door - Represent Consumers

Thanks to Hollywood lobbyist and former Senate banking chair Chris Dodd for telling it like it is.

Dodd warned that Hollywood’s big-money contributors, who have been very, very good to President Obama and his fellow Democrats, might withhold their cash after the president expressed reservations over a controversial Internet anti-piracy bill.

Who ever would have guessed it would be Dodd, who during his 21-year-long career in Washington collected more than $48 million in campaign contributions, much of it from the financial industry he was supposed to be overseeing, who would cut through all the lies and palaver to deliver the knockout punch to our Citizens United-poisoned political system?

“Candidly, those who count on quote `Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” Dodd told Fox News. “Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

But who better than Dodd to make clear what contributors expect for their cash. He knows exactly how the system works, from both sides of the revolving door.

It was Dodd, after all, who made sure that AIG executives got their bonuses in 2009 while taxpayers were bailing out the firm at the heart of the subprime meltdown. It was no coincidence that AIG executives had showered Dodd with $56,000 in contributions.

Nobody knows this terrain as well as Dodd.

He was a “friend of Angelo,” one of those elected officials who personally got sweet mortgage deals – at below market rates– from Angelo Mozilo, the head of the Countrywide, the mortgage company that nearly sank under the weight of its subprime trash loans until Bank of America rescued it. (His colleagues on the Senate Ethics Committee dismissed a complaint against him.)

While he and his colleague, Rep. Barney Frank (House Financial Services Committee?), oversaw the watering down of financial reform legislation in the wake of the financial crisis, Dodd played the role of beleaguered public servant, wringing his hands in frustration over the army of lobbyists against whom he was claimed he powerless.

But now that’s he moved from Washington to Hollywood, he’s got a new script that calls for tough, public, bare-knuckled threats to the president of the United States.

And whatever he owes the American public for his perfidy as an elected official, we owe him a debt of gratitude for it. Because he has exposed the political system and the money that dominates it for what it is.

As Dodd has illustrated so eloquently, the Supreme Court got it wrong in their infamous Citizens United decision, which allows corporations to dump unlimited, unreported cash into our political system.

Money is not free speech. I don’t know whether Bob Dylan had Congress in mind when he sang nearly 30 years ago, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears,” but he was prophetic.

The impact of money in politics has put a curse on our democracy, and it won’t be lifted until we throw the corporations and the billionaires’ money out.

As Dodd’s remarks demonstrate, big money campaign contributions are a blunt force instrument, which corporate interests and the wealthy can use to control the politicians who depend on them for their livelihoods, as Dodd did when he was playing the part of the distinguished U.S. senator.

Rest assured, the people who gave him $48 million knew his real role was so serve them, whatever lines he was required to utter for the scene he was playing at the time.

While the media’s grand poobahs have been poopooing the Occupy movement as a bunch of clueless hippies, the occupiers themselves couldn’t be more focused on the source of their frustration.

It’s a political system addicted to corporate cash, with politicians willing to do and say anything to keep it coming.

The occupiers communicate a keen sense of just how outrageously we have been betrayed by a government captured by corporate campaign contributions, lobbyists and the cozy swinging door between government and big business.

Though the occupiers have been criticized for not arriving with a full legislative agenda in tow, the homemade cardboard signs they carry pithily describe the world that has been too often, until now, left out of the political debate between our two parties, which, just like other kinds of addicts, are unable to have an honest conversation about their substance abuse, or to acknowledge the damage it’s done.

The issue of corporate influence peddling has also been largely left out of the media’s horse race political coverage, which focuses on philosophical differences between left and right rather than what the occupiers are focused on – the corporate might that has overwhelmed our politics.

The occupiers know that at the root of our financial collapse, bank bailout, jobless recovery and continuing housing crisis is one root cause – the undue influence of bankers and corporate titans over our political system.

So it’s left to the youth camped out in parks across the country to pose the tough questions.

They’re picking up on the strong rhetoric Barack Obama himself used back when he was a candidate about the need for fundamental change in our political system. But the president abandoned that quest, and now he’s got to raise $1 billion dollars to fund his reelection ambitions.

The occupiers have also picked up on Obama’s call for civility, with their own devotion to process and making sure everybody gets heard. The cynics are having a blast mocking the occupiers’ general assembly meetings. But the atmosphere at the occupations is a world away from the toxic cable talking point battles that have gotten the country nowhere. Let’s see who has the last laugh.

Here at WheresOurMoney, we’re offering a powerful antidote to the toxic flow of corporate money that is poisoning our democracy: a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s wrong-headed Citizens United ruling, which said that for purposes of political contributions, corporations are just like people. This terrible decision will only make a bad situation worse and we’ve got to start the fight against it now. You can read the amendment, get more background on Citizens United, and sign a petition here.

In new Hollywood role, former senator plays the heavy

Government Under the Influence