Lawmakers For Sale
       To The Highest Bidder
                   Editorial by Jeff Goolsby, Editor

      Instead of representing us in Washington, officials elected to congress spend a large part of their time raising money and then have to enact laws that favor their large campaign contributors.  If they do not enact laws favoring their large campaign contributors, they would lose them to their opposition candidates.
      The chase for campaign funding has been rapidly getting worse.  According to news reports, the campaign finance committees for the Republican and Democratic parties raised $487 million dollars for the year 2000 campaigns.  According to John Lewis, US Representative from Georgia, that was twice the amount raised in 1996 and six times the amount raised in 1992.
      This money is referred to as "Soft Money" which is used by the political parties and is not used directly by the candidates running for office.  However, the elected officials and candidates are involved in raising this money and making promises to the people who supply the money.  This soft money is in addition to the money that is contributed directly to the candidates campaign fund, which is called "Hard Money".
      Soft money is primarily contributed by oil companies, large corporations, and extremely rich people.  The soft money could very well be called greed money. The people who make the contributions usually want laws enacted that would help them make money faster and get huge tax cuts, ie, Reagan and Bush type tax cuts, and give a few crumbs to the public at large.
      If this soft money explosion continues, we could easily go backward to the economic conditions of mostly super rich and super poor which continued into the Hoover Depression.
      There was one huge benefit we received that was caused by the Hoover Depression. The American public at large realized that they were being scammed.  This caused the election of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Democratic control of both houses of congress.  This started a procession of benefits to the public at large instead of the super rich.  It began to change the status of super rich and super poor.  We can not afford to return to those economic conditions, but the greed money is moving us backwards in that direction.
      The Democrats and the unions then created our "Middle Class".  Also, Georgia Governor, Ellis Arnold, finally won the real civil war, Republican Abraham Lincoln Federal Freight Rate War, during his term in office from 1943 to 1947 by causing the repeal of the Federal Freight Rate law scam.
      The Republican stranglehold on Washington had enacted and maintained a Federal freight rate law discrepancy of doubling freight rates for everything shipped North, making it impossible for the South to compete with Northern industrialist.  This Republican freight rate scam caused extreme poverty in the South as depicted in a book entitled "TOBACCO ROAD".
      The repeal of the Federal Freight Rate Scam law is the reason that the South has become very prosperous.  This has also caused the South to become extremely popular and growing faster that the North.
      There is a concern by some Democratic lawmakers that discontinuing the Soft Money will wreck the "Get out the vote" effort.  This is not correct because we had successful get out the vote efforts long before soft money was invented.
      At the obvious request of the oil company executives, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the Republican Speaker of the House has set up rules that make it virtually impossible for the Shays-Meehan/McCain-Feingold bill to receive enough votes for passage and it is now shelved for a few months, or until we get a Democratic majority in the House.
      American voters need to write letters to our U.S. Representatives and put the pressure on them to get the bill back on the floor under reasonable rules so that the bill can be enacted.
      This bill is before us and we need to get this improvement enacted into law.  This bill is not everything we need but it is a huge improvement toward reversing the wrong direction of recent years in which our lawmakers were forced to owe their allegiance to the super rich, oil companies, and large corporations.