President Jimmy Carter Speaks Out: Citizens United Gave ‘Legal Bribery The Chance To Prevail’ Over Democracy And Cheat The American People

President Jimmy Carter, the elder statesman of the United States, still has a lot to say about politics as well as injustice. Carter states plainly that the American people have been cheated, and deprived of an opportunity to improve their lot in life. Carter blames the Supreme Court decision to uphold Citizens United, for disenfranchising middle and working class America.

“The erroneous ruling of the supreme court, where millionaires, billionaires, can put in unlimited amounts of money, give legal bribery the chance to prevail, because all the candidates, whether they are honest or not, or whether they are Democratic or Republican, depend on these massive infusions of money from very rich people in order to have money to campaign.”

President Jimmy Carter, in a recent interview with the BBC’s John Humphrys, confided his feelings about corporate campaign contributions. He explained that when he ran for president against Gerald Ford, and later, Ronald Reagan, there were no fund raising efforts, and certainly no multi-million dollar campaign contributions. He, Reagan, and Ford relied on the “one dollar each” donation to a political party on individual income tax returns to fund the campaigns and elections.

President Jimmy Carter believes expensive campaigns costing hundreds of millions of dollars are not a change for the better. He replied candidly that he, as a peanut farmer from Georgia, could not afford to run for president in 2016.

John Humphrys asked President Carter to explain why Americans were so disillusioned and resentful of American politics in recent years.

“The other thing that seems to many people to have changed in the United States is so many of the middle class and working class… become disaffected from the political process? Why do you think that is?”

President Jimmy Carter did not hesitate to explain, nor did he mince his words. He was direct and to the point, with his answer to Mr. Humphrys.

“It is because they have, in effect, been cheated out of a proper opportunity to improve their lot in life. I think that’s accurate because as the rich people finance the campaigns when candidates get in office they do what the rich people want. And that’s to let the rich people get richer and richer and the middle class get left out. All the statistics show that the middle class are stagnant or going down in their income for the work that they do.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTkICyw6kwk

President Jimmy Carter is not alone in his theory that Citizens United needs to be overturned. Or that it is the cause of many American problems. Two front-running presidential candidates are refusing corporate money. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump want campaign finance reform. Those who vote for them, support their cause, and volunteer for their campaigns are presumably doing so because they too want to free our country from the unfair influences of corporations.

Two of the largest protest movements in our nation’s recent history were also rallied to fight Wall Street’s influence on our government. The Occupy movement, also known as Occupy Wall Street, had the removal of big business from politics at the core of its values, and the current protest, Democracy Spring, is exclusively about creating legislation that forbids these kinds of contributions and overturning Citizens United.

President Jimmy Carter has been speaking out on this issue for many years, and so have many well known Ph.Ds from the economic and political science fields. Professor Martin Gilens of Princeton has amassed strong evidence, essentially proving the disparity of influence, between a few wealthy political donors, and the majority of American citizens, as reported by Inquisitr. Politicians meeting the demands of the wealthy at the expense of virtually everyone else is a provable fact outlined in Martin Gillen’s book, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America

President Jimmy Carter, though, is not endorsing candidates. He is simply informing the American people what the source of their problems is.

[Photo by Pool/Getty Images]