Via Matt Taibbi:

The Iowa caucus, let’s face it, marks the beginning of a long, rigidly-controlled, carefully choreographed process that is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his primary job of energetically representing establishment interests.

If that sounds like a glib take on a free election system that allows the public to choose whichever candidate they like best without any censorship or overt state interference, so be it. But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.

That damning statistic just confirms what everyone who spends any time on the campaign trail knows, which is that the presidential race is not at all about ideas, but entirely about raising money.

The auctioned election process is designed to reduce the field to two candidates who will each receive hundreds of millions of dollars apiece from the same pool of donors. Just take a look at the lists of top donors for Obama and McCain from the last election in 2008.

Obama’s top 20 list includes: Goldman Sachs ($1,013,091), JPMorgan Chase & Co  ($808,799), Citigroup Inc  ($736,771) WilmerHale LLP ($550,668), Skadden, Arps et al ($543,539), UBS AG ($532,674), and Morgan Stanley ($512,232).

McCain’s list includes:  JPMorgan Chase & Co ($343,505) Citigroup Inc ($338,202) Morgan Stanley ($271,902) Goldman Sachs ($240,295) UBS AG ($187,493) Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher ($160,346), Greenberg Traurig LLP ($147,437) and Lehman Brothers ($126,557).