No Matter Who Wins, Money Wins
Via KINJA
It is election day, when we celebrate the uniquely American system of democracy, in which every single dollar gets a vote.
The general idea of a democracy is that it represents the interests of the people. That is not what we have in America. Our political system is an oligarchy. It represents the interests of those with money. Our elected leaders have almost no choice but to fall in line with this, because we have a system that requires a great deal of money to get elected to office, and allows almost anyone (including corporations, which are people) to donate almost limitless sums of money for the purpose of getting one candidate or the other elected. Sure, sometimes the candidate with slightly less money wins. But the candidate with no money never wins. Money—not ideas, or morals, or leadership ability—is the entry fee to our political process. To be a politician, you must be a beggar. As a beggar, you are naturally indebted to those who financially support you. The result is a system in which money talks. The people—the millions of citizens—are reduced to secondary status. In our system, citizens are not intrinsically valuable. They are only meaningful insofar as it costs a certain amount of money to trick a sliver of them into changing their votes.
Back