The power of dark money

Not much new in this Koch Brothers rehash. They raised 400 million from undisclosed donors and they had to hide the donors because, all these obscenely wealthy people are deathly afraid of hate mail. Or something. We'll leave aside that you can't get near a Koch Brothers confab with an army of angry citizens. I suspect between the few hundred oligarchs that pretty much run the world, they probably employ the equivalent of the entire Blackwater corporation, or whatever it calls itself these days.

As always, Charlie pinpoints the cause of this corruption. It is of course, Citizens United.

This is what Justice Anthony Kennedy helped bring about with a single sentence:

"We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."

In a tragic sense, he was right. In a tragic sense, the system is not corrupt at all. The Koch brothers, and the forces that they represent, are getting exactly what they've paid for. It is an above-the-board transaction, and a fundamentally conservative one at that. The peddling of the public influence is now fully privatized.

Good to remember that it's not just the Kochs. The plutocrats have taken over all our public institutions. I mean, look at who owns CBS, new home of crackpot con propaganda. Who do think they're serving? Pretty sure it's not us little people.