The People Who Own and Run the United States

There are many rich people who have their hooks into the American people.  Two of the most important are the Koch Brothers who are brilliantly creating a new country in their own image through the use of a variety of front groups and paid hacks and organizations like ALEC.

Daily Kos has a most enlightening article on our new plutocracy.  Here's a piece of it:

These are the groups that own the Republican party. And let's be clear, in point of fact they are the Republican Party.  The McConnells, the Inhofes, the Tea Party ilk who vote in lockstep at their bidding are really nothing more than paid-off stand-ins. These organizations, ALEC in particular, are made up of industry lobbyists, executives and  corporate lawyers who will actively and eagerly sell us all down the river in a heartbeat if it means more profits. When you cut to the bone of what the Tea Party really is, it's this: a group of fat and irate fossil fuel corporations who will pay any price to stop the U.S. government from checking their endless thirst for increased profits, increased drilling, increased mining. More than anything else, this shows why the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision was such an abomination: it allowed people just like this to take over our country by buying out our political system. This time, however, what they're doing has life-altering consequences for us all. And right now there is only one person stopping them from doing that--the guy in the Oval Office.
What is ALEC? This is ALEC:

ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through the secretive meetings of the American Legislative Exchange Council, corporate lobbyists and state legislators vote as equals on ‘model bills’ to change our rights that often benefit the corporations’ bottom line at public expense. ALEC is a pay-to-play operation where corporations buy a seat and a vote on ‘task forces’ to advance their legislative wish lists and can get a tax break for donations, effectively passing these lobbying costs on to taxpayers. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations.

Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills.

This is what Democracy has come to in the United States of America.  There are a lot of words for it, Oligarchy, Corporatocracy, Plutocracy. Whatever you want to call it, their already-organized response to the President's proposed EPA Rulemaking fits the bill:


Please read the rest of the article here.