If anyone in a position of significant power were left out of the racket, it would not be systemic. This is why behind his DNC stands Obama trying to defeat Sanders, while he says Clinton would make a great president.
3. Buckley - era Democracy: Supreme Incompetence
Obama calls these new anti-disclosure, pro-corruption provisions contained in CRomnibus II "American democracy" at work. When laid-back Obama actually goes to the trouble of personally taking his propaganda game to the public, as is the case with Citizens United, it can be expected that his deeds will be the opposite of whatever he says. Telling the truth to the public is not what he is paid for. These anti-disclosure provisions Obama got from Congress are in fact very clear sign posts that, as Jimmy Carter teaches, democracy is dead in the United States, except on paper.
When the law is used to step in and prohibit rather than promote anti-corruption measures, the malady is clearly systemic. In a democracy, elected officials are not able to get away with passing laws mandating that their formerly illegal bribe-taking and influence-peddling -- now legalized by a plutocratic majority of judicial supremacists on the Supreme Court whom these same officials have failed to restrain within their proper judicial powers -- can be conducted in secret as a matter of law. Ari Fleischer's satisfied comment that "Bush's 4th term continues" under Obama applies to more than just Guantanamo, secret renditions, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, extra-judicial assassination, and permanent war.
Voters should ask, is the United States more corrupt now than it was eight years ago? Than 16 years ago? 24 years ago?
The Supreme Court has constructed its "money-is-speech" jurisprudence since Buckley v Valeo (1976), and as recently as McCutcheon (2014), on the premise that disclosure is the cynosure of all remedies for political corruption. NYT editors complain that Citizens United "blithely pronounced, 'A campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure has not existed before today.' Effective disclosure exists?" Not since Citizens United "relied on disclosure as the nation's sole defense against political corruption under the Constitution, but somehow forgot to make it constitutionally mandatory for the illegal corporate electioneering that the Court legalized.
The Roberts 5 theory about the efficacy of disclosure both demonstrated the Court's total theoretical ignorance on the subject of political corruption and also was proven factually wrong in the 40 years lived experience of the country as it has succumbed to ever deepening and concentrated systemic corruption after Buckley. This occurred within a disclosure regime . NYT complains that the theoretical importance of disclosure did not assure the continuation of that regime after Citizens United. Instead the Court just blithely assumed that effective disclosure would somehow appear on its own to fill in the new loophole the Court had unwittingly carved for independent corporate expenditures.
In fact, the incompetence of the five mediocrities who control the Supreme Court is worse than that. Disclosure does work in a system where corruption is illegal and regularly prosecuted. But disclosure has no useful function after corruption is legalized or otherwise tolerated. Then corruption becomes systemic as it has been in U.S. politics after Buckley v Valeo (1976) bizarrely legalized transfers of money to or for politicians as some kind of protected "speech." Its bizarre justification was that some of the proceeds of the crime of political corruption might be spent on paid political propaganda in addition to "the political consultant racket." No such Robin Hood defense exists to legalize any other crime except the former crime of political corruption. And the Court has never deigned to tell the country, with more than Buckley's dishonest shell-game logic, where the Constitution requires an exception be made for political corruption as if it were less important than any other crime that is prosecuted no matter where the proceeds are spent.
But for Obama, disclosure mandated by administrative rules could have been effective to protect the government-procurement system. This is only because the government-procurement function fell outside the ambit of the Buckley line of cases that legalized political corruption in all other areas. Now that Obama and Congress have actively foreclosed disclosure of unlimited independent corporate and other expenditures, not just passively refused to mandate disclosure by law or administrative regulation, the whole rotten intellectual edifice of the Supreme Court's Buckley "money-is-speech" jurisprudence collapses on itself. The Court has no justification to support Buckley, left to its shell-game Robin-Hood logic that somewhere in his four words "the freedom of speech" James Madison intended to plant a poison pill for democracy, which at the beginning of the country's third century would secretly emerge from the hermeneutics of five plutocratic justices of no particular distinction as "the freedom to corrupt."
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