6 Mind-Blowing Stats on How 1 Percent of the 1 Percent Now Dominate Our Elections

6 Mind-Blowing Stats on How 1 Percent of the 1 Percent Now Dominate Our Elections

www.motherjones.com

Here's a statistic that should jolt you awake like black coffee with three shots of espresso dropped in: In the 2012 election cycle, 28 percent of all disclosed donations—that's $1.68 billion—came from just 31,385 people. Think of them as the 1 percenters of the 1 percent, the elite of the elite, the wealthiest of the wealthy.

That's the blockbuster finding in an eye-popping new report by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan transparency advocate.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
sunlightfoundation.com

Okay, I don't know about "mind blowing", but the six stats are a sobering testimony to why we need campaign finance reform in the United States. When one percent of the top one percent (ie: 0.01% of the general population) is the source of almost one third of campaign spending, and when most of that spending goes towards television advertising, which influences the uninformed electorate far more than debates or discussions with others, is it any wonder that our government caters to the elites and steps on the rest of us?

The six points:

The median donation from the 1 percent of the 1 percent was $26,584. As the chart below shows, that's more than half the median family income in America.

When the elites give as much as many people earn in a year, do $20 or $100 contributions even matter any more?

The 28.1 percent of total money from the 1 percent of the 1 percent is the most in modern history. It was 21.8 percent in 2006, and 20.5 percent in 2010.

That's not a very encouraging trend, made all the worse by those who have been elected are, conveniently, the ones who need to create campaign finance reform laws. Think that's going to happen?

Megadonors are very partisan. Four out of five 1-percent-of-the-1-percent donors gave all of their money to one party or the other.

All of their money, not "most of it".

Every single member of the House or Senate who won an election in 2012 received money from the 1 percent of the 1 percent.

Every single one, no matter how much of a "grassroots" or "regular joe" image they try to portray.

For the 2012 elections, winning House members raised on average $1.64 million, or about $2,250 per day, during the two-year cycle. The average winning senator raised even more: $10.3 million, or $14,125 per day.

Is the primary job of these people to represent us? Or to raise money? Doesn't seem like it's the former.

Of the 435 House members elected last year, 372—more than 85 percent—received more from the 1 percent of the 1 percent than they did from every single small donor combined.

Who are they beholding to? Not you!

www.motherjones.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Hey Adj:
(sandf)
Money IS free speach!

there were also a side order of vote fraud convictions to go with that great big slab of moo

Two former Indiana Democratic Party officials have been convicted on multiple counts of election fraud.

Two St. Joseph County Democratic operatives have been found guilty of conspiring to forge signatures in order to get both Obama and then-presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on the ballot in Indiana. Fox News reports:

Former longtime St. Joseph County Democratic Party Chairman Butch Morgan Jr. was found guilty of felony conspiracy counts to commit petition fraud and forgery, and former county Board of Elections worker Dustin Blythe was found guilty of felony forgery counts and falsely making a petition, after being accused of faking petitions that enabled Obama, then an Illinois senator, to get on the presidential primary ballot for his first run for the Whte house

dailycaller.com...

THis is NOT bipartisan
Bush was pretty much the same same in ohio and florida...convictions there too

People should just stop participating in the preplanned elections, and simply vote for candidates like these or like the following fellow:

Not surprising, but it certainly puts it into an even more disappointing light. I knew it was bad, but wow. That's just devastating.

It should also be of note that after Obama and Romney, Gary Johnson had the next highest vote total in the most recent presidential election. He received less than 1% of the vote.

Nothing will be changing anytime soon.

This is a very important topic and I hope your thread receives the attention it deserves. Albeit I am in the UK our political funding has precisely the same pattern. Our tentative attempts at democracy have been obliterated. It's time to re-write the rule book and take our countries back.

reply to post by boncho


It isn't who votes that counts...
Its who counts the votes...

which in the last election...correct me if I'm wrong, but....was George Soros at a lttle company in Spain

Originally posted by Danbones
reply to post by boncho

 

It isn't who votes that counts...
Its who counts the votes...

which in the last election...correct me if I'm wrong, but....was George Soros at a lttle company in Spain

Exactly my point though. If you could rally enough people to vote for a joke candidate, you would have to expect those numbers in the final outcome.

Ex. Register 5,000,000 people to vote for Danny the Leprechaun. Those are five million votes that can't be used in any form of vote rigging. If someone could organize this in such a way to be effective, it would be one of the biggest formal protests in history.

