This article is dealing with how money and politics in the United States parallels with each other and how important the money factor is when considering who wins the Presidential seat, Congress, Senate, House of Representatives, ect. This political inequality within money and politics is easy to see in my opinion. This system of how money and politics works is just as bad and shows the inequality as it did in the 1970’s with the Nixon campaign.(Not as bad, they have shown strict rules and regulations since then).
The current system shuns down any candidate that can’t raise large amounts of money for his/her campaign. Unless a candidate can gain significant support from those people who have money, he/she can’t stand in the public debate and basically has no chance in winning what so ever. In my opinion and what the author points out, is this has a lot to do with power, especially media power and big corporations, or people with a lot of money.
In my opinion, a lot of this is a scandal, and meetings take place between large, rich corporations, and candidates. The candidates wants the money of course so he/she can run, and is willing to bend the deal al little bit if it favors the candidate and it favors the large corporation, but in the end hurts the poorest people in America, or the 99 percent who do not own the means in this society. Clawson even points out how members of congress have reworked or manipulated people by helping out the rich, large corporate businesses by cutting them a share of the pie, without the people obviously knowing they are not getting screwed over in the district.
You can even look at President Obama, who I voted for and like as a president, and his money campaign and supported him. Jay-Z, a well known rapper who uses words that President Obama would probably not like to hear his daughters listen to, donate a large portion of money to his campaign. I like when the author pointed out how you have people who hold conferences, picket lines attacking companies and its policies on such things, but then turn their backs in Congress and cooperate with the same companies, and act like best friends. It is hypocrisy.
If it benefits the corporation, and benefits the person running for office, then the obligation is to come together and work out a deal. I believe the author shows great statistics throughout the chapter and uses a visual aide with graphs showing the differences between parties. One table showed the total number of dollars raised for republican and democratic Presidential seat, Congress, Senate, House of Rep. It showed that in the 2000 election, Republicans raised for money in all the seats except one. In my opinion, the government and the people running for office will do whatever it takes to get their hands on money, because it shows that whoever raises the most money usually has the best shot at winning any election.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
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If you look at our country, the people who run it are all millionaires. If you have money you have the say-in most situations. While reading this article by Clawson, I learned a lot about the government and how money reenacts with campaigns. I did not know that candidates had regulations with how much a company can give them. I find that to be fair because if people had a huge corporation supporting them obviously they can out win others. However, like Clawson said there are loop holes and people find away around this law. I think the government should regulate this more than they do. Like Patrick stated, the candidates wants the money of course so they can run, and is willing to bend the deal if it favors the candidate and it favors the large corporation, but in the end hurts the poorest people in America. It makes me upset that just because someone has money that they are the ones that are always in the lead. Looking at the charts in the article, Republicans get almost no money from labor, which democrats receive six times as must from business as from labor. This then makes democratic party extremely cautious about taking positions calling for economic policies. By reading this article, it made me realize that candidates will go above and behind just to raise money. They do not care how they raise it just as long as they get ahead of the game. Sometimes I feel like they forget about what they are really running for and just focus more on the money portion.
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