The Wealth of Candidates

We have all by now become quite used to the fact that our candidates for both local and national office are always going to come from one particular class of the population, the wealthy class. This years nominees for president are no exception. The front runners especially are all of enormous wealth. It is estimated that republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has a personal fortune in excess of 200 million dollars. Democratic nominee John Edwards is in excess of 55 million. Rudy Giuliani is at over 50 million. John McCain at over 40 million. Hillary Clinton over 35 million. Millionaires in the United States make up less than one percent of the total population of the country and this raises the question of just how sensitive or interested wealthy elected officials will be to the needs and wants of a nation that is over 99% working class and poor.
In order for a candidate to become elected it requires an enormous amount of money to do so. We have all heard the saying that money is the mother's milk of politics and at every new election cycle it becomes even more true. It has been estimated that it will cost well in excess of 50 million dollars for each of the major candidates of both parties to run their campaigns before it is all over and in order to have access to that kind of money they need to court the wealthy in order to have any kind of serious chance. You know like the way that Barak Obama has been courting Oprah Winfrey in the last weeks. The problem comes in when after they are elected. All that support comes at a price and once they are in office they tend to serve those who provided them the greatest help to get where they are and that often comes at the expense of the middle class. Take George Bush for example. He garnered a huge amount of support for his two election campaigns in 2000 and 2004 from the elite. It is well known that major corporations like Exxon Mobil were large contibutors to his cause. That corporation is known to be a big contibutor to the negative effects of global warming due to the emmissions that it puts out into the atmosphere from its large number of oil refineries. Once elected what does President George Bush do? Well he spends the bulk of his two terms in office basically denying that global warming even exists and has his administration make public statements like "The science is incomplete on the issue of global warming". What does this do? Well it frees up Exxon Mobil to continue to pollute the atmosphere unchecked and frees the company from having to spend large amounts of money to install pollution controls in all its refineries and so they dont have any additional expenses like that eating into the record profits they have been making since Bush became president. It's called a "Quid pro quo", In other words you wash my back and i'll wash yours and so it goes and the result is that the majority of the country and indeed the world suffers. The best example of this lately occured this past week when the United States refused to sign the Kyoto Protocal which calls for all the worlds major industrial nations to set limits on the amount of pollution they distribute into the earths atmosphere each year. The U.S. was the worlds last holdout and did not want to sign on. This all of course is in addition to the enormous tax cuts for the wealthy that this president has championed. In a recent Senate Committee hearing in November of 2007 investor Warren Buffet Testified to the long term destructive nature of this policy when he Stated that under the current structure of taxation he in fact has to pay significantly fewer taxes proportionally on his income than his own secretary. He further stated that this does not bode well for the economic future of the country and should be changed.
They come from the wealthy class, they are elected by the wealthy class through their monetary support during the election campaigns and once elected they serve the interests of the wealthy class. Our first President George Washington came from the wealthy class. All our founding fathers did in fact. So it can be argued that the United States has been an aristocracy more than it has been a true democracy from the first. Being that only 1% of the country is wealthy this leaves most of us out in the cold. You should expect more of the same for the most part from this latest batch of wealthy presidential nominees. Especially the republican ones because its just how the system works.