Okay, I don't know about "mind blowing", but the six stats are a sobering testimony to why we need campaign finance reform in the United States.

reply to post by adjensen


I hear you on that note! As long as they have the supreme court in their corner (corporations are people too ruling), finance reform will be an uphill battle. Corporations, Banks, Special Interest groups and the wealthy elite have our representative in their pocket. When you can't rely on the Supreme Court for justice and interpreting our constitution to protect the people which our forefathers expected, we're all screwed.

I think the fundamental problem of money being virtually the same as power has existed for as long as societies have. And make no mistake, it is a problem. When people whose lives are full of the finer things in life, are the ones making all the plays, funding the campaigns, moving the pawns, what happens is the people that they help into office are obligated. Not legally of course, but you know how these things go.

EXAMPLE:
One day a candidate goes to a wealthy person, goes first to a dinner at a hotel, and then later perhaps a meeting at an office, and then, if all goes well, some big party at the cash cows house, and the fellow finally gets down to business, and it goes down like this:

Fantastically wealthy person:

Well *insert name of candidate*, its about time you and me got down to the nitty gritty. You want to get into office, and I want to help. I am thinking of putting up *outrageous undisclosed sum*, which I figure ought to buy you some ticker tape and a billboard or two...

Candidate:

Good lord! Thats just fantastic, I mean wow!

Fantastically wealthy person:

I know, I know, thats a lot of bread. But heres the thing see. I need to know what kind of a guy you are. I need to know what type of floss you use, I need to know the precise distance between each of the vertabrae in your spine, and the dimensions of both your kidneys. I need a Gods eye veiw on you, because if I am going to invest in your political future, I need to be damned sure you arent going to get drunk and junk the dollar, or for that matter waste the money I am funding you with.

Candidate:

Ok... yeah I can see what you are getting at. You want to know where the bodies are buried. Well, you are more than welcome to go looking, but you wont find much. I had a punch up with a guy over my girlfriend in high school, and shes my wife now... other than that, should be golden.

Fantastically wealthy person:

Yup. Thats what I thought you would say, but sealed court documents from when you were twelve say otherwise. They mention the early onset of your psychopathic traits, evidenced by the speight of pet murders in your neighborhood, and your court appointed psychotherapists assertion that you always seemed calmer right around the dates of those deaths.

Candidate:

I see. So, this would be where you have the leverage.

Fantastically wealthy person:

Essentially speaking, yes. Oh, dont worry, I am not inclined to refuse to fund you on that basis, far from it. I wouldnt be considering it otherwise....

END OF EXAMPLE.

Successful business persons are twenty five percent more likely to be psychopaths. Obviously, people are born with true psychopathy (as opposed to the type that can be caused by head trauma in rare cases), so the environment of the board room is not what does it to them. They are successful because they can place themselves in the position of a person, understand the way empathy works, but do not feel it, so they have no limits in terms of how far they will go to get thier way. They manipulate, they intimidate, they finesse thier way through life, failing to give a crap who they step on to achieve thier aims.

This is also how successful politicians operate. Now, I am not saying that EVERY fabulously wealthy person is born psychopathic. Some are just lucky, and others are simply gifted, and make every effort to be the best human being they can be. But the ones who crave power are part of that twenty five percent of psychopaths who make it big, and they make or break careers in all sorts of positions, political and otherwise.

You hear terror strewn tales of psychopathic behavior from the media, in the movies, in the news, but most of those people you hear about are just a condition with skin on top of it. Thier particular intelligence does not stretch to the long game. But there are those out there, who make thier careers dominating boardrooms with guile and deception, coupled with the keen, predatory gaze that only a true psychopath can muster. The people refered to in the article are likely to contain a high percentage of that psychological trait, and will use thier wealth as power.

That is why laws must be passed that prevent the rich from being the powerful. Have your money, but the power should remain with the majority, not with a small percentage of wealthy, psychologically ill, morally devoid cretins, who are incapable of the empathy which would make them worthy of such power, or capable of using it for the common good.

For those interested in such things, here is the underlying data for the source study in the OP.

Donations from 1% of the 1% (CSV file, open in Excel or other spreadsheet.) Data is ordered by state, then city, then donor name.

The median donation from the 1 percent of the 1 percent was $26,584. As the chart below shows, that's more than half the median family income in America.

The 28.1 percent of total money from the 1 percent of the 1 percent is the most in modern history. It was 21.8 percent in 2006, and 20.5 percent in 2010.

I would like to know how much these .1% are worth. Because to be honest, 25k from the super rich really doesnt sound like them throwing weight around. It sounds like they are donating similar percentages of income as the rest of us.

