Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Republicans For Sale to the Highest Bidder


I just finished reading "Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage," which follows various First Class passengers on the Titanic on its ill-fated maiden voyage.  Frankly, the individuals followed in the book who lived in America's first Gilded Age would be shocked by the greed and avarice of today's plutocrats who view the majority of Americans with even more disdain than how the third class passengers were treated on the night of April 14/15, 1912 - most were kept from the boat deck until most of the half-filled lifeboats had been lowered away.  Can one picture David or Charles Koch remaining on board following the code of women and children first so that a young immigrant woman might survive as did John Jacob Astor and many other captains of industry 102 years ago?  I can't!  But I digress in part.  Recently, an unseemly parade of Republicans could be seen pandering and prostituting themselves to the always slimy billionaire Sheldon Adelson who is basically looking for a 2016 GOP presidential candidate for 2016.  The eagerness to sell one's self to the highest bidder ought to disturb those who still believe in American democracy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this round of GOP prostitution.  Here are excerpts:

Who wants to marry a billionaire?  John Kasich does. So do Scott Walker, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush.

When Sheldon Adelson, the world’s eighth-richest person, according to Forbes, let it be known that he was looking for a Republican candidate to back in the 2016 presidential race, these four men rushed to Las Vegas over the weekend to see if they could arrange a quickie marriage in Sin City between their political ambitions and Adelson’s $39.9 billion fortune.

Adelson was hosting the Republican Jewish Coalition at his Venetian hotel and gambling complex, and the would-be candidates paraded themselves before the group, hoping to catch the 80-year-old casino mogul’s eye. Everybody knows that, behind closed doors, politicians often sell themselves to the highest bidder; this time, they were doing it in public, as if vending their wares at a live auction.

Kasich, the Ohio governor, kept addressing his speech to “Sheldon,” as if he were having a private tete-a-tete with the mega-donor (Adelson and his wife spent more than $93 million on the 2012 elections) and not speaking to a roomful of people.

Walker, the Wisconsin governor, pandered unabashedly by giving the Hebrew meaning of his son Matthew’s name and by mentioning that he displays a menorah at home along with the Christmas tree. And Christie, the New Jersey governor, gushed about his trip to Israel and the “occupied territories.”  

That was a gaffe. Pro-Israel hawks consider the term pejorative and, at any rate, the more relevant occupied territory at the moment is the Republican Party — wholly occupied by billionaires.

In addition to Adelson, two of the world’s other top-10 billionaires, David and Charles Koch (combined net worth: $81 billion) are pouring tens of millions into the 2014 midterm elections in an effort to swing the Senate to Republican control. These and other wealthy people,  . . . . are buying the U.S. political system in much the same way Russian oligarchs have acquired theirs. 

This pay-to-play culture is, at best, unseemly. What makes it ugly is when it becomes obvious just how much the wealthy corporate interests get in return. As it happens, two such instances were on display Tuesday on Capitol Hill, as one congressional committee examined how Caterpillar Inc. avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes while another panel probed how General Motors was allowed to produce cars with a lethal safety defect for more than a decade. 

A Senate panel examined how Caterpillar, using a tax loophole, shifted profits from the United States to its affiliate in Switzerland, where it negotiated a special tax rate — thus cutting its U.S. taxes by $2.4 billion.

In the case of GM, the company knew about a problem in some of its ignition switches since at least 2001, but it didn’t do anything until this year, after at least 13 people had been killed. 
The original Gilded Age was great for the wealthy but not so great for everyone else.  Yet the GOP and its billionaire bank rollers seem hell bent to take us back to those bad old days when most of us were viewed as easily expendable at best and less than human at worse. 

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