Today, House Republicans voted overwhelmingly to eliminate public financing of federal elections. They claim that this measure will save about $60million a year.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-26/u-s-house-votes-to-end-watergate-era-finance-system.htmlHowever, by decreasing the amount of money which we, the people, are allowed to spend on our own federal elections, the Republican Congress is actually increasing the amount that corporate donors (domestic and foreign) will be allowed to
invest in political candidates. Why is Big Business so eager to give suitcases full of money to politcians? Because the returns are so damn good!
Here is one for the Baby Boomers: Remember
why we have a law that allows us to check a little box on our income tax returns if we want to give $3 to help publicly fund federal elections?
Answer: Because it isn’t a democracy anymore if the candidates have to rely upon suitcases full of money.
Here is a valuable resource for those who think that Watergate was just a bungled burglary.
http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=nixon_and_watergate_tmln&nixon_and_watergate_tmln_watergate_campaign_conspiracy=nixon_and_watergate_tmln_slush_funds___illegal_contributionsRichard Nixon was a master when it came to soliciting illegal campaign contributions. Anything was for sell, including ambassadorships ($250,000). In 1969, just a month after being sworn into office, Nixon had White House Chief of Staff Haldeman start up a slush fund with money from J. Paul Getty (Big Oil). So? Some folks think that Nixon escalated the war in South East Asia at the request of oil industry executives who wanted access to South China Sea oil. That war cost 50,000 US military lives and left three times that number wounded. That is a lot of blood for oil.
Late in 1969, Nixon created a special slush fund designed to influence the 1970 Congressional elections:
The list of contributors includes Chicago insurance tycoon W. Clement Stone, PepsiCo’s Donald Kendall, and Texas electronics millionaire H. Ross Perot. “Townhouse” is not the only secret campaign fund run from the White House; another is run by Nixon’s close friend millionaire Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, and features $50,000 secretly flown to Nixon’s beach home in Key Biscayne, Florida by an employee of billionaire Howard Hughes.
Oh yeah, baby. Let’s hear it for suitcases full of cash. Note that George H.W. Bush (Sr) was a big recipient of that illegal money during his unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate.
More suitcases full of cash were distributed in 1970, this time to Gov. George Wallace’s political rival in Alabama.
When Brewer forces a runoff with Wallace in the May 5 primary elections, Kalmbach has another $330,000 delivered to Brewer’s campaign. Brewer’s aide Jim Bob Solomon takes the money, in $100 bills, to Brewer via a flight from Los Angeles to Alabama; Solomon is so worried about the money being discovered in the event of a plane crash that he pins a note to his underwear saying that the money is not his, and he is delivering it on behalf of the president.
In 1971, the Associated Milk Producers of America delivered $235,000 in cash in exchange for executive rule changes designed to drive up the cost of milk---at a price tag of $100 million to taxpayers----
Is that $3 box on the income tax return starting to make sense? If corporate donors expect that kind of return on their investment, that means we, the taxpayer will end up paying about a thousand dollars out for every one dollar received by a candidate. Now that presidential elections cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars, that means corporate donors expect their payoff from taxpayers to be hundreds of
billions of dollars.
Damn! No wonder our deficit is so high! The one to one matching federal funds that accompany the $3 contributions are a much better deal than the thousand to one that we have to pay when corporations bankroll our leaders.
Baby Boomers will remember when the price of a long distance phone call required a bank loan. That was in the not so good old days when The Phone Company had a monopoly in this country, and the film
The President’s Analyst pretty much summed up what most Americans felt.
Dr. Sidney Schaefer: You know, one thing I learned from my patients... they all hate the phone company. It's interesting; even the stock holders of the phone company hate the phone company!
V.I. Kydor Kropotkin: I know. Bedouins hate the phone company. Matter of fact, I've never been in a country where everybody didn't hate the phone company.
The President’s Analyst
There was tremendous pressure on the Nixon DOJ to break up The Phone Company’s monopoly. That’s why ITT offered the WH $400,000. Ma Belle paid so little and got so much. Wouldn’t it be great if ordinary folks could get that kind of return on our investments?
In 1972, Nixon decided that he was going to win that fall’s election by a landslide. So CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President) raised
$20,000,000 in unreported money.
Much of the money is “laundered” through Mexican and Venezuelan banks. “Plumber” G. Gordon Liddy moves $114,000 through fellow “Plumber” Bernard Barker’s Miami bank accounts (see April-June 1972 and June 21, 1972). More money resides in safety deposit boxes in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Miami. “Plumber” E. Howard Hunt uses money from the campaign fund to recruit dozens of young men and women to spy on Democratic campaigns and report back to CREEP
Some of that money would go to pay the legal expenses of the Watergate burglars---and that is where Nixon met his political doom---but only after sweeping the 1972 elections. Note that by 1976, the US budget deficit was an all time (inflation adjusted) high of $275 billion dollars—almost twice as high as it was when LBJ left office. Yeah, a hundred billion dollars sounds like chickenfeed now, but that was a lot of money back then. And you can bet that a good chunk of that extra $100 billion was taxpayer money being spent to give business donors big returns on their investments.
So, how high will the US deficit rise if the Republican Congress outlaws public financing of federal elections and the US Supreme Court continues to allow unlimited corporate campaign spending? The 2010 elections cost $4 billion. If that number stays the same, we can expect taxpayers to be asked to pay out $4 trillion in corporate welfare.
Ouch. Forget about retirement. Once our work days are over, we will be lucky if we are allowed to retire to a nice, quiet Arctic ice flow. If we are unlucky----
“Soylent Green is people!”
Soylent Green
Those aren't just suitcases full of cash. Those are suitcases full of us---our homes, our savings, our lives, our dreams.
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people."
Teddy Roosevelt
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