Want a favor from a member of Congress? Give him money. That was the advice Mick Mulvaney, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and head of the Office of Management and Budget, gave to a group of some 1,300 bankers and lending industry professionals at a conference in Washington, DC.
Mulvaney, a former South Carolina representative, said he would only meet with lobbyists who had donated to his campaign while speaking at the American Bankers Association conference on Tuesday, the New York Times reported. “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mulvaney said. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
So even if a lobby group needed to speak to Mulvaney on the merits - on an actual issue that impacted his state/district/citizenry - that group STILL couldn't speak to him without paying up a campaign contribution first?
HOW THE HELL IS THAT NOT BRIBERY???
Oh, right. This is why:
The anticorruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech here in question. Indeed, 26 States do not restrict independent expenditures by for-profit corporations. The Government does not claim that these expenditures have corrupted the political process in those States... A single footnote in Bellotti purported to leave open the possibility that corporate independent expenditures could be shown to cause corruption... For the reasons explained above, we now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption...
I call bullshit, Justice Kennedy. Mulvaney just made it perfectly clear that as an elected official he would listen only to those who Pay-To-Play. Any excuse he has now about "oh, we will listen to our constituents too" is too much ass-covering on his part.
And what the hell would be stopping Mulvaney from playing this Pay-To-Play scam now that he's in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an office he is openly undermining by telling the banks and financial institutions under its review ways they can limit and shut the Bureau down.
Money is not Free Speech, you goddamn Conservative Greedheads. Money is a tool to buy and sell things. And with enough money, you can buy up politicians and sell out our nation. The ones who don't have any money can't play this fucking game.
Citizens United ruling is one of the key factors our nation is fucked up now with the corruption of trump drowning us all in the rot.
We are so very royally fucked.
1 comment:
We will have a long list of repairs to undertake before we even start on our own agenda once we get back in power, but campaign finance and lobbying check both boxes and should thus be a top priority, right behind reining in the cheating of our elections.
-Doug in Oakland
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