Almost Classical

One of the many aspects of our government that I dislike is the "pay to play" nature of influencing elected leaders. If you were idealistic enough to imagine President Obama would somehow be different, I could have proven you were wrong before election day. He received more donations from the top 1% of Americans than any other president. He also received more money from Wall Street than his opponent. By June of 2008, the Obama advantage on Wall Street was clear. (AP - June 2008) For both candidates, Wall Street's investment and banking sectors have become among their portliest cash cows, contributing $9.5 million to Obama and $5.3 million to McCain so far. There is a commenter on DailyKos using the ID "Goldman Owned Party" as a dig at the Republicans. But, that's also far from accurate. Goldman Sachs has a history of connections to the Democrats in congress, especially the Senate. This makes sense, because the financial industry is in New York City, not a GO...

This story from Politico.com indicates the real problem isn't money in politics. Over the course of the campaign, the report found, Democratic committees and candidates outspent their GOP foes $159 million to $112 million – more than enough to compensate for the money outside GOP-leaning groups contributed toward airtime. Democrats spent more, and lost a lot more at local, state, and national levels. What happened to the huge affect we were told to expect from Citizens United? It didn't happen. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision didn't seem to change spending by more than two, yes two percent . Of course, we also had several multi-millionaires wasting their own fortunes running for offices that pay under $250,000 a year. My personal theory is that problem of "revolving doors" — politicians go into lobbying, business executives go into politics, media consultants become reporters, and every now and then they rotate positions on the chess board. S...