Washington DC: a Potemkin Village

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has an excellent analysis of why things never seem to change and improve, and what We The People are up against in attempting to make our voices heard in DC.  It’s not a pretty picture, but at least we can be part of the community that helps others to open their eyes.  Here’s a significant extract:

We send politicians to stop the madness of government, but nothing changes.  Why?

Washington DC is a Potemkin village.  We focus on the visible but the constructs that impact us do not originate from the false façade.  There’s something behind that façade, and what we see is…. entirely… a façade.  That’s why sending the politicians doesn’t change the outcome.  To get to the core of the issue, we must first stop looking at the Potemkin village and instead look behind it.

Legislation, rules, regulations and laws are not written by congress.  The paperwork comes from the assembly of legal and lobbyist foot soldiers on K-Street.  That’s where the ink is put to the paper and the legislative outcomes first originate.  K-Street is where the corporations, multinationals and financial organizations control the process.

If the corporations behind the DC façade want to shift the money, they proactively write the rules, regulations and laws that steer the actual policy outcomes to their financial target or destination.  Their wealth expands and they reward the participants, the politicians.

Most of the entry level politicians are oblivious to where the corporations have proactively moved; however, a few of the politicians -- the leadership groups -- know exactly where the destination of the legislative intent is going.  The latter are tenured in the power structure behind the façade.

Two private domestic corporations, completely unaffiliated with the constructs of constitutional government, known as the RNC and DNC, require membership in order to participate in the pretense of American democracy.  The same financial entities that fund the K-Street operation, fund the private political clubs.

We The People, voters, are engaging in their construct to send ‘representatives’ into a political construct that is a façade.  The financial entities on K-Street, those who position wealth and generate the rules to maintain it, are the same financial entities that fund the mechanisms of the two private corporations (RNC/DNC).

The United States system of government is now operating to maintain this construct of common benefit. . . .

Read the entire posting here.  And I always learn something browsing through reader comments below the article.

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Legislation 101: Who is writing the legislation?

 

Who is writing the legislation? It’s not your Congress critter. At Conservative Treehouse, Sundance explains, and his entire posting is essentially Legislation 101 for voters:

. . . Recap: Corporations (special interest group) write the legislation. Lobbyists [K Street] take the law and go find politician(s) to support it. Politicians get support from their peers using tenure and status etc. Eventually, if things go according to norm, the legislation gets a vote.

Within every step of the process there are expense account lunches, dinners, trips, venue tickets and a host of other customary financial waypoints to generate/leverage a successful outcome. The amount of money spent is proportional to the benefit derived from the outcome.

The important part to remember is that the origination of the entire process is EXTERNAL to congress.

Congress does not write laws or legislation; special interest groups do. Lobbyists are paid, some very well paid, to get politicians to go along with the need of the legislative group.

When you are voting for a Congressional Rep or a U.S. Senator you are not voting for a person who will write laws. Your rep only votes on legislation to approve or disapprove of constructs that are written by outside groups and sold to them through lobbyists who work for those outside groups.

While all of this is happening the same outside groups who write the laws are providing money for the campaigns of the politicians, they need to pass them. This construct sets up the quid-pro-quo of influence, although much of it is fraught with plausible deniability.

This is the way legislation is created.

If your frame of reference is not established in this basic understanding you can often fall into the trap of viewing a politician, or political vote, through a false prism. The modern origin of all legislative constructs is not within congress.

“we’ll have to pass the bill to, well, find out what is in the bill” etc. ~ Nancy Pelosi 2009

“We rely upon the stupidity of the American voter” ~ Johnathan Gruber 2011, 2012.

Once you understand this process, you can understand how politicians get rich.

Much more at the link here.

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Mo Brooks spills the beans

 

Bascott O’Connor reports on the corrupt culture in DC.  From the Blue State Conservative website a day or two ago:

Congressman Caught On Tape
Explaining How “Special Interest Groups
Run Washington”

In March, at a campaign fundraiser, Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks was filmed and confirmed what many voters have suspected for years—money runs congress. Brooks is running for the Republican nomination for the senate seat being vacated by retiring Richard Shelby. The Alabama Senate primary is May 24 and polling has Brooks in third.

Here are the most substantial Mo Brooks quotes from the video.

• “Special interest groups run Washington.”
• “In the House of Representatives (I’ll use that as an example because that’s where I work), if you want to be a chairman of a major committee, you have to purchase it, and the purchase price for a major committee (say, like Ways and Means) minimum bid is a million dollars.”
• “We have committees broken down by A group, B group, and C group. C are the cheapest, B are middling, A is the most expensive. It’s the most expensive because those are the committees that special interest groups care the most about.”
• “So, where does a congressman come up with a million dollars to be chairman of one of these A committees? You can’t get it from Joe and Jane Citizen because Joe and Jane Citizen back home, they’re not going to be contributing that kind of money. They don’t have it—they need that money for their own families.”
• “And, so, you have to get it from the special interest groups, and with the special interest groups, there is a quid pro quo. If you don’t do what they tell you to do, they won’t give you the money that finances your chairmanship.”

Read the rest here.  Corruption.  Everywhere.

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GOP campaign financing: Part 6

Photo credit: irishmirror.ie

GOP campaign financing: Part 6 ~ Donald J. Trump

The donors to Trump’s campaign are unlike those backing any other presidential candidate -- of either party. Trump is financing his own campaign. He’s accepting small contributions from individuals, selling hats and other merchandise online, but he is not accepting corporate gifts, he has insisted that no SuperPACS use his name, and he does not accept funding through SuperPACS. Smaller business contributions are listed here.

And nobody knows the racket between corporations and politicians better than Trump. He has used the system for years. Trump has talked about his past business practice of contributing to politicians in both parties to gain access. 

On the other hand, he is pandering like a politician when he supports ethanol subsidies to win the Iowa caucus.    

But there is one indicator that the hedge funds/SuperPACS/Wall Street/CoC donor class is concerned. According to the Wall Street Journal, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donahue, is worried about a Trump victory:

The head of the nation’s biggest business lobby inveighed against presidential candidates singling out immigrants, ethnic or religious groups, highlighting divisions among supporters of the Republican establishment and the party’s leading candidate Donald Trump.

“There are the voices, sometimes very loud voices, who talk about walling off America from talent and trade and who are attacking whole groups of people based not on their conduct but on their ethnicity or religion,” Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a speech on Thursday. “This is morally wrong and politically stupid.”

When asked if the comments were specifically about Mr. Trump, Mr. Donohue said they applied to any one of the candidates from the right who “stepped over the boundary” on issues such as immigration and trade.

“They lost track of who we are and what we stand for and how we fix this economy,” he said.

But the remarks closely echo similar comments from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and other Republicans who have pushed back against of Mr. Trump’s policy prescriptions on immigration and security.

In other words, the CoC is worried that they will not be able to influence Trump. Compare that with the latest exposé on Conservative Treehouse reporting on the SuperPAC money going into anti-Trump ads (and pro-Cruz ads) in Iowa.

It’s always the same: Follow the money. So far with Trump, it’s the ethanol subsidies.

For background on Chris Christie’s fund-raising, posted earlier on this blogsite, go here.

For background on Dr. Ben Carson’s fund-raising, posted earlier on this blogsite, go here.

For background on Jeb Bush’s fund-raising, posted earlier on this blogsite, go here.

For background on Marco Rubio’s fund-raising, posted earlier on this blogsite, go here.

For background on Ted Cruz’z fund-raising, posted earlier on this blogsite, go here.

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