Citizens United
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Citizens United is the Supreme Court decision John Kiriakou identifies as finalizing "official corruption" by holding that corporations are people, allowing unlimited money into political campaigns through political action committees.

Corporate capture of the branches

Kiriakou's broader charge is one of institutional capture. Since the decision, he has said, "the corporations have just taken over our government, two of the three branches. They've just taken it over", and in many states all three, because in half the country state judges are elected rather than appointed. He pairs the ruling with a Congress that does not exercise its constitutionally mandated oversight authority, and sees no end in sight short of changing the way elections themselves are conducted. Asked whether Congress could place the decision beyond the Supreme Court's reach, he agreed that it could, and said it does not want to, because its members are collecting millions of dollars from the corporations.

Cost of a seat

The mechanism he returns to is the arithmetic of running. The House is elected every two years, so its members are permanently campaigning, and media markets have become expensive enough that a job paying 180,000 dollars a year requires a million or two million dollars to win. He points to a Thomas Massie primary in which the two sides spent 35 million dollars, almost entirely outside money, on a single House seat at that salary, money he says AIPAC spent because Massie does not support Israel's agenda.

From his own congressional run in 2005,2006 he draws the point that the money problem predates the decision: the electoral process was already, in his words, "a march into hell for a heavenly cause," with a minimum of two to three million dollars needed for a congressional race and roughly twenty million for a Senate seat, leaving the field to the independently wealthy or to those willing to sell their souls in the first week.

Remedy

Asked how the two-party corporate lock might be undone, Kiriakou's answer is to overturn Citizens United and institute public financing of political campaigns, "otherwise you have to buy your way onto the stage, and that just doesn't work." He illustrates the alternative with his 2016 campaign travels alongside Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico then running as the Libertarian nominee: twelve states in a Winnebago bought with the money of the party's single benefactor, and nothing left over for television or social-media advertising.

See also

- AIPAC
- Thomas Massie
- Gary Johnson
