Cory Doctorow — Nuanced view of corruption: money doesn't buy elections, it buys influence
Jonathan Soros, son of George Soros and heavy donor to campaigns to get money out of politics, writes a nuanced account of what huge, open campaign contributions do to electoral politics.
After a certain point, spending doesn't make a huge difference in electoral outcomes (one study says that doubling funding shifts the needle by one percent), but because politicians are entirely beholden to their funders to reach that certain point, the electoral agenda becomes about their donors' priorities. And once in office, every argument is couched in terms that are set by those donors (as Barney Frank quipped, "[Congress are not] the only people in the history of the world who, on a regular basis, took money from perfect strangers and made sure it had no effect on them."
Soros points out that money was corrupting politics -- albeit less openly -- long beforeCitizens United, and calls for a radical campaign-spending reform to minimize the reach of large campaign donors' priorities on political discourse.…
Boing Boing
1 comment:
Too subtle by half.
The big money might not be responsible in most cases for tipping the election to one party or another, but it also isn't merely a matter of buying "influence".
There are only two parties, and the money guys make sure that in almost every case each party chooses its candidate from a very, very, very short list of people acceptable to TPTB. After that point, it doesn't really matter who is elected.
US Senators are all rich anyway. It doesn't matter whether they are subsequently "influenced" by the money people. They don't have to be influenced by them, since they already see eye to eye with them.
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