Public financing, anyone?
Great letter to the editor in WSJ today.
A Slick, Crass Form of Official Near-Bribery
I was enjoying the well-written and informative article on Starbucks ("Legislative Grind: Cautiously, Starbucks Puts Lobbying on Corporate Menu," April 12) when a single sentence literally stopped me in my tracks: "The price of access to meet lawmakers is often campaign contributions." After being taken with the stark, simple honesty of that statement, I became increasingly appalled and then alarmed by it. If our collective attitude toward that fact has become a shrug of the shoulders (and the way it was presented here suggests that very thing), then almost nothing else written in your newspaper really matters. It means that we very well may have lost our republic -- and the democratic values that underpin it -- to a slickly and intricately crafted, but no less crass, pay-as-you-go form of officially sanctioned near-bribery that winks at the law and pretends to be something it's not. Doesn't anyone have a problem with that?
Not to oppose this is to be complicit in it.
John Figliozzi
Clifton Park, N.Y.
###
Maybe someone should forward this piece to this guy:
A Slick, Crass Form of Official Near-Bribery
I was enjoying the well-written and informative article on Starbucks ("Legislative Grind: Cautiously, Starbucks Puts Lobbying on Corporate Menu," April 12) when a single sentence literally stopped me in my tracks: "The price of access to meet lawmakers is often campaign contributions." After being taken with the stark, simple honesty of that statement, I became increasingly appalled and then alarmed by it. If our collective attitude toward that fact has become a shrug of the shoulders (and the way it was presented here suggests that very thing), then almost nothing else written in your newspaper really matters. It means that we very well may have lost our republic -- and the democratic values that underpin it -- to a slickly and intricately crafted, but no less crass, pay-as-you-go form of officially sanctioned near-bribery that winks at the law and pretends to be something it's not. Doesn't anyone have a problem with that?
Not to oppose this is to be complicit in it.
John Figliozzi
Clifton Park, N.Y.
###
Maybe someone should forward this piece to this guy:
posted by bda at 10:21 AM
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