President Obama has been asking me for money, and sending Michelle and other Democratic big-wigs to ask me for money. I have no intention of giving him a penny.
It’s nothing personal. I appreciate what the President has done in his first two years in office. He has done about as well as you could expect any President to do, given the mess he inherited from his predecessor, and the shameful, self-serving shenanigans of the Congress. If McCain had been elected, I’m guessing things would have been a lot worse than they are now.
I am simply not giving any money to any political candidate for statewide or nationwide office, for the foreseeable future. I just don’t see the point in wasting my money on elections that will be decided by the corporations, on candidates that will end up serving the corporations’ interests rather than the people’s. Yet that is exactly how the America political system now works.
Ever since Jerry Brown warned us in 1992 that money was taking over the political system, I have been seeking and supporting the candidates most likely to bring the needed reform to our campaign finance system – Jerry Brown in 1992, John McCain in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008.
Ever since Bill Clinton blew his golden opportunity to rewrite the campaign finance rules in 1992, focusing his political capital instead on a failed attempt to fix the health care system, the power of money has steadily entrenched itself, as the special interests have successfully beaten back all attempts to restore sanity to our political process by taking the money out of it. Things have gotten worse and worse.
Our only hope, as I saw it, was to elect a president from the grass roots, with no special interest money. Then, just when it seemed all hope was lost, along came Barack Obama. He made clear that he was out to change the way politics worked, and he ran on a pledge not to accept any money from lobbyists or political action committees. It was a grassroots movement. By intelligently using the power of the Internet, he was able to raise more money than all the other candidates. Hope was running high for a real change in the way business was conducted in Washington. Here was a guy who really understood.
Or so it seemed. Yet once he secured the nomination of the Democratic Party, he dived deep into the pockets of corporations like Goldman Sachs, and as President, he has been just another corporate toady.
By the time he was elected, he was no longer even talking about election reform. He was all about health, education, and energy. And the financial meltdown that began in September of 2008 necessarily forced him to focus on stopping the economy’s bleeding and rescuing as many jobs as possible.
Then disaster struck. The Republican Supreme Court ruled last January, in a partisan 5-4 decision, that corporations are people with the right to give unrestricted amounts of money to political candidates. Democracy in America, which had been on life support since 1992, was now faced with certain death.
Bold, provocative action was needed. Perhaps a bill in Congress to make Clean Money Elections the law of the land. Maybe even a constitutional amendment denying the absurd claim that corporations are individuals.
So in the face of this crisis, what did our grassroots, man-of-the-people President do? Absolutely nothing. A big, fat goose egg. Didn’t even try. Barack Obama not only has not changed the way business is done in Washington, on his watch it has taken a quantum leap further along the toxic path it was already traveling when he took office.
Ever since 1992, I have been giving more and more money to politicians. Middle class guys like me were able to at least stay on the field against the millionaires, because there are so many more of us than there are of them. I only mildly resented the amount of money I was putting into a corrupt system that seemed more and more like a protection racket every day.
But now? Competing against a few millionaires is one thing. Competing against billion-dollar corporations is an exercise in futility, and a waste of time and money. Don’t expect a penny from me, Mr. President.
