1. Government by the wealthy.
2. A country or society governed in this way.
1. Christmastime for Plutocrats
Political scientists need a new subspecialty to describe the end-of-year extravaganzas that influence peddlers and special interests have combined to make a Capital Christmas tradition: the racket of wholesale plundering of the government's treasury. Paraphrasing Willie Sutton, that's where the (tax-farmed and public-debt) money is.
On Friday, December 18, 2015, Obama and Congress processed the plutocracy's 2015 Christmas gift order at lightning speed. These rented politicians jump right to attention when the owners are being served. Who said government is broken? Under Obama it purrs right along smoothly, delivering on time annual gifts for plutocrats worth, this year, the whole discretionary civilian budget.
Bernie Sanders' supporters already understand this. But if there are Americans in need of more evidence that they live in a plutocracy, where governing is just another racket run by what Sanders calls "the billionaire class," then the Influence Peddlers Protection Act of 2015 should provide it. Technically known as the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, this law piles-on the already sufficiently probative evidence of systemic corruption provided by last year's similar year-end Bonanza for Plutocrats Act of 2014 (known as "CRomnibus").
To place this year's plunder described in Part B in context, last year's episode is first recapped in Part A of this chapter.
A) CRomnibus I
My extensive piece last year on what can now be called "CRomnibus I" described how Obama and a majority of Senate Democrats similarly connived to bypass ordinary legislative procedures to expedite the Omnibus appropriations bill of 2014. The 2014 "CRomnibus Act" ranks as one of the most deeply corrupt laws in United States history. It increased the amount of money that plutocrats can legally give to political parties by a factor of ten. (This enables plutocrats to finance, while their propaganda machine supports, the DNC effort to stop Bernie Sanders, for example).
Enabling of large 2014 kickbacks from plutocrats to political parties was a quid for the Chrismas quo to Wall Street of drafting taxpayers as insurers of gambling losses at their Capitalist Casino. The punters are poised to drop trillions when the roullette pill lands on the next too-big-to-fail banking crisis. I wrote: "The CRomnibus repeal of this 'swaps push-out rule' to withdraw federal insurance from this particular [swaps] gambling table is the most blatant of second Gilded Age economic recklessness, exceeding even such Clinton-era corruption as the repeal of Glass-Steagall."
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