Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagney, the Republican candidate for Governor, admitted in a secret recording that he pushed a very bad voucher bill to passage, because if he didn’t, the Walton family would give $3 Million to his opponent in the Republican primary.
What a creep. He sold out public schools and the children of Georgia for fear of Walton money going to his rival.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is the golden rule of politics. He who has the gold, makes the rules.
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In American politics, he who has the gold can buy power but should go to jail
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Until our nation “bites the bullet” and has publicly-financed election campaigns, our politicians are going to have to grovel to the big-money people, to get the money to mount campaigns. Sad, and a disgrace to our democracy.
I am generally conservative on most topics. But I break ranks with most conservatives, when it comes to public financing of campaigns. I wish more progressives/liberals would demand this. Former V-P Joseph Biden quietly advocated public financing, for most of his career. Read “Promises to Keep”. Biden is a liberal democrat, but I have always admired his sterling integrity, and stainless character.
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CT has public campaign financing.
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I think they call that “extortion.” CBK
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Ed reform is hard at work “improving public schools” in Georgia, I see.
Have any of these politicians done anything for the public schools in the state this year, or are the unfashionable public schools back-burnered again while ed reformers conduct political strategies?
I guess the teachers will have to go on strike to get their attention, although I’m not sure any of them would even notice if the public schools closed completely.
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These are the calculations politicians have to make these days. That’s just a fact. And there’s plenty of places to place the blame that this is where we’re at. I’m not sure of how to fix it, however. I hope we haven’t reached a tipping point where it’s just too late. California had a 21% turnout on Tuesday’s primary election.
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Wow. I know crack dealers in The Bronx with more accurate ethical compasses than this.
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There is no limit to the number of “creeps” running for office dreaming of the power and wealth that comes with being a member of Congress or another elected office. The Waltons, like other democracy hating autocratic oligarchs, know this and use it to achieve their goals.
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Cagney is a pure scumbag . . . . a microbe badly needing an anti-biotic . . .
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Antibiotics might not be powerful enough. How about massive doses of chemotherapy and radiation treatments until Cagney is turned into a mound of radioactive sludge?
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So mean and so appropriate, Lloyd . . .
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Let me say it again; When money is more important than people, at some point in time there will be a pile of money and no people. [With all that is happening with climate change we are fast approaching the time when that will occur – lest anyone think I am exaggerating.]
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Nonsense. When the earth is all banged up from climate change, the rich will escape it using space transportation designed and financed by Jeff Bezos, and they will move to a luxury satellite planet also designed and financed by Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos wants to help people. He’s a people person.
But he is interested in helping very rich people. Not the masses.
We are the next “Elysium” . . . .
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Are you sure we are not already living in “Elysium”?
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We are not becuase there’s no habitable satellite to live on, per se.
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The wealthiest 0.1-percent combined do not have enough wealth to build a Legrange L5 orbital colony with it’s own gravity source — large enough to support hundreds or even thousands of the wealthiest humans, their families and whoever else they want to bring alone. To survive, they have to be able to grow their own food and have an adequate water and air supply to last “theoretically” forever.
The International Space Station cost $150 billion to build and get up there, and it was designed to only handle a crew of seven with regular supply runs and that doesn’t have the ability to create its own gravity.
For a station like the ISS, today, the cost is $21-billion per person and we do not have the technology yet to build it.
It would probably take decades and even centuries before the cost is low enough to build a place like that and by then the wealthy will have caused the collapse of global civilization as we know it by their own arrogant, autocratic behavior that will cause the rebellions and civil wars by people they have made way too miserable and desperate.
No, the wealthiest 0.1 percent are not anywhere close enough to escape the rest of us rabble they detest. We are billions and not all the uber-wealthy will want that lifestyle anyway. Probably the Alt-Right members of ALEC will but few others. That’s about 2,000 of the arrogant idiots.
I’d love to get rid of those autocratic, democracy-hating thugs, but it looks like we are stuck with them until individuals like the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump and the Walton family cause the destruction of the environment of the only place we’ve got and they take us all down with them.
Our only option is to rise up and stop them from the ballot box, if that’s possible, or follow in the US Founding Fathers footsteps.
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Is it possible to be buried with much if not all of your wealth if you are one of the filthy rich?
Yes, all one has to do is look at the pyramids in Egypt where many of the Pharaohs attempted to take their great wealth with them and even had company when concubines, wives, and servants were sealed in alive with the mummy.
Then there is the tomb of the 1st Emperor of China that might be the most lavish tomb of all time.
The problem is someone digging into the tombs of the dead-rich decades and centuries later to loot them. But that problem will be solved for today’s autocrats if they make sure the rest of us are dead too so no one is left alive to break into their tombs.
Then their dead bodies will be safely surrounded by as much of their wealth as possible unless some alien explorers from another planet orbiting another star in another galaxy arrive millions of years from now to loot their tombs.
I wonder how many of the 0.1-percent want to take their wealth and power with them.
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