A recent document from the Republican Governors Association (RGA) illustrates just how much access is available to corporate donors.
Apparently there are new offices in our government called Statesmen, Cabinet, Board, and Council. These new government positions can be purchased for:
- Statesman $250,000
- Cabinet $100,000
- Board $50,000
- Council $25,000
A Cabinet level position gets you into exclusive events with Republican governors and "opportunities to exchange ideas and concepts with our Governors."
Maybe it's time to cut out the middle men and just install these "statesmen" as our new government. Or we could just directly sell state assembly positions. Or the governor's office.
After all, all this pesky government has to be a great deal of overhead for the corporate "statesmen." No wonder corporate special interest groups rail against "government" so much. What a tremendous and inefficient inconvenience to the "statesmen." Why not just sell off government directly?
Below are some of the "statesmen" and "cabinet members" or click on Jonathan Wiseman's article at the NY Times.
$250,000 "Statesmen"
Aetna
American Beverage Association
Centene
Coca-Cola
Corrections Corporation of America (hmmm ... what could they possibly want?)
ExxonMobil
Koch Industries
Pfizer
Motorola
Microsoft
Sanofi
United Health Group
WalMart
WellPoint
$100,000 "Cabinet" members
AFLAC
Allergan
Blue Cross, Blue Shield
BNSF Railway
Comcast
Duke Energy (they're about to get a $110 million handout from Governor John Kasich here in Ohio)
Express Scripts
Farmers Insurance
Healthways
Hewlett-Packard
K-12, Inc. (apparently the future of our public schools)
Marathon Oil
MPAA
The National Rifle Association
Novartis
Shell Oil
Verizon
Walgreens
I think my favorite part of Wiseman's article, however, is that Republicans, in a tit-for-tat move, released a Democratic Party document showing similar levels for the Democratic Governors Association (DGA). Ummm ... turning "government for sale" into a Democrat/Republican fight does not solve "government for sale."
The real problem is the corruption. Regardless of who is doing it.
If we can't find a way to get the money out of politics, I fear it will come to the pitchforks.
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (release scheduled for October).