by Zach Bigalke

Created on: October 29, 2007   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

Corporate influence and lobbyist power have already pervaded Washington. Our security forces overseas, the entirety of our transport infrastructure at home, more and more functions traditionally managed by the government being handed over to corporate subcontractors along with pork barrels of cash for the trouble. Unions, with their own personal agendas, have no purer motive for cutting a check to candidates. We live in what is still, theoretically if not practically, a representative democracy... opening the floodgates for excessive funds would only serve to turn the screws all the way over to aristocratic governance. He who has the cash writes the rules...

We are already seeing the dearth of positives and the plethora of negatives surrounding privatization of government functions. Corporations are taking billions of dollars to repair the highway infrastructure in exchange for full control and autonomy over any levies appropriated from tolls - they are sucking on the teat of the cash cow at both ends of the negotiation. Blackwater has bungled its way across Iraq, ostensibly protecting American dignitaries for whom the legitimately-stationed armed forces are simply not good enough, killing and looting its way through the Iraqi citizenry and American taxpayer dollars. Lobbyists convince Senators and Congressmen to sign away environmental protections so that private enterprise and its peons can come in and chop the tops off the "purple mountain majesties" in a strip-mining frenzy or dump waste "from sea to shining sea" or belch particulates into the "spacious skies"... and we want to give these people license to further buy their way around the laws of the land, freely and openly and unapologetically defecating on democratic ideals and individual sentiment?

Even with the inevitable contribution limits, the ability of corporations and unions and guilds and any other non-individual entity to donate amounts to further eroding the meaning of the vote in the eyes of Americans... after all, if a business can hand over money to a politician, how are we to have meaningful oversight anymore? Borne of a special interest and with specific desires often at odds with accepted predetermined principles, corporations and unions and even non-profit charities have only their personal agendas in mind when they are handing over reams of blank checks to their friendly neighborhood Representative...

It is high time that the INDIVIDUAL take back more of the power which should be inherent in representative democracy. Washington is getting far too comfortable for the career politicians. Disenfranchised from the realities of REAL LIFE, the Beltway has yielded a society of degenerates fiending for ready cash supplies and desperate to help out their amigos in the world of money-making... we are losing our rights and our meaning as a united entity when we keep handing over the power to faceless corporations and the bloated hubris of those comfortable on power and excess...

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