"No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.
"Any officer, employee, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation, who shall violate this act, shall be punished upon conviction " by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years " and if a domestic corporation it may be dissolved " and if a foreign or non-resident corporation its right to do business in this state may be declared forfeited." [emphasis mine]
Five Republicans on the Supreme Court, however, struck down that and literally hundreds of other state and federal anti-bribery laws in their corrupt 2010Citizens United decision.
In the wake of that decision, state courts were forced to strike down similar anti-bribery laws in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
As a result, today Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kirstin Sinema, Josh Gottheimer, and the entire Republican caucus in both the US House and Senate and virtually every Republican in every state house and senate in America are regularly on the take.
A political network organized by rightwing billionaire oligarchs is believed to have more employees and a larger budget than the entire GOP. And it's just one of several, each run by different groups of American oligarchs, sometimes even using money or other resources from foreign countries (Russia, for example, is alleged to have funded the NRA).
This is a genuine crisis for American democracy. The poison of big money is seeping through the veins of our political system in ever-larger quantities. If not stopped, this process can be fatal.
No democratic republic in history has ever survived as a functioning democracy more than a few generations once political bribery is either legalized or simply becomes widespread due to weak law enforcement.
This story of how wealthy oligarchs corrupt political systems is so ancient it's at the core of the decline and fall of the Roman empire.
Historically we've usually seen this phenomenon in Third World countries with a weak rule of law, but more recently it destroyed or is eroding democracy in Russia, Hungary, The Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, and South Africa (which, with the "gift" of American corporate lawyers to help write their new constitution three decades ago, institutionalized corporate personhood and the right of corporations to fund elections, as I document in Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became Persons).
The evidence of this cancer -- installed into our body politic by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court -- is now so obvious that it's turning elections and politicians are openly calling it out.
And if we don't do something about it soon, America may well go down the authoritarian road Trump tried to pave and the countries listed above are now on.
America has faced a crisis of oligarchy much like today's twice before.
The first time was in the two decades leading up to the Civil War, when the Cotton Gin enabled a handful of uber-wealthy families in the South to buy up or wipe out their cotton-growing competitors, producing America's first full-blown fascist oligarchy.
After this handful of super-rich families had taken over the entire political system of the Confederacy, they rose up and declared war on the United States itself, explicitly trying to end America's experiment with democracy once and for all. (I lay this out in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class.)
America's second experience with oligarchy stretched from the 1880s and the Industrial Revolution until the Republican Great Depression led Americans to put Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House in the election of 1932.
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