The reader comments section on the AP story of a Mexican official detained last week at an airport with $1.9 million in a briefcase and backpack were predictably sanctimonious, and of course the money run cannot be defended legally.  To these readers, corruption is endemic in all of Latin America and is part of the HispanicLatino genetic makeup.

The same readers might note that at the same time that the official’s plane was in the air, millions of dollars in wire transfers whizzed through cyberspace into the coffers of the so-called super-pacs by supporters of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich – legally, of course.  Two good fellas – a casino owner and his wife from Las Vegas – gave Gingrich $10 million.  No corruption or outsized influence there.

When the Supreme Court of the United States unleashed the wave of money that has engulfed the American political process – already undermined by the system before the Court’s disastrous decision, mind you – it made any bungled Mexican money-packing operation look like a lollipop compared to the ten pounds of Belgian chocolate on which the Republican candidates have already gorged themselves in just the first month of the primary season.

Seriously, when are we going to do something about this?  There is no difference in the legalisms in the United States and in Mexico.  In each country, the process has been suborned.  Americans – and Mexicans – have long known that money can find its way to where it needs to get in order to influence government.  And perhaps they do not have the energy to not rise up and change the state of affairs.  But without reform, the long decline into irrelevancy will continue for the United States and Mexico will remain more mirage than miracle.  None of the hard decisions that have to be made in either country will be made.

The good people out there trying to start third parties or occupying buildings or trying to get all elections run by mail or the internet – these people should join forces to amend the Constitution to undo the Supreme Court’s ruling.  How elections are financed is critical to whether the country can be governed at all.

But this, of course, will take money, and lots of it, meaning the donors who can give $10-million will swamp any reform effort.  Perhaps the only way – and it is a slim chance – out of this is to elect a Democratic supermajority now that attempts to reform the law to negate the knife the Court plunged into the country’s future – legally, of course.

It is a long shot but so was the Mexican official thinking that even in Mexico a suitcase and a backpack bulging with cash would not be noticed.

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