Other People’s Power

Vasu Reddy from Chicago
vasureddy@aol.com

Billions of dollars are spent on US presidential elections.  This is just for the president, and untold amounts are spent on congressional and senate elections.  Politics itself is a massive industry (in every election cycle) as advertisers, promotions, travel, hotels, people, industrial and human resources, cars, busses, oil and gas, and everything else in the country is mobilized and paid for by the campaigns.  Although the money is raised by the candidates, it mostly flows back into the economy.  It is well accounted for and well spread out into the nation’s economic system.  Candidates raising money and spending it on bashing each other, is in one way adding to the economic activity.  Although we don’t hear the coverage on economic impact of raising campaign money and spending it.  With each election cycle the campaign spending keeps growing (just like our national debt).

Political action committees and various loop holes in the system allows for raising huge campaign contributions and spending by small group of individuals.  They also yield massive power in directing the economic and political direction of the nation.  Both the democrats and the republicans, as simply politicians, who get elected with the help of massive contributions.  That’s the lead for power, with other people’s money or it really is other people’s power.

Why are people making massive political contributions?  No one gives political contribution just for the love of politics, they do it to influence an economic and political agenda.  The billions spent on political campaigns can be spent on education, health, urban development or any other people related programs, but the political contributions are limitless outweighing the philanthropic or humanitarian causes.  My comments no way ignore the huge contributions made to humanitarian causes, it is just politics command power that comes with winning elections, and money has a major part in winning elections.

In the 2016 USA presidential election Trump did not need anyone’s money.  He started out campaigning that he was going to self-fund himself, which ended up not being the case.  But it was very appealing to have someone run with own money.  The idea was he would not be indebted to other people’s money.  Trump ended up taking in more money than anyone else, and continues to take OPM.  Although we are only in the first few months of Trump’s presidency, he has already started raising money for 2020.

It is a fact that political agenda will follow the money, and put someone in power.  The more money, the more opportunity for power.  There are distinct differences between the priorities of political parties and their ideology, and just about half of the population determines the priorities every four years.  Money that powers the presidency drives the next four-year agenda.  Nothing drives the national agenda other than the very large amounts of money.