'Democracy' ain't democracy if it has a price tag

Does the thought that an elected official - mayor, city council person, judge, governor, senator, president, dog catcher - is taking bribes bother you? You know, the knawing thought that the person you may have voted for, the person elected via a system that you trust and may have even risked your life for ('freedom ain't free') may be on the take. Does that bother you?

It certainly bothers me.

To me, democracy is all about the little guy having a chance at the good life just like the big guy ('life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness').

In short, democracy should be, well, democratic for everyone, both rich and poor. Right?

Does it matter if the bribe was offered before or after the person was successfully elected?

This is what we mean: looking at the Federal Election Commission's Summary Reports Search Results for the 2007-2008 fiscal cycle, numbers start to jump out.

'Which numbers?' you ask.

ALL of the numbers and LOTS of them, I reply.

According to Wikipedia's tabulations of the same data we referenced above, "a total of 148 candidates for all parties raised a collective total of $1,644,712,232 and spent $1,601,104,696 for the primary and general campaigns combined through November 24, 2008."

That's right folks, $1.6 BILLION dollars was raised just to get one man elected. Those figures do not include the administrative costs to stage the election; those are just the dollars raised to have people be persuaded, tricked, scared, cajoled, pressured into voting for one candidate over so many others.

A billion and a half dollars may not represent a percentage point of the trillion dollars deficit but shoot if would not help SOMETHING.

*Pardon the fiscal/economic/financial ignorance folks....

Here's another thing to chew on (and then choke).

The wiki figures also broke down the amount spent on the campaign trail by each candidate, compared it with the number of votes received and figured out the average cost per vote. Take a look:

Candidate
Amount spent
votes received
Average spent per vote

Barack Obama
$513,557,218
69,498,215
$7.39

John McCain
$346,666,422
59,948,240
$5.78

Ralph Nader
$4,187,628
738,720
$5.67

Bob Barr
$1,345,202
523,713
$2.57

Cynthia McKinney
$238,968
161,680
$1.48


So, according to those figures, the math is simple: the more one spends to get votes, the more votes he/she will get.

I guess at this rate, Mr. Smith will never really get to Washington ... because freedom really ain't free.

Be Careful What You Ask For

According to the BBC, President Obama earned about 43% of the "white" vote in last year's general election. The same source tells us that Obama actually did a better job of having Mister and Missus Ofay vote for him than John Allah X Muhammad Kerry did in 2004.

Not quite eleven months since the election and only eight months into the actual time in office, things appear (if one puts any stock into the "news" pushed onto us by corporate media in the U.S.) to be changing for the President and the un-ethnic voters. To whit, check out this snippet from a recent article on National Public Radio's webpage:

In April, 53 percent of white voters approved of "the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president," as opposed to 42 percent in August — reflecting an 11-percentage-point decline.

That's right: in just four months, the President has managed to piss off 21% of the tens of millions of voting white folk enough for them to say, 'we don't like him any more.'

Of course, there is more than one way to look at this: (a) Obama was able to make even more white people like him as "the new, cool President" than he was when he was "the scary Black guy that COULD be president;" (b) he pissed off 21% of the tens of millions of voting white folks.

Here is my question for those white folks that loved Obama and proudly drove through "urban neighborhoods" with their Obama-Biden-Change bumper stickers and now think he is a Hitler Socialist Muslim (henceforth known as HSM): when y'all were honking for "change" and wearing t-shirts that read "change" and hugged new-found ethnic friends saying "change" and blah-blah-blah-change-this, yadi-yadi-yadi-change-that...what the @$%&# did y'all expect?!

The quality of life in this country keeps sinking, people all over the world hate this country, we can't produce good cars in this country, all of the best baseball players are not from this country - dingdabnabit, we need change!!! So shut the #&%$@ up and get with the program - we need change!

*Shoot, even left-wing futhamuckas here on the no-fly-list who distrust Obama as a moderate opportunist see that. Jeeez!