If you have any doubt that we live in a plutocracy, check out this very interesting article in the Huffington Post by my friend Cotty Chubb. In it, he reproduces a graph showing the recent spike in the price of stock shares for health insurance companies when Max Baucus (above) and a few other cronies on the Finance Committee he chairs announced their plan to scuttle the public option in the “health care reform” bill they intend to report out to the full Senate. The market apparently felt that Baucus's action added between four and five billion dollars to the worth of those companies.
Wikipedia reports that from “2003 to 2008, Baucus received $3,973,485 from the health sector,
including $852,813 from pharmaceutical companies, $851,141 from health
professionals, $784,185 from the insurance industry and $465,750 from
HMOs/health services, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.”
Now he's paying his masters back. Aware of how bad this looks, Baucus, on 1 July of this year, announced that he would take no more money from the health industry, but of course he hasn't offered to return the earlier bribes — and we can be quite sure that when he retires from the Senate he will be well taken care of by the folks who own him, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in “consulting fees”, with the money this time going directly into his own pockets.
He has essentially sold his public trust, and the welfare of all Americans, for cold hard cash.
Why is this man not in jail? Because we live in a plutocracy.