Campaign Finance Reform is Needed!

Holy underwear! Have you seen Mitt Romney's latest campaign finance numbers? He's leading Obama by more than double. Team Obama has cash on hand of a little less than $88 million. Team Romney has $186 million.

And that's against a sitting incumbent president! Do you recall that little "Do you want $3 to go to the presidential election campaign fund?" check-box on your tax return? Complete with the "this will not decrease the amount of your refund" reminder? Well, Romney has outpaced even that!

Not that Romney needs it. Any more money raised, and he'll have finally matched only ONE of his off-shore bank accounts.

It's not difficult to see what's going on, if you're paying attention to who owns the media outlets. You see, a very few people, who have a whole lot of money and own a lot of media outlets, are very pissed at Our Trophy President, and can afford trying to buy the election. So to protect the mansions they own, they're using the television stations they own, and the radio stations they own, to speak through the talk-show hosts they own, which results in lots of ads being sold on the networks they own, and they make a boatload of even more cash as a result!

Why the hell are they so mad at Obama? He's been the best thing to ever happen to their bottom line!

It's true. Look what Bill Clinton did for the careers of Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch!

Of course the Mitt Romney campaign finances are just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine all the Superpacs who are getting even more money! We're talking trillions wasted!

This is proof of something I've said for a long time. Democracy has a fundamental incompatibility with capitalism. The two are not synonymous. In democracy, you see, it's one man, one vote. In capitalism, it's one dollar, one vote. This election, more than any other, pits oligarchy vs. democracy, with Team Obama batting for democracy.

Now, here's my main point: Think of all the jobs those trillions of wasted campaign finance dollars could have bought. Think of all the economic growth that's been simply thrown away on Obama-hatred. That's a lot of money for you, me and our children that's been lost! And all for what? Why, to blame Obama for the jobs that they, the ultra-rich, are deliberately not spending their money on. They're wasting that money on "long-shot" Romney.

The fucking hubris!

(Hey! That's a really cool nickname for Holy-Underwear-Mitt! "Long-Shot!" Yeah. Ol' Long-Shot Romney. It has a nice ring to it!)

All this is based on a phony premise. Simple supply and demand economics works like this: If demand rises (as it does during an election season) while supply stays the same (there are only so many TV and radio stations to go around) then price goes up. So what happens in an election season like this one, where more cash is there to buy ad time than any other before? Why the price of the ad time goes up even further! In other words, the notion that more money results in a louder economic voice is an illusion! It's a mirage in a desert, and every politician is running towards it, their parched throats aching with imagined thirst, believing that if only they could just get a few more donors, the election will be theirs.

And it's all a lie.

Every election only needs a certain amount of money to get its message out. After that point, all the extra money does is artificially drive up the price of ad time. Great news if you happen to own a TV or radio station. Bad news for the rest of us.

All that money could have been part of your next paycheck.

Some of this is off-set by the fact that Obama has the ability to buy airtime in advance. Romney cannot buy in advance until he is officially named the Republican candidate, and that won't happen until the end of this month. (That's part of why he has so much more money right now. Obama's spending, and he's not.) So, no matter how much Romney outspends Obama, he cannot keep Our Trophy President from having his voice heard. But to try in vain, he'll end up paying a premium price in comparison to the bargain price for ad time Obama was able to buy. Har, har!

Of course, the Superpacs know how to play this same game. Tip of the iceberg, again.

This is why we need campaign finance reform now! If lower taxes on the rich will result in economic growth (the "trickle down" notion, you see), then just imagine what a windfall there will be for jobs if the rich are barred from throwing their money away on a sure-fire loser like Romney? Curtailing all this ridiculous spending will hurt the TV networks, but so what if it brings this nation's unemployment down to reasonable levels? We need John McCain and Russ Feingold to... no, wait, we were dumb enough to lose Feingold. Never mind. Well, we need somebody to put a lid on all this!

Campaign finance reform is the ultimate economic stimulus bill! A de facto tax-cut for the rich!

And if the NFL can have a spending cap, then so can our political process!

Eric

*