The last American presidential election in 2008 cost around $1 billion; the last mid-term congressional elections in 2006 cost about $2.8 billion; this November’s mid-terms are estimated to cost approximately $5 billion. That’s $5,000,000.000.<\/p>\n
How come? Thanks to a recent decision of the US Supreme Court, effectively corporate interests can spend as much as they want and big business is determined to halt the ‘socialist’ programme of Obama and his congressional Democrats.<\/p>\n
Shouldn’t there be a fairer and more limiting system of political funding? As Michael Tomasky puts it in this article<\/a>:<\/p>\n “How to stop it? There is no way to stop it. There are ideas about, but our system of campaign finance in America is probably broken beyond repair and subject to the paradox that while it’s horrible for the republic and (nearly) everyone knows it, it’s good for each legislator individually, so there’s never any incentive for real change.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What’s at stake in the elections\u00a0 on 2 November? Some 37 of the 100 Senate seats, all 435 House seats, 37 of the 50 governorships, and a range of state legislative places.<\/p>\n You can find more background on the mid-term elections here<\/a> and you can find an explanation of the American political system here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The last American presidential election in 2008 cost around $1 billion; the last mid-term congressional elections in 2006 cost about $2.8 billion; this November’s mid-terms are estimated to cost approximately $5 billion. That’s $5,000,000.000. How come? Thanks to a recent decision of the US Supreme Court, effectively corporate interests can spend as much as they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3816"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3823,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions\/3823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}