Abramoff: Campaign Contributions = Bribery

You can take it with a grain of salt -- convicted influence-peddler Jack Abramoff, who greased the wheels of Republican government with cash during the Bush years, is trying to rehabilitate himself.

But he's certainly telling the truth when he says:

What I did not consider then, and never considered until I was sitting in prison, was that contributions from parties with an interest in legislation are really nothing but bribes. Sure, it's legal for the most part. Sure, everyone in Washington does it. Sure, it's the way the system works. It's one of Washington's dirty little secrets - but it's bribery just the same.

Campaign contributions are the root of all evil in our system of government. Why did the economy collapse? Because creeps like former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine spent money and influence to get rid of all the rules. 

Why is our healthcare system still a catastrophe? Because the insurance industry bought enough politicians to take the teeth out of reform.

Why are we blindly destroying our planet's ability to sustain life in the form to which we are accustomed, and in which our species evolved? Because the energy industry corporations have virtually unlimited money to spend buying politicians who then force the taxpayers to bear the cost of their doing business ... with cancers, emphysemas, polluted waterways and groundwater that cost billions to clean up -- and our atmosphere, whose ability to remove excess carbon and bury it in rocks and oceans is now grievously broken.

Even the White House is up for grabs -- Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute bought themselves ten years of a do-nothing policy on global warming, the denationalization of Iraqi oil, and the biggest profits in the history of money. Goldman and Sachs appear to have bought themselves control of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

It's so egregious and so openly accepted now that Koch Industries -- a conglomerate whose entire business model is based on exploiting public resources, and forcing taxpayers to pay for the waste it generates, now have their own candidate, Herman Cain.

When entrenched forces become so powerful that they can prevent a society from acting in its own interest, that society is in existential danger. 

Just like stellar matter, power and money accumulate in pockets of gravity. That's the state of nature.

Capitalism, regulated by democracy, allows freedom.

Capitalism unfettered destroys democracy. 

It begins with legalized corruption -- and that's where it must end.