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Now, welcome to the award-winning Bestable Left Podcast with clips today from the Young Turks, the David Pakman Show, Represent.us.

Counter-spin, the Tom Hartman program, and activism from Wolf-Pak.com, Represent.us, SaveDemocracy.org, and stamp stampede.org.

Brazil's Supreme Court has come out pretty strong in response to widespread political corruption in their elections in recent years.

They've banned corporate donations in politics, which is amazing. The entire country of Brazil is now free, at least temporarily,

from the plight of corporate donations in politics. The court ruled eight to three to block such campaign financing, which in the most recent presidential elections, represented well over 90% of the funding for leading candidates and eventual presidents.

It reminds me of another country, I know. And this is one of the justices voting to ban it, said,

the influence of economic power culminates by turning the electoral process into a political game of marked cards, an odious pantomime that turns the voter into a puppet, crumbling in one blow both citizenship and democracy.

And the particular law that they overturned allowed corporations to donate two percent of their gross revenue from the year prior to any particular election cycle.

Rosa Weber now is one of my favorite people on the planet. I love that quote.

Yeah, that quote is amazing. Right. And in turning the voters into puppets, think that through for a second, right?

She's saying, if you have enough money, you just simply buy off the politicians, which is what they were doing in Brazil, and they did it to two billion dollars in legalized bribes.

Now you hear that and you think like, oh, that's a scandal. And it was a big scandal. And so remembering the 20 club election, we also had two billion dollars in legalized bribes that went to Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

But for us, it wasn't even a scandal. That's how we run things. Like, well, of course, the corporations bought two good products, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

And they had a race in the product Obama one instead. I mean, what's the big deal? Right. So she says, but if you take the money and you give it to the politicians and they use it to buy the money,

to buy their ads, do all the things that gives them a larger megaphone to be able to spread these truth lies, their positions, etc. to the people.

And the other guy doesn't have a megaphone because corporations didn't give millions of dollars. Well, you've turned the people into a puppet because their votes are not actually informed.

It's the United of real democracy. One side has an overwhelming advantage you can't recover from. So the whole thing has become a sham.

Well, she was right about Brazil. She's also right, maybe even more so, by the United States of America, where these political donations are now considered fake or complete.

And we're supposed to accept our fate and bow our heads and say the donors get to pick our politicians. And that's it.

Yeah, I don't know if there wasn't going to be any Latin or French. Can I make one quick observation that I was watching? So in Bloomberg, the day after Joe Biden went on with Stephen Colbert and had that moment,

the next day he had a meeting at his hotel with a big bundler that bundled for Barack Obama and golf with him and everything.

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