Curtis Moore has spent a professional career in and around politics. It started in 1964–65, covering the North Carolina General Assembly for The News and Observer and the Associated Press, continued in 1966 in the campaign of James Tunnell, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Delaware. The Viet Nam conflict and three and one-half years in the U.S. Marine Corps intervened, but in 1970 he signed on as press secretary for then-Rep. William V. Roth, Jr., who was running as a Republican for a Senate seat from Delaware, and won. Attending law school at Georgetown University, Moore continued to work for Roth as a legislative aide, then administrative assistant.

Another interruption—three years practicing law on Bainbridge Island, Washington—ended when he returned to work for Roth, co-managing the 1976 re-election campaign. A radio spot he wrote for the campaign won a national advertising prize. In 1978, he made the jump to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, where he was counsel until January, 1989, working on virtually every environmental law on the books, from Superfund to the Clean Air.

Once described by a chemical industry lobbyist as the “single most hated person in Washington,” Moore was the junkyard dog of the Committee’s moderate Republicans, charged with fending off the assaults of the Reagan Administration. He was good. When EPA official Rita Lavelle was convicted of perjury for lying to Congress, her response had been to a question drafted by Moore. When she and every other senior official at PA, save one, resigned en masse, it was in the wake of “intensive oversight” that had been managed by Moore. When the first-ever hearing on global warming was held, it was at the instigation of Moore, and when DuPont agreed to stop making ozone-destroying chemicals, it was because Moore had dredged from history full-page advertisements in which the chemical giant had pledged to halt production if damage to the ozone layer were ever demonstrated. When fastfood giant McDonalds abandoned the use of “clam shells” and other food service articles, it was Proposal: Saving Ourselves Page 11 of 52 after The Washington Post printed Moore’s story, “McTruth: Fast Food for Thought,” exposing the company for deceiving its customers.

In 1989, Moore’s sponsor, Sen. Robert T. Stafford of Vermont, retired and Moore did the same. He opted to return to his original career as a writer rather than become a Washington lawyer/lobbyist (he had one over-the-transom offer of $250,000 per year, plus a partner’s share and perquisites, but the clients would have been General Motors and Dow Chemical). As a consultant on international environmental policies and technologies, his clients have ranged from Tokyo Electric Power Company to Greenpeace and the American Lung Association. In 1995–96, he returned to the Senate briefly, as an aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D. VT), where he organized the initial Congressional efforts to publicize the dangers to pregnant women and their children from mercury poisoning from coal burning power plants.

Money has always played an important role in politics. In 1965, for example, a local Coca-Cola bottler, chairman of the powerful judiciary committee in the North Carolina General Assembly, locked up in committee a bill that would have allowed people to sue for adulterated soft drinks. And, yes, without naming names, there are members of Congress who accepted money in exchange for favors, including votes. There was a reason that Congressional staff said, not entirely in jest, at the time when Indiana was represented by Birch Bayh and Vance Hartke that the state had two Senators, “Senator Bayh and Senator Bought.” Yet, as indefensible as those actions might have been, that dishonesty was of the sort that has existed since the first government was created, a much less serious threat than what is happening today. The amount of damage done to the system itself was limited, partially because votes or favors were bought one at a time.

Today, it’s almost as if the exchange is at a wholesale level, with money and votes or favors swapped one for the other in huge indivisible blocs. Money has made it virtually impossible to legislate, difficult to regulate and increasingly burdensome to litigate in the public interest. Like water on granite, money seeps into every crevice. As a result, almost the only laws enacted these days are those that relieve corporations and the wealthy of burdens—taxes, regulations, delay or whatever else they find objectionable.

Money has seeped into the judicial system as well, calling into serious doubt the independence of even the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. How else can one explain the boast of former White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray—who personally chose many of those nominated to the federal judiciary by Presidents Bush and Reagan—to his fellow lobbyists that he had “five sure votes” on the Supreme Court to invalidate rules issued under the Clean Air Act? Perhaps that was merely an idle boast. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. It’s not just American political institutions on the auction block. Colleges and universities have been subverted by corporate money. So have some individual members of the press and the companies for which they work. Too many churches hew a line that is driven by corporate interest, not religious principle.

Much of this money is being spent under the guise of advancing abstract principles, such as freedom from government intrusion and the sanctity of property rights. In reality, it is being spent to increase corporate profits. Strange how those who say the government should not interfere with freedom of decision are perfectly happy to see the Texas legislature or the U.S. Congress enact statutes to abridge rights of common law that pre-date America itself. Not once have they urged that laws limiting the liability of corporate shareholders be repealed.

Indeed, what afflicts the system today cannot necessarily even be termed corruption, because most of what occurs is legal. That makes sense, of course, since the legislatures and courts themselves determine what conduct is deemed illegal. Nevertheless, there is a seizure of power occurring that is every bit as real and dangerous as a beer hall putsch or a military coup. In every branch of government and at every level, there is a slow erosion of the power allocated to the people, and a corresponding accretion of that power in corporations, the wealthy and their benefactors.

Democracy in the United States is, in short, dying of a disease, and it’s called money. Only a handful of people, if that, can not only penetrate the shroud of secrecy surrounding this slow, insidious corruption of the nation, but also focus attention on a book that describes it. Moore is one.