Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
You're correct, now let's follow the money
In the 2014 campaign cycle, people and political action committees associated with commercial banks gave more than $28.2 million to federal candidates, committees, parties and outside money groups that support them. Besides trade groups such as the American Bankers Association, the industry includes financial institutions such as Quicken Loans, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase.
In the early 1990s, the industry split its support between Democrats and Republicans, but since then has heavily favored Republicans, with the exception of the 2008 election cycle. In recent years, the lean has become even more pronounced. In 2014, 72 percent of the industry's donations to candidates and parties, or more than $19 million, went to Republicans.
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Generally, not always, corporate money flows to the politicians or party in power or perceived to be coming into power. Probably why who the money goes to fluctuates. For instance there's this:
https://howmuch.net/articles/the-30-...he-fortune-500
And this:
https://www.businessinsider.com/comp...ticians-2018-9
More to my point, Republicans, in the large picture, differ from Democrats mostly in degree. My concern is with Progressivism vs. constitutionalism. The first Progressive President was Republican Teddy Roosevelt. Republican Herbert Hoover was the Progressive presidential model for FDR. They all cemented and advanced Progressivism into American politics. They all were for centralized power, for the big government-big business complex. Their message was "for the people" but their policies were "for the government." Of course, "for the government" in their eyes was the most efficient way of gaining "for the people." But that turns out to be more wishful thinking than reality.
Both parties have been steadily taking us down the big government big business path. America has had a few "great awakenings" in the past, mostly religious. I think there is a current awakening in progress now. And its mostly political. And it is divided by two different views.
One, perhaps the descendent of the Tea Party, has come to the realization that the Progressive model of centralized government power at the expense of dispersed local power and connected to the centralization and growth of big business over small business was diminishing the opportunities and quality of life for far more than it was helping, and leading us into the oppressive authoritarian nation of homogenized citizens who could only be "diverse" within the "equality" defined by government, a sort of centralization into a uniformity of thought prescribed by big government and supported by big business in its hiring and advertising policies--a dictatorial nation that the U.S. was created to oppose.
The other has been been brewing in different cultural or racial groups, but, perhaps recently preceded and inspired by Occupy Wall Street has now "woke" a far more diverse and greater number to a political, cultural, and economic system in which the "privileged," who are the benefactors of the racist, capitalist founding of this country, control everything, and from whom power must be wrested, either by electing those who will transform this nation away from its racist, capitalist, mean, selfish, unfair system, or transform it by revolution, violent if necessary.
One may tend to vote Republican as the lesser of two evils. The other will vote Democrat as the party that speaks the right rhetoric. Both parties, in different degree, have disappointed. But both have seemed to reach a real point of departure from each other . . . again, by degree.
The Democrats have become less secretive about their Progressive agenda to centralize and grow federal power and about appointing administratively rather than constitutionally oriented judges to the local and Supreme Court systems. They show no sign of departing from their regulatory system of government along with its unavoidable big business/big government complex. Their penchant for control along with their leftist rhetoric and leftist leaning or actual socialist politicians give the best hope, between the two parties, for the "woke" awakening.
The Republicans, in large have not changed much, but been driven around the edges toward a more populist agenda by Donald Trump. The populist shift by the Republicans give a ray of hope to the descendants of the Tea Party that there can be a return to local government power and a constitutional return of power back to the people and a cutback of the regulatory system in order to remove systemic barriers to entrepreneurs, especially individualistic small business ones.