Big Business Billionaires to Continue Buying Elections in the US

[lunasun]

http://www.nationofchange.org/big-business-billionaires-continue-buying-elections-us-1410523563
The promise of more transparency and open government by the Feds, is laughable. As long as biotech companies, corporate polluters, and pharmaceutical behemoths, among others, have the opportunity to buy our politicians, we don’t have an open government. Following are just a few examples of corporations who buy votes in Congress and the Senate with their deep pockets:

Monsanto’s contributions to the House and Senate can be found in a link in the article
Big Pharma spent nearly $2.7 billion on lobbying expenses from 1998 to 2013 — more than any other industry and 42 percent more than the second highest paying industry: insurance.

The political action committees of the 11 largest health insurance companies and their primary trade group gave $10.2 million to federal politicians (in the last five years) with nearly two-thirds of the total going to Republicans who oppose the law or support its repeal, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.

Other big donators are in telecom, media, and Internet industries – to promote the limiting of viable, unbiased reporting.

It isn’t difficult to see who is running this country. It certainly isn’t the people. When you consider that just a few elite individuals own a majority of the Fortune 500 companies in this country, and that those companies give exorbitant amounts of money to political campaigns, it is obvious we have become an oligarchy.

Charles de Montesquieu, the French politician and philosopher once said, “The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy,”

[upaloopa]

1. We have measure P in Santa Barbara County.

It is an anti fracking measure. That is all it is. But big oil has ad after ad and signs after signs saying it will stop all oil production in the county