So Where Does the Money Come From?

I need to apologize for drumming 70% of the registered voters in Del Norte County, who did not vote in the Primary election. After the final tally, it turns out that I should have drummed only 57% of them. My humble apology goes out to those that I wronged.

Money has become the primary driver in modern elections, and I agree with Kevin Hendrick about how the candidates and propositions rely on special interests’ groups for funding. He mentioned a bill that was proposed by Assemblyman Chris Rogers about limiting the corporations on their contributions but didn’t explain the shortfalls of the bill.

The assemblyman stated in his press release that the bill (AB 1984) wasn’t going to go anywhere, so it looks like the bill was only a grandstand play, especially since his campaign funds come from the unions, PACs, and corporations.

Campaign finance laws need to be looked at but his bill was to eliminate corporations and not the real brokers of political power.

The real villains of campaign funding are the unions and other organizational donations, such as non-profits, corporations, out of state entities, and non-profit special interest groups. If they were included, the bill would truly return the vote to the people and give them a voice.

How much do the unions spend? Heavy contributors to political campaigns in California are the unions and the Political Action Committees, who receive large donations from the unions.

For example, the Nurses and Teacher unions in California in the Prop 50 election, last November, spent a combined $7,500,000 and that didn’t include the union money that was donated to the Democrat national HM Pac, which spent $16,500,000.

The unions also give out money on the local level, and it is projected that Los Angles Teachers will spend close to $7,000,000 this election cycle, not included in the above figures.

To quote Kevin Hendrick, because he wrote it so well, “The best we can do is try to identify the source of campaign donations and then decide whether these donations are affecting the policy positions of the candidates that are accepting them.”

So how do we fix it, with a one-party dictatorship in Sacramento: We can’t. Proposals have been made in the past and perhaps they need to be reevaluated.

One proposal is that to restore power to the people, a radical shift is necessary: eliminating all private funding from unions, corporations, non-profits, and out-of-state groups, and instead providing candidates with public campaign money. These should include reallocations from failed programs like high-speed rail, failing non-profits, such as mental health, homeless, and green energy programs.

There is more than enough money in these failed Democrat programs to fund elections. By redirecting funds from these programs, the goal would be to ensure that candidates are beholden to the voters rather than to high-stakes donors and it makes sense to give the people a voice in the process.