Billionaires and elections

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:  Sanders made less for a year of exhausting work on Capitol Hill than his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, earned from ONE SPEECH that she delivered to the massive vampire squid of global capitalism, Goldman Sachs, which paid her a cool $225,000 for a 45-minute job of a speech, a fee that was paid to the once and would-be future White House resident on three separate occasions. (Because, as Hillary shrugged in a 2015 debate, "that's what they offered.")That's not all. In 2014, Hillary and her ex-president husband Bill Clinton earned just over $28 million, or a whopping 135 times as much as the Sanders household. Their income that year came from giving speeches ($10.5 million for Hillary Clinton, $9.8 million for Bill) and $6.4 million in consulting (or as USA Today called it, "consulting") by the former president. Also known as trading on their political clout as once and possibly future leaders of the United States of America....

Ordinary Americans are angry.  The article goes on to point out:  Over the last week in Washington, D.C., a staggering number of people -- at least 900, with more in the works -- have been arrested for sitting-in at the U.S. Capitol, all to support new restrictions on the influence of millionaire-and-billionaire dollars in American politics and to roll back the recent wave of limitations on voting. The Democracy Spring protesters are the vanguard of a growing revolt that is looking outside-the-box of conventional U.S. politics, to attack the corruption at its root source. Not surprisingly, the major media outlets -- which reap millions from the current system of political advertising -- have imposed a virtual news blackout on Democracy Spring.

And then there is this: At the time the Panama Papers story broke, U.S. tax experts said there was no need for Americans to hide wealth in places like Panama when we have havens right here in places like...Delaware.  In fact, you'll be shocked (OK, probably not shocked) to learn that when Bill and Hillary Clinton found themselves in private life and making the real dough, the couple was involved in the creation of five Delaware corporations -- three related to the Clinton Foundation non-profit, one for Bill's "consulting" fees, and one for a $5.5 million Hillary book advance. Why take advantage of the low tax rates and limited public-disclosure laws of the American Cayman Islands? I guess that's what Delaware offered......  The defenders of the Clintons say they money doesn't matter as long as her opponents can't demonstrate a quid pro quo. First, the weeds can get pretty quick, but take a second to read this, or this, stories that raise serious questions of a conflict of interest. Second, these self-proclaimed progressives seem to have forgotten the first rule of political graft, which is that the appearance of corruption is just as bad as demonstrable corruption itself. 
Take the example of Verizon, where about 40,000 workers are currently on strike, protesting both the steady drip of jobs overseas and the endless flow of resources away from the middle class and toward a tiny band of corporate elites. "My co-workers and I aren’t asking for $18m a year," one striker wrote, referring to the paycheck of Verizon's CEO. "We’d just like to take care of our families." In the Democratic primary, both Clinton and Sanders issued statements of support, and the Vermonter gained some added cred by walking the picket line. Clinton should probably lose some cred, though, since Verizon paid her $225,000 -- that's what they offered -- for a May 2013 speech and showered donations on the Clinton Foundation. That's the appearance of corruption -- when it's not unreasonable to wonder whether a President Hillary Clinton would really be on the side of the picketers...or her corporate benefactor?

Read the rest of the article here.  It is not just a monopoly game.