Brace yourself. The 2016 presidential campaign will be the nastiest, most corrupt ever, filled with billionaires backing their candidates, and little or no discussion of issues. Instead, vicious attack ads with fill the air as a lapdog mainstream media reports on the horse race, and not the issues. MSM makes huge money from political advertisements. They aren’t about to do anything that might jeopardize that profit stream, and thus are part of the corruption. And if you think billionaires will donate huge sums to candidates without expecting financial rewards in return then you are terminally deluded if not compromised yourself.
Apologists for the political corruption squeal golly shucks, that’s just how the system is, and while it may be broken, we are forced, forced I tell you, to work within it and grovel for money from the wealthy who look at politicians as potential profit streams. Besides, the Other Side are Bat Demons from Hell Who Must Be Stopped. Once we stop them, then perhaps we can think about removing the corruption of money from politics. But not until then. Right.
Oh, isn’t that cute, Ted Cruz has his own billionaire now funding him. Hillary Clinton has several, including a Walmarrt heiress and George Soros. Jeb Bush, in a genuinely cynical ploy, is asking big donors to not give more than $1 million, for now, to avoid the impression he might somehow be beholden to them.
“The dominance of a few key people early on is not a productive thing for the campaign or for Jeb Bush,” Rick Hohlt, a veteran Republican fund-raiser, commented on the instruction to set a million-dollar lid for the first 100 days of the campaign. There will be time for less restraint about eye-popping donations as the election approaches.
It just takes a random billionaire to change things. Democracy can take a hike. A hedge fund billionaire who hates icky taxes likes Ted Cruz.
“It just takes a random billionaire to change a race and maybe change the country,” Potter said. “That’s what’s so radically different now.”
Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, “recently faced an unflattering congressional investigation, the results of which indicated that it used complex and unorthodox financial structures to dramatically lower its tax burden.”
I’m guessing Mercer wants these troublesome tax issues to disappear and what better way to do that than have your own pet president. The ROI on this could be awesome.
Billionaire Walmart heiress Alice Walton, billionaire philanthropist Jon Stryker, and billionaire progressive global financier George Soros were among the wealthy donors who helped raise over $4 million last year for the “Ready for Hillary” super PAC, newly released public filings reveal.
And that was just in 2014. Her big money push starts today.
All of this is hideously corrosive to democracy and to a campaign where actual issues are discussed. This country has serious problems now, none of which, I predict, will be discussed in any meaningful way amid the flood of money for the rich to candidates, to benefit themselves. Yes, the contributions are legal. However their effect is corrupting to both those giving them and those receiving them.
And, oh yeah, Wall Street would be happy with either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. I guess they see two as mostly being the same.
“If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that and either outcome would be fine,” one top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer said over lunch in midtown Manhattan last week. “We could live with either one. Jeb versus Joe Biden would also be fine. It’s Rand Paul or Ted Cruz versus someone like Elizabeth Warren that would be everybody’s worst nightmare.”
I refer to political elections as Crooks and Liars competitions, they are certainly nothing to do with democracy.
Billions of dollars, character assassinations, and nothing of substance will be discussed.