Bernie Sanders discusses the power of big money and the need for publicly funded elections

How does it happen that a year after the economic crisis, Congress has enacted no real economic reform? Is it because financial corporations have spent five billion dollars on campaign contributions? Why do Americans pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs? Why do we have an enormous military despite the end of the cold war? Independent Senator Bernie Sanders points to the common source of the problem:

On and on it goes. The reality of Washington, to a very significant degree, is that those people who have the money are able to influence public policy. Big money controls the agenda. If you don’t have the money, you get to the end of the line. That’s the reality today. It could get worse. Right now, the Supreme Court is considering a case that could be used to open the coffers of all the big corporations to directly fund campaign ads in this country. So you would not just be dealing with political action committees and lobbyists, you would have to deal with the treasuries of large corporations. This is a huge issue. The antidote, in my view, is public funding of elections so that everybody has the opportunity to run for office without having to be beholden to powerful special interests.
Here's another issue where money is corrupting the debate: net neutrality. I agree with Sanders. In fact, I'm ready to concede that we are unable to deal with any important issue in the United States because the conversation has been thoroughly corrupted by money in the form of private campaign contributions. We desperately need publicly funded campaigns to have a chance to honestly deliberate important issues.

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Iraq journalism applied to Iran

According to Glenn Greenwald, if you want to see what Iraq journalism looked like, read the the hyped up news on Iran. Take, for example a recent Washington Times piece by Toby Warrick, which is:

purely one-sided, unquestioning and entirely anonymous series of dubious, unverified, fear-mongering assertions that can have no purpose other than to create the most sinister picture of the "Iranian threat" possible.

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Bond raters hiding behind First Amendment

This is insanity: The bond raters, those three big Wall Street companies that rated crappy mortgages to be great investments, thereby plunging the country into economic chaos, are hiding behind the First Amendment. They are claiming that they can't be sued for the financial equivalent of calling a mouse an elephant, because their work product is just an "opinion." We charge millions of dollars for giving you a rating, and you can't hold us accountable because it's an "opinion." I'll tell you this: I work as a lawyer. If a screw up someone's case because I give him bad advice (in return for charging her a fee), she could (rightfully) sue me for malpractice. If I raised the defense that I can't be sued for terrible advice because it was merely "an opinion," I'd be laughed out of court with an adverse judgment tattooed onto my forehead. That the courts aren't letting these ratings firms get hammered makes you wonder whether the unspoken defense is "too big to fail." If they didn't have this ridiculous "First Amendment" defense, the smug and irresponsible raters would be ripped apart by millions of justifiably irate plaintiffs. And, of course, Congress is in no hurry to beat back the ratings firms' lobbyists and hold these jokers accountable for all of the 401K's they've trashed.

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