Breaking the corporate, two-party stranglehold on our political system is the only way forward. The 2024 election might be the tipping point.
“Keep money out of politics!” by Public Citizen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Let’s get this out of the way first: We don’t have a functioning democracy. We live under a corporate-political oligarchy that completed its coup d’état in 2010 after the Supreme Court decided by a 5–4 voted to eliminate restrictions on political campaign spending.
Former President Jimmy Carter in a 2015 interview summed what happened to what was left of our so-called democracy after the court ruled on the Citizens United case:
“Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”