Your money or your soul
I despair a little of Arnold Schwarzenegger's win in the Californian Governers election. It's not that I question his ability to do the job (he may or may not be up to the task, I honestly don't know), it's just that the election campaign seemed to have been fought not with ideals or policies but with increasingly large sums of money. I believe the final bill for Arnie's campaign was about $20 million, of which approximately a third was put up by the candidate himself. These are not sums of money that mere mortals can easily begin to compete with - not without an amount corporate soul selling at least.
Even more worrying is reading about the Democratic candidates for the next presidential election. Again, candidates seem to be judged first on the size of the campaign war chests they've amounted and on their beliefs second.
Has politics in the UK managed to escape this trap? Or is it simply that discretion truely is the better part of valour and that political parties here are as beholden to their sponsors and their US counterparts?
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Well for starters, you don't have a presidential election, which is really where most of the money is sucked up. The thing that irks me the most is that the electer politicians apparently all enjoy spending the ridiculous quantities of money because they can't seem to pass a law limiting campaign finance contributions.
Sometimes I depair of the American political system, aka our so-called democracy.
My question is on the title of the posting:
shouldn't that be "Your money AND your soul"?
The situation here in the UK is much better because there are spending limits on election campaigns at all levels, regulations about who can donate to political parties and requirements to declare all donors above a threshold as well sums spent during election campaigns. Speaking from experience the regulations can be a bit of a headache (particularly to small parties who pay attention to the rules) and the spending limits are sufficiently high that they do little to even the playing field between small parties and commercially sponsored parties... on the other hand the regulations are better than nothing...
For more information take a look at the Electoral Commission website www.electoralcommission.org.uk - you can even find out how rich the parties are and how much different parties spent on elections.