Upton Sinclair captured in a few words why our current political campaign finances need to be reformed. Trump was right when he said, \u201cThe system is rigged.\u201d It is rigged in favor of whoever has enough money to make campaign contributions to buy a politician and his \u201cunderstanding\u201d of an issue.<\/p>\n
How did we end up with a political system that is so far off from commonly held values like integrity and honor?<\/p>\n
The late actor Robin Williams said, \u201cPoliticians should wear sponsor jackets like Nascar drivers, then we know who owns them.\u201d The oil and gas industry has consistently been a major contributor to our Rep. Scott Tipton. His \u201csponsor jacket\u201d would bear their patch. Tipton is on the Energy and Mineral resources committee and has recently come out strongly in favor of more gas development.<\/p>\n
The gas industry has been under fire for not being quite the \u201cclean burning\u201d energy it was thought to be, when taking into account the methane leakage in extracting it.<\/p>\n
Tipton voted to further reduce methane regulations, making it even easier to pollute. The public bears the cost of fracking waste and greenhouse gas emissions to our watersheds and atmosphere. It appears Tipton \u201cunderstands\u201d his contributors\u2019 interests quite well, ensuring himself future jacket patches and endorsements from them.<\/p>\n
Jan D. Dixon<\/p>\n
Cortez<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sinclair captured in a few words why our current political campaign finances need to be reformed. Trump was right when he said, \u201cThe system is rigged.\u201d It is rigged in favor of whoever has enough money to make campaign contributions to buy a politician and his \u201cunderstanding\u201d of an issue. How did we end […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5820,5819],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-99053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters-to-the-editor","category-opinion","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99053"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=99053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}