Comment Text:
Dear Chris,
I've been regularly watching MSNBC since the 2008 presidential primaries. I became a fan of the Rachel Maddow show and first met you as a guest commentator on her program. I think your weekend programs are first rate and more than make up for Rachel's weekend absence.
Politically I no longer know how to characterize myself. Suffice it to say that I am left of center: the two politicians that I most admire are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The only candidate for whom I knocked on doors was RFK in 1968 – and they shot him. It was the first election in which I could vote. And I did - for Humphrey rather than RFK, and it broke my heart.
I live in suburban Cleveland Ohio in reasonable comfort, at least for now. I fit into the category of those in their 60s in 2008 who were laid off during the economic calamity and were unable to find alternative employment. Time passed and eventually even the extended unemployment benefits ran out. I took my Social Security early. My wife and I are without health insurance and have been for a couple of years. In June of this year I will qualify for Medicare. Unfortunately, my wife will have to wait more than 3 years before she too qualifies. Over the past year in order to stabilize our finances I cashed in nearly $100,000 of my IRA to eliminate a home equity loan, refinance our mortgage, and pay for my wife's medical care. I still have about $20,000 left. I am a healthcare bankruptcy waiting to happen. There is nothing to be done but hope for the best.
I am writing you prompted by today's program in which you made sure that the audience understood that the implementation of Dodd/Frank financial regulation is being deliberately obstructed and delayed by financial lobbyists. Someone claimed that there were ten financial lobbyists for every member of Congress. It doesn't matter what Congress does or intends, in the end the lobbyists write the laws. We've turned our political institutions into markets dominated by moneyed interests that seek to serve only themselves independently of the public interest. Where the hell do we get off calling this a government of by and for the people?
Here is what I want: get the money, I mean all the money, out of our politics. As a society we make laws aimed at keeping minors from indulging in vices such as alcohol and tobacco. We do this in the belief that it prevents irresponsible behavior. Is putting alcohol in the hands of a minor really very different from lobbyists putting money in the hands of a politician?
How do you remove money from politics in a society in which money is the measure of all things? I don't know. How did we become such a society? I don't know that either, but it seems to have gained momentum with the trickle-down of Reaganomics and the certain decline of the middle-class that followed. I do know that as a citizen I feel ashamed of my country's political institutions. Lobbyists write our laws and have been doing so for years. The highest court in the land decides that less regulation and more money in the political market will make it better. The deregulatory madness at the heart of the financial meltdown now threatens our politics. Is it wise to await a another collapse before addressing this problem?
I am a child of the 50s and 60s. The country is nearly unrecognizable to me now and soon, I fear, it will simply seem foreign ... the feelings of alienation I had in my youth seem child's play compared to what I now feel.
