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<oembed><version>1.0</version><provider_name>naked capitalism</provider_name><provider_url>https://www.nakedcapitalism.com</provider_url><author_name>Yves Smith</author_name><author_url>https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/author/yves-smith</author_url><title>Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats) | naked capitalism</title><type>rich</type><width>600</width><height>338</height><html>&lt;blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="hXd5LiY1pO"&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/04/our-polarized-and-money-driven-congress-created-over-25-years-by-republicans.html"&gt;Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;iframe sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" src="https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/04/our-polarized-and-money-driven-congress-created-over-25-years-by-republicans.html/embed#?secret=hXd5LiY1pO" width="600" height="338" title="&#x201C;Our Polarized and Money-Driven Congress: Created Over 25 Years By Republicans (and Quickly Imitated by Democrats)&#x201D; &#x2014; naked capitalism" data-secret="hXd5LiY1pO" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" class="wp-embedded-content"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;&lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;
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</html><description>Political scientist Tom Ferguson prepared a short but important paper for the INET conference last weekend on how Congress got to be as polarized as it is today. His answer: it was redesigned quite deliberately by conservative Republican followers of Newt Gingrich starting in the mid 1980s and their methods were copied by the Democrats. Their changes resulted in firmer control by leadership (ie, less autonomy of individual Congressmen) and much greater importance of fundraising (which increased the power of corporate interests).  The extent of corruption may surprise even jaundiced readers.</description></oembed>

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