Corporations are not people. They do not breathe, they do not eat, they do not think. They exist only on paper. They are contractual agreements in which people unite their efforts in order to do one thing and one thing only: make money.
Therefore, corporations should not have the same rights that people do. But as of today, that's not how the Supreme Court of the United States sees things. Corporations are now essentially the fourth (or fifth) branch of government. Out of their endlessly deep pockets will come a barrage of TV ads, mailers, billboards, perhaps even canvassers, that will change the political system forever.
So we are now finding out the answers to some of our questions about which members of Congress actually represent We, the People...and which ones represent, Them, the Corporate Masters.
We have seen a Democratic Senator propose a policy that would put people in jail for not buying health insurance and a Democratic President who has taken numerous public beatings from those on the left side of the fence for his inability to ram something through a group of people...and yes, folks, the entendre was intentional.
But most of all, we've been asking ourselves: "why would Democratic Members of Congress who will eventually want us to vote for them vote against something that nearly all voting Democrats are inclined to vote for?"
Today's conversation attempts to answer that question by looking at exactly how money and influence flow through a key politician, Montana's Senator Max Baucus-and in doing so, we examine some ugly political realities that have to be resolved before we can hope to convince certain Members of Congress to vote for what their constituents actually want when it really counts.
