"Non-candidate" Campaigns Dominate 2016 Presidential Race

Jim Hightower Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

Once upon a time in our Good Ol' USofA, presidential contenders and their political parties raised the funds needed to make the race. How quaint.

For the 2016 run, thanks to the Supreme Court's malicious meddling in the democratic process, corporations and billionaires have taken charge of the electoral game. These very special interests, who have their own presidential agenda, now put up the vast majority of funds and run their own private campaigns to elect someone who'll do their bidding.

So far, of nearly $400 million raised to back candidates of either party in next year's race, half of the money has come from a pool of only about 400 people – and two-thirds of their cash went, not to candidates, but into corporate-run SuperPACs. For Republicans, 77 percent of the funds have gone to SuperPACs.

The reason is that the Supreme Court decreed in its reckless Citizens United decision that these "non-candidate" campaigns can take unlimited sums of money directly from corporations. Therefore a very few wealthy powers can pour money into these murky political operations and gain unwarranted plutocratic power over the election process. Of the $37 million in the PAC backing Ted Cruz, for example, $36 million was pumped in by only three interests – a New York hedge fund operator, a corporate plunderer living in Puerto Rico, and the owners of a fracking operation who've pocketed billions from the explosive use of this destructive drilling technology.

But one of these new players assures us that they're not buying candidates for corporate and personal gain, but "primarily [for] a love economic freedom."

This is Jim Hightower saying... Sure, sweetheart – all you want is the "economic freedom" to pollute, defraud, exploit, rob, and otherwise harm anything and anyone standing between you and another dollar in profit.

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This has been reposted from Jim Hightower's website.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

Posted In: Allied Approaches, From Jim Hightower

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