The Forces Buying This Election

Tom Toles nails this one. And Think Progress has been on fire this election cycle. It broke the New York Times story on the Chamber of Commerce secretly funneling money for major corporations, including foreign interests, mostly oil. Which deliciously falls into the self interests of the oil dependent Koch Brothers conglomerate and the Kochtopus, engineering America for a carbon only energy policy, rejecting conservation or alternatives, making America more dependent on foreign sources of energy, killing any environmental measures, so the Koch Brothers keep raking in billions, regardless of what's good for America. Because they think they are America despite the fact that foreign interests are comrades in their cause and are joining them in corrupting the American electoral process. The Koch Brothers ramped up the teabaggers using the camouflobbyist shell PACs from Rove et. al., and some skillful purchase of media whores to further infiltrate traditional media thus extending the reach of the right wing noise machine.

There is a similarly corrupt dynamic recurring in Idaho with IACI going all in to defeat Kieth Allred who had the audacity to suggest that IACI members' special interest tax exemptions should be re-examined, before we take the unprecedented step of depriving Idaho school children. And as mentioned in the comments in the post below, SE Idaho Malalueca magnate, Frank Vandersloot, and prominent IACI member, is attempting dirty trick attack ad in an independent buy on behalf of questionably qualified Tom Luna. Vandersloot joins "K12 Management Inc., a for-profit curriculum developer based in Virginia that provides the curriculum for Idaho’s largest online charter school" which wants to make sure they keep their nose in the public trough. Please recall that Tom Luna received his degree online just before he first ran for superintendent. They ain't helping Luna in order to get money for Idaho school children. Betsy has more.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the four members of the SCOTUS for recognizing that first amendment rights don't extend to corporations, which lack a right to vote and are inherently restricted from participation in a government of "We, the people". Just five justice voted to overrule wildly popular bipartisan legislation restricting the corruption of money in our political process and nobody responds to that better than Justice Stevens who said.

At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Emphasis mine.

Updated for clarity.