Crisis in Pacistan?

 A country is on the brink of catastrophe. And its people desperately need our help.

Here’s a synopsis of the tragedy unfolding as we speak:

• A few of the country’s richest inhabitants are spending billions to install political puppets in office — from city councils up to the highest levels of government, even the country’s president — who will do the bidding of the wealthy uber-class, the overwhelming majority of the populace be damned.

• The nation’s proud tradition of democratic elections is eroding as the country lurches toward plutocracy.

• Multinational corporations can spend as much as they want pushing politicians and policies that will make them even more profitable, creating a feedback loop of corporate corruption leading to more corporate power leading to more corporate corruption and on and on and on and on.

• Political candidates create shadowy groups to spend unlimited money attacking their opponents, and these groups don’t even have to disclose which billionaires and Big Businesses are funding them.

• Judges on the country’s highest court have facilitated this corruption with rulings overturning a century of protections against control of elections by the elite.

The nation is led by a say-anything, self-aggrandizing faux populist leader guilty of nepotism, narcissism and nativism.

This besieged nation’s nickname could be PACistan.

But you know it as the United States of America.

And I sincerely wish I were exaggerating.

Nobody has done, is doing or will do more than Public Citizen to fight the wholesale debasement of our democracy by Trump and the oligarchs.

With all that’s at stake, we simply can’t afford to leave money on the table.

Onward,

Robert Weissman is President of Public Citizen in Washington D.C., USA