Bill Moyers thoughtfully analyzed this distinction in tompaine.com. He describes the access our legislators give to special moneyed interests:
The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.
Moyers writes that this huge legalized bribe is “a small investment on the return,” pointing to specific pieces of corrupt legislation passed by Congress in the past decade. All of this has been given the combined stamp of approval of “big money” and the religious right:
Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God’s favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.
Moyers ends his piece with the following:
This is the heresy of our time – to wrestle with the gods who guard the boundaries of this great nation’s promise, and to confront the medicine men in the woods, twirling their bullroarers to keep us in fear and trembling. For the greatest heretic of all is Jesus of Nazareth, who drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem as we must now drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.
