Campaign Fundraising

          So far to date the Republican and Democratic parties have combined raised over 10 million dollars. 10 million dollars on hate ads and god knows what else. The one thing that this does bring me to is the 2010 Supreme Court case "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission" which upheld that the government could not restrict how much money corporations donated to political campaigns. This case decision was a turning point in the amount of influence corporations have over our government in the public eye. Obviously there is no doubt that lobbyists and corporations play an enormous role in United States politics, it has been this way since the dawning of our nation and peaked during the Industrial age with big railroad giants like Cornelius Vanderbilt. But the influence of businesses who send most of their jobs over to different countries is dangerous.   
     The reason for my concern about these large scale businesses donating money to political campaigns is that most of these corporations have a sense of false patriotism. These businesses with their as of 2010 UNRESTRICTED donations claim to be all for "making jobs" and "helping the private sector" while they don't nessicarily specify for whom. That is because they can't, the only economy that most of these businesses are helping to grow is the Chinese economy, because that is where the majority of our big scale corporations like Wal-Mart have taken their workers base from. 

    This has been much parodied about in the media from comedians referencing to how much products we receive from the country. There is no doubt that it is impossible to own a home that does not have a single product that states on the label "Made in China". The most recent and popular media parody came from the comedy movie "The Campaign", starring Zach Galifinakis and Will Ferrell. In the movie a set of brothers called the "Moch Brothers" whose names uncoincidentally mirror the names of the American billionaire Koch Brothers, (thought it was a funny representation of them). What this brings me to is that not only did the movie portray the two as crazy men who wanted to buy a local election in order to have this small district sell their local lands to China in order to make a factory, but made them look like total fools, and the Koch brothers were not having it and fired back to "The Campaign" star Zach Galifinakis (see video above; courtesy to CurrentTV).  The movie itself may have been all fun and games but there is much truth to the satiric nature of the film, it is dangerous to allow businesses run our country from the back door.

      What this has to do with is beyond just who to vote and what propositions to vote yay or nay to, this all has to do with what I mentioned in my previous post,  education for voters. Because endorsements are key in any election, it is important to see who those endorsements are from, and what interests might the candidate serve for those people who are endorsing, whether it just be because they like the candidate, or whether it may be a key business move. Because endorsers can often serve as figure heads for people who aren't familiar with the candidate but are with the business or actor, it is important for voters to learn who to trust and why or why not they should trust them.