Money Rules Our Laws: The Great Plains
Revolt

Bill Moyers, Doubleday

 The property qualifications for federal office that the
framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an
unseemly "veneration for wealth" are now de facto in force and higher
than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. "Money rules Our laws are
the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The
parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us." Those words were
spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that
swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120
years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too,
spells trouble.