Once upon a time in our Good Ol’ USofA, presidential contenders and their political parties raised the funds needed to make the race. How quaint.
For the 2016 run, thanks to the Supreme Court’s malicious meddling in the democratic process, corporations and billionaires have taken charge of the electoral game. These very special interests, who have their own presidential agenda, now put up the vast majority of funds and run their own private campaigns to elect someone who’ll do their bidding.
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So far, of nearly $400 million raised to back candidates of either party in next year’s race, half of the money has come from a pool of only about 400 people – and two-thirds of their cash went, not to candidates, but into corporate-run SuperPACs. For Republicans, 77 percent of the funds have gone to SuperPACs.
The reason is that the Supreme Court decreed in its reckless Citizens United decision that these “non-candidate” campaigns can take unlimited sums of money directly from corporations. Therefore a very few wealthy powers can pour money into these murky political operations and gain unwarranted plutocratic power over the election process. Of the $37 million in the PAC backing Ted Cruz, for example, $36 million was pumped in by only three interests – a New York hedge fund operator, a corporate plunderer living in Puerto Rico, and the owners of a fracking operation who’ve pocketed billions from the explosive use of this destructive drilling technology.
But one of these new players assures us that they’re not buying candidates for corporate and personal gain, but “primarily [for] a love economic freedom.”
This is Jim Hightower saying… Sure, sweetheart – all you want is the “economic freedom” to pollute, defraud, exploit, rob, and otherwise harm anything and anyone standing between you and another dollar in profit.
A Wealthy Few lead in Giving To Campaigns,” New York Times, August 2, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/small-pool-of-rich-donors-dominates-election-giving.html?_r=0
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