#LegalizedBribery Miller and the event’s co-sponsors — a number of whom once worked for the now-speaker — represent clients with stakes across major policy fights before Congress: PhRMA, Mastercard, Apple, Altria, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Investment Council, among others. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/08/mccarthy-first-fundraiser-speaker-00081960

The GOP has been for sale like this for decades. They take huge donations from fossil fuel companies and then do their bidding to keep us addicted to fossil fuels. The GOP isn't even pretending to care about climate change and neither are their fossil fuel donors. The GOP-appointed supreme court justices made this kind of bribery legal exactly for these purposes. They have handed the government over to large business interests and the wealthy. What democracy?!

GOP House Puts Big Oil's Revolving Door Into High Gear https://www.commondreams.org/news/accountable-us-maga-big-oil

#GreedKills
#GOPInBedWithBigOil
#LegalizedBribery
#CitizensUnited
#GreedKillsDemocracy

""These lobbyists are not getting hired to advocate for American energy consumers—they will push an agenda that benefits the new majority's donors no matter what it costs taxpayers."

An analysis published Friday by the nonpartisan watchdog Accountable.US revealed that numerous former fossil fuel lobbyists are being hired to work for the Republican-controlled 118th Congress, including in high-level positions on the House Natural Resources Committee.

"As the Republicans majority begins the new Congress, former oil industry lobbyists will have new and growing influence as top staffers for congressmen on key committees," the analysis states.

Accountable.US detailed the close ties between Nancy Peele—chief of staff to House Natural Resources Committee Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.)—and fossil fuel interests.

"It's no surprise that Big Oil is infiltrating the halls of Congress after spending millions to elect some of the most extreme legislators in American history."

Peele's history includes:

Lobbying Congress on behalf of Taylor Energy Co. LLC, an oil company liable for causing the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the "longest running oil spill in U.S. history";
Representing Hercules Offshore Inc., a gas company that caused a "massive blowout" and two-day fire in the Gulf of Mexico; and Lobbying on behalf of Hornbeck Offshore Services to ensure that they continued to profit off the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The publication continues:
Majority Leader Steve Scalise's [R-La.] Chief of Staff Megan Bel Miller came to Scalise's office straight out of working as an oil and gas lobbyist... Miller lobbied Congress on behalf of National Oceans Industry Association, a group representing the offshore oil and gas industry. Bel Miller advocated for polluting industry interests on numerous conservation issues, including the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and offshore leasing. Majority Whip Tom Emmer's [R-Minn.] new Policy Director Ian Foley is an energy and mining lobbyist. In 2022, Foley lobbied Congress on behalf of the uranium mining industry and public utilities with oil and gas portfolios.
These are but a handful of the many examples of the revolving door between Big Oil and Congress highlighted in the analysis.

"It's no surprise that Big Oil is infiltrating the halls of Congress after spending millions to elect some of the most extreme legislators in American history," Accountable.US energy and environment director Jordan Schreiber said in a statement. "These lobbyists are not getting hired to advocate for American energy consumers—they will push an agenda that benefits the new majority's donors no matter what it costs taxpayers."

Underscoring the analysis' findings, the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed legislation that would require the federal government to lease a portion of public lands and waters for fossil fuel extraction for each non-emergency drawdown of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The bill was introduced by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee and was the top recipient of oil and gas PAC money in the House Republican caucus during the last election cycle."

Greed is a sickness, like eating too much food, and drinking too much alcohol. Balanced people don't want or need more than enough. Insecure, fearful, emotionally dysfunctional people need ever more to fill a hole that no amount of stuff will ever fill. The GOP sucks up to the greedy because they are also greedy and power-hungry.

Is Greed the Biggest Threat to America & Democracy? https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-greed-the-biggest-threat-to-america?

#GreedKills
#GOPInBedWithRich
#LegalizedBribery

"In the late 1970s, the US Supreme Court, under the guidance of Justice Lewis Powell, decriminalized political bribery: specifically, in 1976 they legalized bribery of politicians by the morbidly rich and in 1978 they legalized bribery of politicians by corporations.

With this newfound power to buy politicians and to shape American policy, CEOs and the very rich could have done anything. They could have ended childhood poverty. They could have made sure every American had a quality education at no cost.
...
Instead, they went after tax breaks to undo FDR’s raising the top income tax bracket to 91% in the late 1930s and early 1940s. And we’re still suffering for it.

The fruit of those two SCOTUS decisions was Ronald Reagan floating into the White House on a tsunami of fossil fuel money; he and bought-off Republicans in Congress then obediently dropped the top 74% personal tax bracket and the top 55% corporate income tax bracket down to 25% each.
...
Reagan and his neoliberal buddies Hayek and Friedman told us that if we’d just let the greediest among us fully exercise their greed in ways that were previously illegal it would bring an explosion of prosperity to our country.

And, sure enough, there was an explosion of prosperity, but only for the top 10% of us...Fully $50 trillion has vanished from the wealth of the middle class and magically ended up in the money bins of the morbidly rich.

This “invisible hand” of the economy was so perfect, the neoliberals told us, that we wouldn’t even need to monitor CEOs and the morbidly rich to make sure they weren’t cheating, so we defunded the IRS, under four Republican administrations, so severely that they could no longer audit the returns of the very wealthy.
...
It’s estimated tax fraud by the morbidly rich costs America around $1 trillion a year, according to the IRS Commissioner.

Enough to end all student debt in 18 months. To wipe out child poverty in a year. To fully fund Medicare For All. To end homelessness in America. To cure most cancer and heart disease in less than a decade.

But the morbidly rich aren’t even bothering to hide their greed and corruption any more. Two billionaire families, for example, gave Republican Senator Ron Johnson’s campaign and its backers around $20 million.
...
As ProPublica noted, just that one tax “cut [inserted by Senator Johnson] could deliver more than half a billion in tax savings for Hendricks and the Uihleins over its eight-year life.”

This system, fine-tuned by 40 years of annual Republican tweaks, has become one of America’s most obviously corrupt scams: “invest” $20 million in a corrupt politician and make a $500 million return on that investment. And the entire party is proudly in on the act!
...
Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court overturned it, leading to today’s orgy of greed by the elites of our society. Citizens United and its predecessors have turned the American economy into an aristocratic candy store for the morbidly rich, while the rest of us can hardly even see into the windows.
...
Political systems require widespread faith in their integrity to survive, and the crass and obvious unfairness of Reagan’s neoliberalism combined with a corrupt Supreme Court has bred much of the cynicism and open disdain for government we see across the political spectrum.
...
Greed, one of the seven deadly sins, is both toxic to society and intrinsic to human nature. It can’t be ended or “stopped.”

But it can be regulated, which is the goal of good tax policy.

With a fully-bribed GOP set to assume control of the House of Representatives, where all tax legislation must originate according to our Constitution, the next two years will be challenging for Americans who would rather see children educated than more billionaires shooting themselves into space on giant penis-shaped rockets.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about how corrosive these twin poisons of bribery and greed are to our nation; we must never stop working to solve this crisis Reagan, the morbidly rich, and a corrupted Supreme Court inflicted on us."