Who Has Bought the Republican Party?

As November 2 draws nearer, some chinks in the armor of secrecy surrounding attack ads against Democratic candidates are beginning to appear.  In the words of Deep Throat to Woodward and Bernstein, lets follow the money and see who America’s rulers will be, if Republicans are able to regain power.

Back in May, the House of Representatives passed HR 4213, the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act. The bill, which ran into a Republican-led filibuster that stalled it in the Senate, is intended to close tax loopholes that incentivize the offshoring of American jobs to foreign countries. One congressman who voted against the bill was Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL).

Now, it has come to light that Kirk — who is also the Illinois Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — held a fundraiser with at least a dozen American businessmen doing business in China the day before he went to the floor of the House of Representatives to vote down legislation that would help keep American jobs from moving overseas.

The Capitol Fax Blog has obtained an internal memo detailing the Kirk campaign’s fundraising. Interestingly, at one point the memo sets out a fundraising calendar. On the calendar, it lists the words “Beijing FR” on May 27th, one day before the May 28th vote on the offshoring bill… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

Keith Olbermann and Faiz Shakir fill in the details.

The Chamber of Commerce is spending money hand over fist in for to return Republicans to power.

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.

Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber [corporate criminals delinked] last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has been critical of growing federal regulation and spending. These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group that keeps its donors secret, as it is allowed by law — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.

They suggest that the recent allegations from President Obama and others that foreign money has ended up in the chamber’s coffers miss a larger point: The chamber has had little trouble finding American companies eager to enlist it, anonymously, to fight their political battles and pay handsomely for its help… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

This was just the introduction to an extensive article exposing the chamber’s Machiavellian machinations.  I urge you to click through for the rest.

The Chamber is not the only source of money to follow as Keith and Howard Fineman reveal in a follow up to the previous video.

So a very small group, perhaps 1,000 strong, are attempting to buy our government.

Voters, ask yourselves this question?  Why are these very rich individuals so anxious to transfer power from the Democrats to the Republicans?  Some on the left claim that Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans.  Granted, some are.  But if the Democratic party as a whole were for sale, it would be far less expensive for these corporate demagogues to simply buy the Democrats, because shifting power costs more than maintaining it.  The only feasible answer is that Republicans will do what they’re told, while Democrats won’t.  Do you want to be governed by 1,000 of the uber-rich?

Republican rule is the punishment you may get for not voting!