{"id":7846,"date":"2012-01-30T20:23:24","date_gmt":"2012-01-30T19:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7846"},"modified":"2012-01-30T20:23:53","modified_gmt":"2012-01-30T19:23:53","slug":"the-cost-of-american-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7846","title":{"rendered":"The cost of American democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

All efforts to curb or contain election spending in the United States have failed and a 2010 Supreme Court ruling effectively abolished spending limits by allowing super Political Action Committees to spend as much as they want \u00a0(as long as they do not co-ordinate their campaigns with that of an individual candidate – which is no limitation in practice). The result is that election expenditure – already hugh – is ballooning.<\/p>\n

These days to run for US President can cost up to a billion dollars. One analysis predicts that the campaign spending this year on presidential, congressional and state elections may exceed $6 billion. How do candidates raise such sums? By appealing to private interests that will expect those interests to be advanced by the candidate in office and by those in office spending an inordinate amount of time fund raising for the next election.<\/p>\n

Given all this, it is not surprising that the people elected under this system are often themselves very wealthy. An article<\/a> in today’s “Guardian” newspaper explains:<\/p>\n

“The trend towards oligarchy in the polity is already clear. There are 250 millionaires in Congress. Their median net worth is $891,506, nine times the typical US household. Around 11% are in the nation’s top 1%, including 34 Republicans and 23 Democrats. And that’s before you get to Romney, whose personal wealth is\u00a0double that of the last eight presidents combined. All of this would be problematic at the best of times, but in a period of rising inequality it is obscene.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gary Younge is absolutely right when he comments:<\/p>\n

“The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests \u2013 cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it’s systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can’t have because times are hard. And unless the ruling is overturned there is precious little that can be done about it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi once put it: “The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.” If it takes vast sums to run an election campaign and most candidates are themselves wealthy, how can the interests of most citizens be represented and served?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All efforts to curb or contain election spending in the United States have failed and a 2010 Supreme Court ruling effectively abolished spending limits by allowing super Political Action Committees to spend as much as they want \u00a0(as long as they do not co-ordinate their campaigns with that of an individual candidate – which is […]<\/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-7846","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\/7846","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=7846"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7852,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7846\/revisions\/7852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}