Liberalpro: Give me a break, enough is enough. So far, this has gone from a strong resolution, to a moderate resolution, to a strong non-binding resolution, and now to a whimper that basically says: please don't "surge", and we promise not to cut your funding. Either you don't understand why you are the Majority Leader in the Senate now, or you just don't like your job anymore. Fact is Harry, people are getting a bit tired of the Democrats already. This might just be the thing that finishes off your “second chance party” and paves the way for a new political party.

We just can't go on the way that we are going. I never thought I would say this, but I'm coming to hate my own country. It has become a vile, disgusting monster that seems to want to subjugate not only the world, but it's own people. Why? I think I know why. It's for the few. The many will sacrifice for the few. The few that have been born or have been smiled on by fate, to be included in the class of the wealthy. The wealthy and the privileged that can't seem to have enough wealth and power. The few politically connected families with mega-fortunes that jealously guard their wealth and who create situations that will enable them to grab more wealth and with it... more power.

The people of this once proud country used to be secure in the knowledge that America would always find the way to do what was moral. Sometimes the change has came slowly, but change would always come. We always had a surplus of leaders that had that spark of real morality. The kind of leaders that would right these injustices and bring us back to a moral center. Those kind of leaders are nowhere to be found, at least not in the government. The people that have been charged to take the helm of this "Ship of State" seem to be steering her into the shoals, to run her aground. There seems to be no moral compass to show these would-be leaders where right is, as the direction they take us in is always wrong.

The right in America is anything but. It seems as if there are no longer two parties, but an aristocracy that is hell-bent on sacrificing anything for the short-term while our long term goals are non-existent. There is no future for these people, only the present, and as long as this rich aristocracy is making a profit, it matters not what we are sacrificing for the future.

The words that come out of the opposition party are strong and brave, but the reality of their actions are meek and timid. The Democrats claim that they can not get enough support if they criticize the administration. That they must "go along to get along". So they surrender even before they act. This is the death knell of a once proud political party. Either you want to reign in these pretenders or you don't. Either you want to be part of the solution or just another part of the problem. The choice is clear. The path is laid out for you. It is up to the Democrats to do what they said they would do. This might just be the last time you get to make a decision on what path to take. You must act with conviction and make clear what it is that you are demanding. To stand on the side and timidly ask that this President not escalate this war will not work. He will start a war with Iran next. You know it and I know it and so do a majority of Americans. Now is not the time to be subtle. Our future is in the Senate’s hands. It is a sin that you are promoting a “non-binding” resolution, and a watered down gutted non-binding resolution is just not acceptable. The worst that could happen is that a strong resolution gets defeated. At least you will have sent this President a message that he can not ignore. I can’t be any plainer than I am right now. The decision rests with the Democrats for the first time in 12 years. Either you show the American people what you are made of, or apologize to them and resign so that we may elect real leaders for the People’s House. Remember this Harry, you work for us, and I can guarantee that I have millions of people behind me as I write these words. Ignore them at your peril.

Our Corrupt Comgress

M&P: Seems like Hillary Clinton has killed Campaign spending limits for good. The Mccain-Fiengold Bill was really doomed before it got off the ground anyway. That bill was just lip-service for the public from Congress. They won't pass any meaningful campaign reform until "We the People" make them. Getting back to Hillary, she has already managed to amass over 100 million for her campaign war chest. People are predicting that this Presidential campaign will cost over 1 Billion dollars. If you ask me, I think that if you counted all the 527 committee money and all the money that doesn't get reported, it want over a billion in the last election that Bush managed to steal again.

I am so tired of corporations running this country. It's not just corporations, its also the unions (they are actually losing ground) and the special interest groups. Those are groups such as the AMA and the Association of Petroleum Retailers and PAC's like American Family and other groups that lobby and influence lawmakers. They have gone so far, that the Congress is putting forth a resolution where lobbyists cannot text message congressmen when congress is in session! Give me a break!

The MainStream Media (MSM) acts like we should be concerned by the lobbyists taking our lawmakers to lunch or giving them a free flight to Jamaica. That's wrong, but it isn't the big problem. Not when you're talking about $50,000.00 in campaign donations.Do you know how long it takes for a lawmaker to come up with $50,000 ? Think about it. Hillary already has $100,000,000.00. Damn! Who can run against that? Another fat cat, that's who. This is why we get saddled with big mouth buffoons in politics that are well connected. The majority in Congress are filthy rich. They are not like us. It's true, as Susan Howatch said: The Rich are Different. They don't have the same problems that we do. Do you know how many working class families saved any money last year? Let me tell you, -1%. That's ridiculous. This is where they want to keep us. EXXON-MOBILE made more money than any corporation in history last year. The Washington Post estimated that they made about 33 Million dollars a minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They can well afford to give money to Hillary Clinton and any politician that will do their dirty work. Human nature being what it is, there is a lot of dirty work to go around.

