Earlier in the year, when the Jack Abramoff scandal was still in the news, Larry King interviewed those famous reporters that uncovered Watergate: Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein.
Here's Carl Bernstein:
Larry: Carl, what is going on.
Carl: The system is corrupt, thoroughly corrupt. It's become corroded. The legislative system in the Congress and the state legislatures is subject only to money. And what the Founder's intended to be a citizen legislature is an oligarchal legislature today. It is a plutocratic legislature today. Unless money is involved, forget about the public good. And if money is involved, forget about the public good. The system isn't working. It's not about Jack Abramoff. He's just the example of what happens when you take it as far as it can go in terms of how toxic it can become and how the evil of what happens when money determines what goes on in our political system. Abramoff is reflective of it. It goes all through this administration. It goes all through the other administrations. Who's in the White House doesn't matter ultimately. It's the Congress of the U.S. and they're no longer responsive to the people. They're responsive to money.
Here's some other quotes along the same theme:
Alan Greenspan, Egalitarian?
A Question of Power
If we do ignore inequality, Greenspan himself believes we will pay a high price. "As I've often said," the Fed chair told the congressional Joint Economic Committee this past June, "this is not the type of thing which a democratic society—a capitalist democratic society—can really accept without addressing."
Reich’s Reprimand
We now have more national income and national wealth concentrated in fewer hands than we’ve had since the gilded age of the late nineteenth century. This poses a fundamental threat to democracy.
Wealth And Our Commonwealth
Oligarchy may be defined succinctly as "rule by the few", often by the wealthy few.
Adams believed that when 'economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.
The term "plutocracy" is formally defined as government by the wealthy.
... the owners and top-level managers ... are far and away the dominant power figures ... Their corporations, banks, and agribusinesses come together as a corporate community that dominates the federal government in Washington. Their real estate, construction, and land development companies form growth coalitions that dominate most local governments.
A good blog, though not updated very frequently: Concentration of Wealth
A good rant, by the great comedian George Carlin: Who Really Controls America
Oh, and one more quote:
Chapter 3 - The Spouter-Inn - Moby Dick
"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions."
OK, so we all know that the Republicans are savages who sell human heads on Sundays, but what about the Democrats?