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Sophomore examines the sources behind campaign funding

Money fuels and directs American politics. Candidates cannot run for president if they don’t have the money, and people aren’t going to give them money unless they can get something out of it in return. It is important to understand who is giving our candidates money and why they are doing so because it gives us insight into the actions they might take as president and who it is they’re really fighting for.

The two main sources candidates receive funding from are super political action committees (PACs) and people called “bundlers.” A bundler is somebody who raises money from other people in support of a candidate and often receives benefits such as a position in the party or other privileges.

Legally, super PAC funders do not have to reveal themselves to the public, and at this point no Republican candidate has released all of their bundlers’ information.

According to the Open Secrets Blog, a website dedicated to keep politicians and their spending transparent, the majority of Mitt Romney’s funding comes from special interest groups in the business and energy sector. Romney is heavily pro-business and his financing shows how dedicated he is to ensure corporate success. Romney has spent the majority of his funding on ads attacking his fellow candidates, a common trend among this year’s candidates.

Newt Gingrich has relied heavily on just one man, Sheldon Adelson, for the majority of his funding. Adelson is a Republican billionaire casino owner who said, “Why is it fair that I should be paying a higher percentage of taxes than anyone else?” Most of the rest of his funding comes from extremely wealthy businessmen who gave over $500,000 at once. This seems to show that Gingrich prioritizes the wealthy few rather than the majority of Americans.

A lot of the candidates’ funding this year has come from small, wealthy special interest groups. The danger in this is that it limits the power of the American people to change anything when our president has to pay back the favors he used to get the job.

Thanks to laws that largely protect the identities of donors, the race for the presidency has become increasingly reliant on who can raise the most money, and we often have no idea who is providing the money or why.

The Huffington Post reported that this is because of the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case to allow undocumented and unlimited funding for candidates. Super PAC donations are anonymous, unlimited and tax-exempt. This has created huge problems as money and corporate interests have to be placed above the interests of the average American. Because the donations are tax-exempt, there have been cases where groups send money through the super PAC but the money never actually gets to a candidate.

In a convoluted way that I don’t really understand but smarter people with calculators do, this is a form of money laundering, and it illustrates just how corrupt our system of funding is. The real power in this country is being held by those with the money to pay for a candidate, and if we don’t know who is paying for whom, then we don’t know what our candidate will do once in office.

Many congressmen and other groups have been pushing for the Supreme Court to change these laws, but nothing has been done yet. Until something happens, our government is in danger of being nothing more than a bidding war.


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