Everyone complains but nobody does anything about it. This is not exciting enough for them. They may believe that the things they are involved in are more important, but as far as activism goes, there is nothing more important than Campaign Finance Reform. It is the big kahuna so to speak. "The Reform that Enables All Other Reforms". Get the corporations and the special interests out of government, we get our representative democracy back. Simple as that. These people in Congress don't worship any God. Money and Power are their Gods. They act nice and try to be overly friendly and want you to like them, so they can screw you out of your last dime! They are in this for themselves. Call me bitter, call me jaded, call me anything you want to call me, but if you research where the money is, you'll call me correct! These people are the scum of the Earth. There are a few good people in Congress. Dennis Kucinich, Jim Webb and a few more have a conscience. They won't be President though. They don't have that killer instinct and don't know where all the bodies are buried. Our Congress is corrupt through and through. Unless we take the money out of their hands that they get from these Corporate Slavers, we will never get an honest country. Is that exciting enough for you?

Will Politicians Help Rid Us of Corporate Money in Elections?

Money & Politics: The NY Times came out today and actually claimed that Campaign Finance Reform in America, the issue nearest and dearest to my heart after my wife and my liberty, is effectively dead. I don’t think so. The NY Times is not the Chief Medical Officer attached to the critical care unit of dying political reform. Campaign Finance Reform still has a pulse. However faint and intermittent it may be, and is still considered, even in this harsh world of absolutes, to be alive. There are still initiatives in several states for “Clean Money” elections. If people could be exposed to the idea, it may just germinate into something that could be used on a national level.

The chief “evil” that permeates the land, is this legal ruling that the Supreme Court made almost 90 years ago, about the “Personhood” of corporations. That Corporations should have the same rights and privileges afforded under the Constitution for individuals, makes the case for getting big corporate money out of political races very difficult. The people who claim that this "“influence buying" which in reality is what it really is are protected under the 1st Amendment. They claim that corporations are only exercising their freedom of speech by supporting candidates that are favorable to their business interests. That would be a logical argument if the amount of money we were talking about were $2,000.00 a year or less. If corporations do indeed have the same status as an individual, then hold them to an individual’s limit for campaign contributions. A Corporation that gives $50,000.00 to a congressman is not holding the corporations at the same level of financing as an individual.

The problem with all of this is that the very people who can change this sorry state of affairs are also corrupted by these same corporate contributions. It’s all falls under “conflict of interest”. As adults, we can make the logical assumption that it is going to be very difficult to wean these politicians away from the corporate tit. They will fight it at every turn, and with every weapon they have at their disposal. One such weapon is the media. Whether the media is influenced by the politicians or bought by the politicians is irrelevant. The situation is that they can use the media by downplaying the problem that corporate and special interest money is to our representative democracy. It has gotten well past the point where a few special and corporate interests equal individual citizen contributions; they are well past that point. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives had 66% of her campaign financed by special interest and corporate money. That is two thirds of her campaign funding and it came from PAC’s! How can the Speaker of the House support campaign finance reform when she apparently does so well under the system we have in place now? Who does Madame Speaker owe? When are people going to call in favors that she owes? Will it benefit the people when she pays these PAC’s for services rendered? You can bet you bottom dollar that it’s not going to benefit the common citizen. Do you believe that they have given her millions just to vote her conscience on the things that would be “right” for The American people? Sure, PAC’s are just that altruistic. They just want somebody in power that “will do the right thing”. Not.

Why I Care About Campaign Finance Reform

The majority of people in this country don’t have any idea of how the political game is played. Some people are experts in polls and issues and reading a politician’s chances of winning an election. These are the people that we look up to, the ones we expect to let us know when our political system is failing us. We take it for granted that warning bells would go off if something were amiss. Well, consider this your warning bell. I’m not the best expert on political campaigns, but I have been digging for awhile now, and I believe I have a pretty good insight into how this political game is played.

First of all, let me tell you how I got on the subject of Campaign Finance Reform. It isn’t a very glamorous subject, and there are some people ask me why I am so interested in it. Well, the reason I am so interested, is because the people that contribute to political campaigns, are the people that control politicians. I have come to realize that political campaigns and their funding have produced the largest group of pimps and whore in this nation’s history. Do you wonder why I claim that? Well, as Sherlock Holmes would say, it’s elementary. In fact it is so elementary that people don’t stop to look at campaign financing. This is the root of all evil and its right under everyone’s nose, but we’re too damn busy looking for complicated mechanizations to politics.

I started a political party. I tried to get people to join, and I did. My plans for the party were just to get like-minded people together and to influence politicians at first. I figured that later on, we could move into the area of fielding our own candidates when we got more support. The more I tried to get us listed on websites and the more I tried to get us recognized, the money part of it hit me right on the head. To get a political party registered in most states, you have to come up with about ten thousand signatures with names and addresses of them all. Remember, not all states operate the same way, I’m generalizing. I tried to figure how much it would cost me to get ten thousand signatures, and the answer was much more than I could come up with. I started to dig a little deeper and I started looking at how much money it cost to run a campaign.

