My father always used to say you could sell horse manure as perfume if have enough money to promote it.

He was right.  Big money can promote and sell you anything.  The California Initiative process is a great example.  California established the initiative system as a populist concept.  The idea was that its citizens could put initiatives on the statewide ballot by getting enough signatures from their fellow citizens so it could be voted on by all the voters in the state when presidential and gubernatorial elections were held.

Then big money figured how to subvert the process.  They just put their own initiatives on the ballots that negated the purpose of the citizen-driven initiatives.  They promoted the hell out of them making them sound like they weren’t really giving the oil companies or drug companies cart blanche, they were doing the exact opposite.  And most of the time big money wins.

When the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were the same as “individuals” in the Citizen United decision, that really open the floodgates to multi-national corporations to buy their way in with impunity. The bad guys own most the majority in Congress and get laws passed (or prevent laws from being passed) that further their interests, not ours.

That’s why Billionaires and Bagmen is such a must read.  It is a blueprint for a town, any town, using civil disobedience to establish majority rule over their citizens.   Fairview votes to let their citizens decide what laws they want to follow, regardless of what egregious laws the Congress and the judicial system pass.  It’s time to say “Enough!”