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you should. And now welcome to the award-winning Best of the Left podcast with Clips Today,

from the effort with the Reflunders, the Tom Hartman program, start making sense from the

Nation magazine, The Young Turks, and activism from Democracy Spring.

Dark Money Super PACs shady multi-millionaires buying up democracy. When Americans were asked

recently what they fear most, it wasn't terrorists unless you mean the sort that take over your

TV at election time, it was corruption. It's that fear that a certain multi-millionaire

megalomaniac is playing into when he says, I'm so rich, I can't be bought. So vote for me.

But is voting for a billionaire to protect you from rule by billionaires, a sensible way to fight

money and politics? Not exactly. It just looks that way on television because we see so little

else. Is today's election auction normal or inevitable? Neither. A handful of Supreme Court

decisions decided by a single vote, five to four, unloosed this particular cash flow.

It's happened mostly over the last decade. As the Brennan Center reported this January,

just one justice shifting opinion could speedily restore some common sense. Change won't come

easily in the last quarter century. The share of political contributions traceable to the top

hundredth of Americans has doubled from 15 percent to 30 percent excess corporate cash rushes

into every congressional and state house office in the land. Clearly, concentration of wealth is

the problem, corruption is the consequence. But it's just not true that there's nothing regular

Americans can do. Reformers in California are gathering signatures right now to put a

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