This is the part where I had an epiphany of sorts. I went to the web site “opensecrets.org” and found out how much President Bush spent on his campaign. The answer was about 360 million dollars. That’s right, 360 million dollars. Think about it. We have just gone over 300 million people living in the United States. Take away the people under voting age, the people incarcerated, the people that don’t register to vote and the people that are registered and just don’t vote. When you get down to it we are talking about $6.00 dollars a vote. Six dollars each from sixty two million people! That was how many votes it took and how much money. $360,000,000.00 for a job that pays $400,000.00 a year, not too shabby! The President could have taken matching Federal Funds, but that would have given him only 78 Million dollars. He refused the money until the primaries were over. After the primaries he received $74.6 million dollars and therefore could not raise any more money after the nomination. That meant that he raised approximately $292,000,000.00 from contributors.

Who are these contributors you ask? Well a large part of these contributors are corporations, Unions and Special Interest groups. They are called Political Action Committees (PAC’S). When I looked into who financed the Presidents campaign, it was very revealing. I started looking into Senator’s and Congressman’s campaigns, and what I found there was even worse. I found out that the majority of money for Congress is from PAC’s. Those individuals don’t make up the majority of the donors.

It works like this. Before the primaries, a candidate has to fund his or her own campaign. That could run into millions. In order to win the primary either the candidate has to find very rich donors and a lot of them, or tale money from PAC’s. Election campaigns have gotten so expensive that unless you are “sponsored” by corporations, you don’t have a chance. It’s almost like NASCAR. For every corporate donation to the race, there is probably another favor attached to it. Do you think that these corporations just donate out of patriotism? How would you explain that to a Corporate Board?

So this is where we are at. Let me say this, there are a few states that have limits on campaign donations and a few states that fund their political campaigns. There are more judicial elections that are state funded than legislative seats. States consider corporate and special interest funding for judges to be too risky. A judge might well rule in a defendants or plaintiffs favor if they happened to fund their campaigns. So if they feel that way about judicial candidates, why not legislative candidates? Don’t you believe a legislator would pass laws in a campaign contributors best interests? Especially if he had to hit that same company up for the next election.

So think about it. Is this why we don’t have National Heath Insurance? Would you like to know how much the American Medical Associations give to politicians? There are associations of Doctors, Surgeons, Heart Surgeons, ect., ect. Get the point? There are so many medical and lawyer and insurance PAC’s out there you wouldn’t believe. We have Timber Associations, Agricultural Pac’s, Oil producer Pac’s, you name it and we’ve got it.

I’m going to tell you one simple thing that could change your entire outlook on American Politics. These Corporations and Special Interest PAC’s are the donors that finance our elected officials. Our Congress is bought before they reach the halls of the Capitol Building. Think about it. They do not work for the people, they work for corporations. The only time that they legislate for the people is when it doesn’t conflict with their corporate and Special Interest supporters. Doesn’t that make you sick? It sure makes me sick.

Let’s do something about it. Tell everyone that will listen. Call your elected officials. Write them. If you are rich and want to do something, find a Campaign Finance Reform outfit and donate. Scream bloody murder. This is the root of our problems in this country! The people’s government is no longer the people’s government. Corporations are recognized by the Federal government as individuals, as “people”. Tell them to overturn that old case Santa Clara Co. vs. Southern Pacific RR. From 1896 that recognized corporations as people. They should not have the same rights as people. Hell, most corporations are multi-national. Should foreigners have the same rights as citizens?

Can you see why I’m interested? This problem needs to be addressed. It permeates everything Congress does. No law is beyond suspicion as long as this political se-up is in place. We are second-class citizens in our own country. The politicians don’t want to move against the Status Quo. Would you want to be the first politician to point all of this out? If the whole of Congress didn’t buy it, then say goodbye to the seat you have, because you are not going to run an effective campaign next election with no corporate money. This HAS to be a grassroots thing. Let’s do it.

P&M: This is the very first post of "Politics ans Money". I am Timothy V. Gatto. I write for OpEdNews.com and also for my own blog "Liberalpro". Even though I am a "Progressive", this site is non-partisan. Here we do not recognize Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Conservatives, or any other political label. Here we are devoted to taking Corporate and Special Interests out of the campaign financing loop.

The sad thing in out country is that the people are no longer the ones that finance the politicians that run for office. The political parties are not the ones that finance the majority of money that goes into a political campaign. The majority of money that a politician gets to run his campaign comes from corporations and special interest groups such as the American Medical Association, The American Trial Lawyers Association, and also Unions and other assorted Political Action Committees also known as PAC's. The fact is, Pac's usually make up more than half of a candidates political campaign war chest.

You may be wondering where do we get our data? We get most of the data we will use on this site from The Center for Responsice Politics that run a web site called OpenSecrets.org. This site tells people who gives, and who gets. Most of the donations we will ask for will be for this organization. The only time we will ask for donations, is when we need to get funds for office equipment or for travel. We are a long way from asking for donations.

I am going to keep thjis first posting short and sweet. At this time we will enable comments with no moderation, so we ask that any comments left have no profanity, and that no political comments be left. Remember that we are trying to run a non-partisan website. If anyone is familiar with my politics, you know you can comment on other sites if you want to argue political issues. Here I hope we can together tackle one big problem, corporate and special interest politics. I will try to post daily. If you wish to join this website, please e-mail me at timgatto@hotmail.com.