received 1,000 times more federal money than they spent on campaign contributions and political lobbying. (This constitutes a whole separate venue of political profiteering with benefits that by far exceed any opportunities in the private sector).
However, those facts would hardly surprising anyone, so it’s about time we move on to the on to the individual level.
As it’s been noted the other day by the notorious alternative media CounterPunch, Hillary Clinton is far from enjoying a comfortable night’s sleep given the ever-widening maelstrom of scandals engulfing her presidential bid. Clinton’s political machine is known for its criminality, duplicity, and corruption that haunts her.
The last story in a long series of embarrassing scandals is centered on the powerful Clinton Foundation, and the obvious impropriety of its acceptance of large donations from foreign governments (and wealthy individuals connected to them), especially those governments universally recognized as oppressive dictatorships. For example, the Saudi regime has donated up to 25 million dollars to the Clinton Foundation. While the last donations were made at the end of 2014, they were made around the time Hillary Clinton was preparing to announce her presidential ambitions. A group called “Friends of Saudi Arabia, “co-founded” by a Saudi Prince, “gave an additional amount between 1 and 5 million dollars.” The Clinton Foundation says that a comparable sum was also donated by the State of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the government of Brunei. In turn, the State of Kuwait has been way more generous, donating between 5 and 10 million dollars.
But there’s little doubt that Hillary’s devotion to the oil oligarchs of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf goes much deeper than simply an exchange of money for weapons, in fact Hillary is deeply committed to the Saudi royal family’s foreign policy, in particular the weaponization of radical Islamists as a means of achieving their strategic objectives.
It goes without saying that in Syria, Clinton’s stated policies of regime change are aligned with those of Riyadh and Doha and that it was during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department that US intelligence was funneling weapons and fighters into Syria in hopes of doing to Syria what had already been done to Libya.
According to the records of the US Department of State, at the very least out of 154 individuals that communicated with Clinton, 85 people donated a total of 156 million dollars to the Clinton family fund.
It should come as no surprise that US policymakers look after the ultra-wealthy instead of the rest of us. Forget the top one percent, the top 0.01 percent of Americans gave nearly 42 percent of all political donation dollars in the 2012 election cycle.
Back in her State Department days, Hillary Clinton arranged a dinner which was attended by faithful contributors to the Clinton Foundation. Among them one could find a Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk who donated at least 8.6 million dollars to the former First Lady, The Wall Street Journal noted. Now the links between Hillary and the Ukrainian business tycoon Viktor Pinchuk are being brought to light with a new portion of incriminating emails being released.
Despite being embroiled in multiple scandals, any one of which is enough to sink the campaign of most other candidates, Clinton and her army of fawning corporate media sycophants, have attempted to deflect attention away from her own misdeeds, corruption, and nefarious ties by instead portraying everyone who opposes them as being puppets, stooges, and useful idiots.
Clinton’s Internet and corporate media trolls claim that Donald Trump as Putin’s man who has no say in any matter. And then, of course, Julian Assange has also been smeared as a Putin puppet. While blaming Russia in an attempt to rig the US elections, “the ardent defenders of American democracy” have virtually actioned the Oval Office, willing it over to the highest bidder without as much as a blink.
Sixty six percent of Americans are convinced that the presidential election is being rigged, as it’s been shown by the Rasmussen Reports poll. The Huffington Post would note that despite countless attempts to hide behind the mythical “Russian threat” and “terrible Russian hackers”, the US democracy was hijacked by the people that cannot speak Russian at all.
There’s a massive opposition these days in the US to the system of unlimited cash injections in the electoral process, as it was discovered by The New York Times and CBS, since people are tired of being ruled and robbed in the broad daylight by Wall Street’s moneybags.
_____________________________________________________________________