WILL BUNCH, in his September 28th column says everything I did except he doesn't trace the corruption back to its source in the line of First Amendment decisions that start with the Sullivan Decision in 1964, through Buckley v Valeo of 1976, through the other decisions gutting and destroying the campaign finance reform and other clean government laws passed in witness of the criminality of Nixon and others and on to the even worse decisions, the Supreme Court enabling the corruption of our politics and handing over power to billionaires domestic, certainly as they always seem to end up doing, but also foreign as they were warned would be one of the consequences of Citizens United, a consequence which became reality in the 2016 election that gave us Trump. Here's how he starts:
It sounds bizarre, but a $1,117.40 summer internship at a vineyard in the heart of California wine country may prove the ultimate saga in how Big Money has permanently broken American politics. It was as seen on TV this past week in Washington, where squabbling Democrats and an obstructionist GOP is showing the middle class why we can’t have nice things.
The eager worker who showed up during the coronavirus summer of 2020 was no ordinary summer intern, but a then-44-year-old United States senator: Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. That Sinema (who makes $174,000 a year at her day job) would spend a week picking and maybe stomping on grapes in Napa Valley for some pocket change actually isn’t totally shocking for the Senate’s most iconoclastic member — atheist and bisexual with a defiant openness, and a marathoner with a Ph.D. in justice.
What’s more noteworthy is who was hosting Sinema and paying her four-figure intern salary during that wine-soaked summer: Billionaire Bill Price, who not only owns the Three Sticks winery in Sonoma but also co-founded one of America’s most lucrative private-equity funds, TPG Capital. At the end of her internship, Price did something worth more than his intern’s modest paycheck: He hosted a $5,000-a-ticket fundraiser that benefited both the Arizona senator’s campaign but also a PAC that supports a gaggle of centrist — i.e., anti-progressive — Democrats on Capitol Hill. The Intercept reported that the vineyard fundraiser was a key stop on a Sinema summer 2020 tour that netted campaign cash from Price, his TPG Capital associates, and Silicon Valley legends like billionaire Bill Gates.
You should read the rest of it because he is one of the stronger journalistic takes on this and he almost gets to the root of the matter of not only Sinema's but the other "centrist Democrats" doing Republican's bidding. But don't expect a journalist is going to get you to the real source of it.
Will Bunch is a professional journalist, if a real one and a good one, but professional journalists and the corporate entities and individuals who hire them have an interest in what Sullivan allowed the press, impunity from having to be careful not to lie in a way so as to defame politicians. The First Amendment rulings of the court gave them other things which are profitable to the media and privileges which people who work for the media find both profitable and pleasurable. It's a pain in the neck to have to fact check and verify and do the hard work of being a reporter who has to sift falsehood from truth, planted lies from hidden truths, etc. It is so much easier to go with the NPR-NYT style "it's being said" approach to creating ersatz reporting in which they can report lies and not bother with verification. I think Bunch is more careful than that but he certainly knows that if he did what I've done here, slam the corruption of our politics at its real source, the real corruption of our politics from the creation of the Constitution by slave-owners and financiers in ways that would benefit them and, especially in this, the corrupt pseudo-scientific 18th century "enlightenment" refusal of the First Amendment to make a distinction between the absolute right and moral obligation to tell the truth and that there is absolutely no right to tell a lie for an individual, one who has natural God-given rights and corporate entities like the media which are human creations without real rights but which were given privileges by the very un-godlike First Congress. I fully believe that it was that declaring that there was a moral obligation to tell the truth and one to not lie that was at the heart of the reluctance of the "framers" to include that obvious truth. It wasn't fashionable in the world of the 18th century "enlightened" to admit that there were such things and, beside that, as today, if "the law" can put aside questions of moral obligation it's so much easier to turn it into the tool of self-interest that the present Court is making it and people of their class.
I will say that in regard to Kyrsten Sinema Bunch implies something that I have thought about and that's the relationship between her CFI honored atheism and her seeming to believe that there is no such thing as a real and durable moral obligation, not even one that would have formerly fallen under the debased imitation of that as a "gentleman's agreement." I do have to wonder if she isn't an embodiment of what I have so controversially said here before, playing off of Dostoevsky's observation that if there is no God then nothing is impermissible. There is no logical, mathematical or scientific assertion that would give morality any durable or enduring status as reality, it has to have the conviction of belief to become real in almost anyone's life. I am and have always been open to a rational or scientific argument that would prove that assertion wrong though I have never had one made to me which I couldn't demolish, and I'm no pro at doing that, atheists do it all the time.
However, that assertion within this would easily be countered by pointing to the other "centrist Democrats" and ALL OF THE REPUBLICANS who do the kind of evil that Sinema is now engaged in, ALMOST ALL OF THEM PROFESSED CHRISTIANS perhaps with a few professed Jews thrown in. I can say that I don't buy their profession of belief in the Gospel or The Law anymore than I do a prosperity gospel hallelujah peddler or any other pseudo-Christian fraud or corrupt cult leader rabbis who prosper under the idiotic inspecificity and so pretended judicial stupidity of the First Amendment.
But her atheism isn't the entire explanation of her corruption.
There are three or four officially non-affiliated Democrats and one Buddhist in the Senate (at least two of whom I would vote for president at the drop of a hat) who not only seem to find but also demonstrate their belief in durable moral obligations of the kind that Sinema certainly doesn't believe in anymore than she believed in her former political stands as a Green, an independent and, as opportunity made it convenient to her, an ersatz Democrat. I don't question the demonstrated fidelity of those unaffiliated Democrats or the great Mazie Hirono BECAUSE THEIR ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN ANY WORDS COULD. Sinema could demonstrate the same thing if she chose to but, obviously, she doesn't care about that.
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While I have every confidence that saving Democracy, even it it passed and was signed into law by President Biden, would be destroyed by the goddamned Supreme Court as it has destroyed everything from clean elections legislation to the greatest law passed in the United States in the 20th century, the Voting Rights Act, we can't test that because a reputed atheist and a reputed Catholic (yeah, I was surprised to find out Manchin is officially one of those) are blocking it in the face of the worst anti-voter crime wave in the history of the country
In fact, if the two intertwined infrastructure bills implode this autumn, or if the pro-middle-class measure shrinks to the level of triviality, the failure won’t really be on the legislation itself, but rather the failure of Congress to enact a different measure: The For the People Act that aimed to take a whack at money in politics. Although it wouldn’t have eliminated the power of campaign cash altogether, the bill — which narrowly passed the House with only Democratic votes in March — includes several giant steps to clean up our campaign-finance mess, including a ban on untraceable, massive “dark money” donations.
The For the People Act — at least its most progressive, un-neutered version — is going nowhere in the Senate, blocked by a Republican-led filibuster. As a result of this, as well as stalled voting-rights legislation, a growing number of Democrats are willing to break with 200 years of warped precedent and either fully or at least partially kill the filibuster. Again, all 50 Democrats would need to be on board. Again, two of them are rigidly opposed to progress.
The goddamned Senate, the most anti-democratic entity in the government other than the goddamned Supreme Court are the roadblock to egalitarian democracy and for corrupt oligarchy that Madison, Hamilton, Jay, etc. intended it to be. That's something I doubt you'll ever hear from a professional journalist but I'm going to keep saying it as long as it's true and it always will be. Democracy shouldn't be so hard to save as the Senate, the Supreme Court and, ultimately the friggin' slave-owner-financier "founders" intentionally made it to be.
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