Lawrence Lessig, an advocate of real campaign finance reform, has an article in The Atlantic showing just how bad things have gotten in terms of the massive influence of the filthy rich on our elections. These numbers are pretty staggering:

While the media pays enormous attention to JP Morgan losing $2 billion (or up to $9 billion, apparently), a far more serious scandal has received relatively little attention. The CEO of Barclay’s has admitted to rigging the value of the London InterBank Offered Rate (LIBOR) index. Having spent several years in the mortgage business, let …

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We’ve long known that the Obama administration strongly courted certain industries — pharmaceutical and insurance companies in particular — to back, or at least not strongly oppose, the health care reform bill. But now it looks like they even coordinated advertising campaigns with the pharma industry:

The LA Times reports that Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are moving to block the implementation of a new FCC rule that would require TV stations to make their records of political ad buys available online. That rule would make it much easier to track campaign spending leading up to elections.

Jonathan Bernstein points out the absurdity of the right’s constant refrain that the media hasn’t exposed the real Barack Obama — you know, the atheist Muslim Black Liberation Theology Christian Kenyan Indonesian communist fascist one — and includes this statement:

This report should be troubling to everyone, not just to Democrats. It tells you just how insane the amounts of money in politics have gotten when third party groups will spend many times more than the campaigns themselves do to influence the outcome of an election.

One of the arguments raised by people like me against Michigan’s authoritarian and anti-democratic emergency manager law over the last few years is that allowing people, and even whole businesses, to have dictatorial control of a city will lead to inevitable conflicts of interest and using that power to enrich themselves. Here’s a perfect example:

Matt Taibbi has an article at Rolling Stone looking at the many ways the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate Wall Street and prevent disasters like the housing collapse from happening again has been weakened both by subsequent legislation and by regulatory decisions made by the Obama administration.

Crossroads GPS, Karl Rove’s Republican powerhouse organization, has filed its first tax returns with the IRS and is claiming to be a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization rather than a political one. And it’s going so by using an incredibly absurd legal distinction between campaign ads and “issues advocacy.”