by Robert Reich
In Rancho Mirage, Cal., Sea Island, Ga., and Las Vegas, the Republican "money primary" is occurring, in which GOP candidates are making their cases to exclusive gatherings of wealthy donors whose riches have granted them far more power than held in the first Gilded Age by political bosses and party chairmen. At least in that age, those bosses were indirectly bound to networks of ethnic urban voters and those chairmen had to court the party hacks beneath them. Now in this second Gilded Age the billionaires have responsibility to nothing and no one but themselves and their heirs. And the deals they're making, unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, will add still more to their riches, and compound their power for the next round of payoffs. That the Democrats will have to make similar deals with perhaps more publicly-spirited billionaires does not balance the playing field.
It is now the privileged and the powerful of both parties against the rest of us, whose voices are rapidly disappearing. We must not only vote in 2016, but create an indelible mandate to reverse this obscene corruption.
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