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The Book of the Week is “Bill Moyers Journal, The Conversation Continues” by Bill Moyers, published in 2011. This compilation of interviews was done in the middle of the Obama Era–prior to the historical revisionism and 20 / 20 hindsight of the Trump Era and thereafter.
One subject Moyers touched on was campaign finance. Due to the merging of the American political, media and business worlds, and court rulings, money has corrupted the election process. Two cliches apply: The fox is guarding the henhouse (it’s really hard to clean up “Tammany Hall” because many of the enforcers themselves have conflicts of interest), and the fish rots from the head down (unethical behavior is contagious).
One way to take unfair advantages away from wealthy candidates is to legally require publicly financed campaigns. Obviously, even legally required disclosure means nothing to shameless, greedy officeholders who refuse to act ethically in connection with their conflicts of interest, once they’re elected.
Higher-quality (better behaved, less hypocritical!) Americans would be more inclined to run for office at all levels. Leaders need to be tax-paying, law-abiding citizens– people for whom honesty is a habit, a lifestyle (or at least have a reputation for it, such as Bernie Sanders). Otherwise, this nation will become a Third World country.
The latest big U.S. Supreme Court ruling is yet another indication that the nation needs campaign finance reform. That ruling was likely a choice between the lesser of two evils, in which the worse evil would be even more expensive (not just financially) for American taxpayers.
It was comparative to the 2008 financial-crisis bailout program. The alternative to the bailout would have been, that alpha males with hubris syndrome who possessed almost as much hegemony as George W. Bush, would have launched an extremely long, traumatic, complex set of lawsuits (whose goal of some would have been to get their bonuses), that would have bankrupted ordinary, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens. Ironically.
Perhaps the conservative Supreme Court justices rationalized that their ruling would be the lesser of two evils. Yes, they would give absolute power to a future president who acts like a dictator who loots his country. However, the law could be modified in the future. And the current American money-driven electoral system allows a candidate to purchase his way to office, anyway.
But the alternative would be: Trump could take the title, “president.” As is well known, Biden has some skeletons in the closet, and he’s been the target of witch hunts for, forever. So the ruling was also a deterrent to Trump’s allies and other Biden-haters who would stop at nothing to kick Biden out of office, and distract Americans from the 2024 presidential election process.
The bottom line is, TAXPAYERS ARE ALWAYS FOOTING THE BILL FOR THE MESSES AND SHENANIGANS OF THEIR GOVERNMENT. Decisions made by the authorities in massive financial scandals clearly aim to lessen the (still outrageous) tax burden on innocent Americans, lest there be revolution.
The United States needs CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM NOW. Abortion, gun control and healthcare can wait.
On a different issue, Moyers interviewed James Cone, a professor in New York City and a person of color. Cone thought white Americans omitted inconvenient facts when discussing their history, such as: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slaveholders. He said, “Because America likes to be innocent… that’s why it’s hard for Barack Obama or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to talk about blackness; if they talked about blackness in the real, true sense, it would be uncomfortable.”
Read the book to learn about a wealth of other issues on which America needs to work.