MONEY CORRUPTS POLITICS

The most obvious thing about politics is that money corrupts it. This is so commonplace that everyone seems to have given up on regulating it. Many things are wrong about money in politics and it keeps getting worse. The most obvious is the Supreme Court Decision to treat corporations as people thus opening wide the gates to the road leading to plutocracy. There are others as well. Popular politicians, such as Marco Rubio, collect huge sums of money nation wide and deposit it for future campaigns, even when the people choose not to reelect them or they voluntarily retire. Apparently, such funds can be huge; TV talking heads often talk about this or that politicians having millions in such funds.

  

The other day, I heard that Rubio was sharing his campaign funds with another politician. This sounded wrong to me. It finally dawned on me that what they were referring to was a leadership PAC, which means funds are separate from his campaign funds but which he still has control over. The size of the PAC fund depends on the politician’s popularity. It is open and legal.

I remember the disastrous Newt Gingrich “Contract for America”. How this ambitious hard working politician put that legislation  together was by using campaign money to support handpicked candidates across the country.  He worked at the grass roots level so he was in contract with Republican Party clubs etc from across the entire country not just Georgia, his home state, who could identify candidate that could not afford to run. Of course, there were strings attached to getting the funds. The candidates had to pledge loyalty to Newt Gingrich. They had to have a chance the people of their districts would elect them and they had to be to the right of center. It worked like a charm; he found and elected over 60 such candidates. If they agreed with him on what he wanted them to agree with they could go crazy with any other one issues they liked: abortion racism, church and state, women’s’ issues, foreign policy, etc.

It surprised no one that he easily held his chair as Speaker of the House and that the legislation he handcrafted matched his political ideology and not the ideology of the Republican Party. This eventually alienated him from his Party and he was force to resign. The point is that money collected nationwide was used to “over represent” Georgia in the congress of the United States. This is not what America is all about; it is not fair to people in other legislative districts. Instead of a law that promotes such activity, there should be a law that prevents it. Money collected by a politician in a state can only be used by his campaign in that state for his own election. Marco Rubio of Florida should not be able to control elections in the New England or anywhere else. This should include the campaign for the Presidency. Why should David and Charles Koch control elections in Wisconsin, which they did as proved by the Scott Walker recall election? Our system of political funding is corrupting democracy.

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