Senator Elizabeth Warren Plans to Battle Political Corruption in the United States Government

Sen. Elizabeth Warren cited recent Pew Research Center polling that found only 18% of Americans say they can trust the U.S. government to do the right thing to unveil her Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act on Tuesday.

It is well known that the rich, their corporations, and their lobbyists have bought almost every member of the United States House of Representatives and almost every member of the Senate since 1981, which include such corrupt blowhards as RepubliCons Orrin Hatch, Mitch McConnell and Democrat Ron Wyden. Since 1981, every United States president has bent to the desires of the well-to-do on all matters having to do with redistributing income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent. Wyden, Hatch, and McConnell have voted to redistribute income and wealth from the 99 percent to the rich and powerful time and time again when they voted to export millions of jobs held by United States citizens via trade agreements.

The difference between the old higher US wages and benefits and the new three dollars a day jobs in foreign nations goes straight into the pockets of the super-rich via higher corporate profits, rising share prices, and surging dividends. The newly unemployed in the U.S. might get unemployment insurance for a few months if they are lucky.

Political corruption is precisely why income inequality has grown from the 1 percent receiving 8 percent of all income produced in the USA in 1980 to 37 percent today, and why three people own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population, and why the 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.

Warren’s plan provides a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress, Presidents, and agency heads and banning foreign lobbying and lobbyists donations to candidates and members of Congress.

Warren’s bill seeks to eliminate both the appearance and the potential for financial conflicts of interest by banning members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, federal judges, and other senior government officials from owning and trading individual stock, including requiring the Supreme Court follow the ethics rules applicable to all other federal judges. One study has found that members of the U.S. Supreme Court rule in favor of companies they invest in.

Warren advocates “locking the government-to-lobbying revolving door” and eliminating the “golden parachutes” that companies pay some executives when they enter public service, citing the instance of Goldman Sachs paying Gary Cohn more than $250 million when he left the firm to lead President Trump’s National Economic Council.

Warren’s legislation also aims to end what she characterizes as the corporate capture of public interest rulemaking by requiring disclosure of funding or editorial conflicts of interest when corporations and special interest groups pay for comments and studies that support rulemaking, as well as requiring elected officials and candidates for federal office to disclose more financial and tax information and making federal contractors – including private prisons and immigration detention centers – comply with federal open records laws.

A lot more can be done to end corruption in the U.S. government. Banning the paid speeches made by former presidents and high officials is a starter. Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama get $250,000 a pop for half-hour paid speeches. Who is to say the lure and promise of future profits do not influence the choices made by people in high office? In addition, the government could limit the amount of funding of political campaigns provided by political action committees, corporations, and individuals. However, the corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court has been so corrupted by the inflow of cash and favors and class warfare mentality in favor of their social and economic class, that they eliminated one hundred years of legal precedent in the Citizens United case of 2010 that limited contributions as outlined in the sentence above. Reversing that, and successfully impeaching the corrupt corporate wing of the Supreme Court would go a long way toward ending the massive wave of political corruption that has swamped the United States governments at all levels like rising tides of overflowing cesspools.

For the complete story, see Elizabeth Warren Proposes Ways to Fight Political Corruption–MarketWatch.

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In a Modern Sense, the Billionaires are the Political Right and the 99 Percent are the Left

The Communist Party of the United States never amounted to more than a few thousand people. The Socialist Party of the United States, quite different from the Communist Party, peaked in 1912 when presidential candidate Eugene Debs received 6.0 percent of the popular vote. The socialist party went downhill from there, and never really was a political threat to the two major corporate political parties. The political left of the United States has been effectively dead for decades in terms of communists and socialist. So who makes up the political left nowadays? And who is on the political right?

The political left is the 99 percent, while the political right is made up of the billionaires, their corporations, their corporate media, the two major political parties they own, their allies in political office, their anti-U.S. Constitution corrupt corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brent Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas).

In the days of yore, during the Great Depression, the left came up with socialist legislation, such as the 40-hour work week, social security, the minimum wage, labor union organizing rights, unemployment insurance, and so on. The right tried to prevent these things, and as President Franklin Roosevelt noted in 1936, the millionaires previously in control of the government and both major political parties wanted everything as it had been before the Great Depression. The millionaires wanted nothing for the 99 percent. They wanted to be in charge so to use government as an appendage of their own corporations, and let political corruption run rampant, just like the billionaires today in the United States.

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, when all those socialist programs were put in place, the United States middle class thrived. The middle and lower economic classes even won political battles, such as ending racial segregation, terminating the profitable war in Vietnam, winning the battle of the environment which industry lost, winning women’s rights, etc….

The 1 percent felt threatened enough to organize among themselves, using their corporations, and creating propaganda think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, and by 1975, the rich began a massive propaganda campaign, along with corrupting both major political parties and the United States Supreme Court into giving them more rights and a vast array of political victories over the 99 percent, especially when it comes to redistributing income and wealth from the 99 percent to themselves.

The rich use social issues to divide us, and keep our attention from the redistribution of income and wealth from us to them, led by such politicians as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, and Wall Street Senator Mitch McConnell. The billionaires who own the Democratic Party and the billionaires who own the RepubliCon Party often work together to redistribute income and wealth from the 99 percent to themselves, such as pushing legislation to export millions of jobs, while simultaneously using their corporate news media to divide the 99 percent via social issues, such as abortion, racism, the war against Christmas, the war against women, and the war against dirty diapers.

There you have it: the political right is made up of the billionaires and millionaires, and the political left is made up of the rest of us.

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