Megadonors are very partisan. Four out of five 1-percent-of-the-1-percent donors gave all of their money to one party or the other.

People who donate 25k are "Megadonors"? I would call Sheldon Adelson a Megadonor. 25k Is a lot more then I can come up with but that sounds reasonable to me when it comes from the top .1%. And arent most political donors partisan?

Every single member of the House or Senate who won an election in 2012 received money from the 1 percent of the 1 percent.

You could use this information to make the point that the top .1% are eclectic. They do not represent any singular agenda and spread their money around.

Of the 435 House members elected last year, 372—more than 85 percent—received more from the 1 percent of the 1 percent than they did from every single small donor combined.

I hate to be the guy but it seems to me that these statistics and issues are being used as a class wedge. It says it right there. The top .1% of our nations wealthy donated more money then "every single small donor combined" That doesnt knock my socks off. Especially when you consider they are talking about donations to House members. How many people who donate 20$ are really following those campaigns and all they encompass? Most small donations are a people patting themselves on the back, not people actively trying to change politics. Similar to many people who donated money to Kony2012. A Feelgood donation.

There is a lot to be concerned about as far as political donations are concerned. But that article seemed all over the place. The fact that I couldnt find the average worth of these .1% is also shady. All that information, graphs, pictures of stadiums and they left that out. I suspect its because if we knew Billionaires were only donating 25k it wouldnt seem that much of an outrage.

There are letigimate gripes to be had about mega donors. Sheldon Adelson and Devid Seigel for example. The fact also that 1/3 of the money donated by .1% were donations to committees is bothersome. But lets not attack with blind fury.

while interesting no doubt, it shouldn't be that much of a surprise. after all we let corporations, things that really only exist as abstract concepts, vote with their money.

the funny thing is, for all the money those people spend, it doesn't do jack to make their chosen guy any more palatable.
i think it's amazing how much money those people have and are so willing to waste on elections! just think if they used it all on something useful!
various companies and people donated for the election on either side and didn't bat an eye over the loss of the money they wasted when their guy lost.

obama had more money but the amount spent on romney was still high and i bet his donaters don't even care because they can just write it off!

how messed up is that?

THIS is the Major thing I would change in the Constitution and it's the Only thing I'd change. ( er.. I don't even know if this is covered by the constitution but it SHOULD be) ( er.. i should go read through it)

I did discover that in 2010 The supreme Court upheld that there should be NO restrictions on corporate spending on political campaigns

While many Republicans on Capitol Hill hailed this week’s Supreme Court 5-to-4 decision striking down restrictions on corporate spending on political campaigns, Democrats are ramping up measures to curb its impact.

www.csmonitor.com...

Now if you google the string, "what does the constitution say about campaign funds" you will find all kinds of people shouting we need this reform. They propose we do so with a constitutional amendment..

I'd like to know the reasons the Supreme Court thinks this would be unconstitutional. The only thing I can think of is now they have made Corporations into People giving them the same rights as the individual has

The problem with voting is that with respect to being unbiased it breaks down when the population of voters gets too large. This is because with a larger group of people the candidates become less and less familiar to each potential voter, so in turn recognition becomes a matter of winning the popularity contest. Thus it ends up that, whoever has the best marketing wins. And then you end up with an oligarchy of recognizable hand-me-down candidates or a plutarchy from whoever can buy the best marketing campaign.

Then you have the party based system applied to the ballot system, and that even compounds the problem because the pool of candidates is even further reduced based on arbitrary rules. Makes it harder for smaller or newer parties to get listed because of percentages from the last vote, petition requirements, etc. Not to mention that in order to get presented in the dog-and-pony-show of potential candidates for a given party, you pretty much have to toe the party line.

The fix needed to have representatives actually representative of citizenry in an unbiased fashion is to have representatives chosen from the general population in a manner akin to jury duty. If you want to see how it works, look up "sortition" and also research how democracy was actually run in ancient Athens. (They anticipated these problems, and although it is a type of republic - it's not broken like the Roman one that we use now. I'd say those Athenians were a lot smarter about how politics can be gamed than those that came after them.)

Of course some would argue that people with unpopular views would end up holding office if chosen by lottery, but they'd still be in the minority of representatives and out-voted. And another arguement is that representatives chosen by that method could still be bought, but with fairly short term limits they'd return to the general public and reap whatever they've sown amongst their peers. (Because of the responsibility and power, this is one case where decisions and opinions should not be anonymous.) If implemented well, it has some interesting ways of balancing out.

Also some sites relating to that topic...
sortition.net...
equalitybylot.wordpress.com...