A Quote by H. L. Mencken

The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money.
Look, the United States doesn't have political parties. In other countries, take say Europe, you can be an active member of the political party. Here, the only thing in a political party is gearing to elections, not the other things you do. So it's basically, a way of making people passive, submissive objects.
The nature of our two main political parties has changed in the United States.
The other thing that gives a scientific man the creeps in the world today are the methods of choosing leaders - in every nation. Today, for example, in the United States, the two political parties have decided to employ public relations men, that is, advertising men, who are trained in the necessary methods of telling the truth or lying in order to develop a product.
The principal purposes to be answered by union are these the common defense of the members; the preservation of the public peace as well against internal convulsions as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States; the superintendence of our intercourse, political and commercial, with foreign countries.
People get together and they donate to organizations so that a pile of money can be used to create a message that can be broadcast en masse as part of the a political campaign. They are the lifeblood of Hillary Clinton campaign, the banks and all these big time rich people from Hollywood and Silicon Valley are the mother's milk of her campaign. They are the money. She just doesn't want Donald Trump to have it or any other Republican to have it or any average citizen to be able to bundle his money with other people's money and create an ad or a campaign.
The United States is in the midst of many spirited political debates about national priorities and public spending... However, we have found that science is an area where both political parties can find common ground, and in which political change does not necessarily create discontinuities.
The illegitimate money made by corrupt public servants and the power that it gives them is then also used to perpetuate them in office. This corrupt money is one of the main factors responsible for the continued reelection of such politicians. They become masters of the people they are supposed to serve.
It is important for me, as a popular artist, to make clear to the governments of the United States and Mexico that despite the strategy of fear and intimidation to foreigners, despite their weapons, despite their immigration laws and military reserves, they will never be able to isolate the Zapatista communities from the people in the United States.
Hillary Clinton, an agent for the Oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against Donald Trump. This shows that the media and the political establishments of the political parties no longer have credibility with the American people.
In the United States, unlike any other advanced democracy, money really talks. Our Supreme Court has said that spending money on politicians is a form of free speech. No other court has said that.
It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.
Public values are not only under attack in the United States and elsewhere but appear to have become irrelevant just as those spaces that enable an experience of the common good are now the object of disdain by right-wing and liberal politicians, anti-public intellectuals and an army of media pundits.
Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters' own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.
I do think the public want to see politicians acting in a different way. What's brought young people into our campaign is that they were written off by political parties but they had never written off politics, and what we have is a huge number of young people, very enthusiastic and brimming with ideas. Those ideas have got to be heard.
What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over and over again those campaign contributions through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing.
The Catholic Church must be the biggest corporation in the United States. We have a branch office in every neighborhood. Our assets and real estate holdings must exceed those of Standard Oil, A.T.&T., and U.S. Steel combined. And our roster of dues-paying members must be second only to the tax rolls of the United States Government.
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