How to Buy and Election

Here is a bit from an article in Salon.com on the source of campaign finance money in the US:

The hidden infrastructure of the 2012 campaign has already been built.

A handful of so-called Super PACs, enabled to collect unlimited donations by the continued erosion of campaign finance regulations, are expected to rival the official campaign organizations in importance this election. In many cases, these groups are acting essentially as outside arms of the campaigns.

These are America’s best-funded political factions, their war chests filled by some of the richest men (and almost all are men) in the country.

More than 80 percent of giving to Super PACs so far has come from just 58 donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis of the latest data, which covers the first half of 2011. The Republican groups have raised $17.6 million and the Democratic groups $7.6 million. Those numbers will balloon, with American Crossroads, the main Republican Super PAC, aiming to raise $240 million.)

If you want the names named, go read the whole article.

The US is sliding into "banana republic" status because the politics and the judicial branch have been bought off with the idea that "corporations are people" with "rights" to "speech". The joke is that corporations have no limit on their donations, but real breathing humans do have a limit. And of course, the Supreme Court has decided that the ultra-rich can set up Super-Pacs to allow them to use big dollar amounts to skew elections to favour the ultra-rich.