Kurt Wirth is a junior majoring in communication. He can be contacted at [email protected].There is an obvious contradiction in our nation’s fundamental ideas and processes that provides a clear medium for bias and manipulation in governmental procedures.
I dearly love my country and wish to live nowhere else in my lifetime, but these cyclical degrading patterns could cause more serious disruptions later on and should be addressed now.
The conflict is one of capitalist and democratic ideals. On the one hand, our nation supports and fosters an economy which rewards the successful more than any other and punishes the failures, enlarging the income gap more than any other industrialized nation, per The World Bank.
This motivation to engorge in unrestricted amounts of wealth and personal property can be argued to be helpful or limiting to the nation, depending on whom you ask. However, it’s when the ever-increasing amount of wealthy citizens is provided access to the government that the undeniable problems arise.
A perfect example of this conflict is evident in the suddenly-famous state caucuses. Although the Republicans commendably haven’t adopted this system, the Democrats adopted the idea of “superdelegates” in their National Convention in 1968.
Instead of each state simply placing their votes and the candidate with the highest amount of votes receiving some or all of the state’s delegates, the Convention now holds permanent seats for “party leaders,” or those who have obtained suitable notoriety or respect to be afforded their own personal delegate vote, free to be given to whichever candidate the selected individual decides upon.
It seems innocent enough. But when you factor in America’s thirst for purchasing enormous amounts of power, trouble brews.
All former Democratic presidents, all current Democratic members of Congress and all current Democratic governors receive superdelegate status, making up for more than 19 percent of the total delegate count of 4,049. Do you suppose, however, that these individuals place their vote based upon their conscience or free thought?
Of course not in America. Who the nominees have exchanged business deals with, who has donated to what cause and what decisions the contenders have made politically that have affected voters’ pocketbooks all undoubtedly play major roles in their decisions.
If these decisions were made only on ideals, the votes would simply be too unpredictable to accurately predict before the actual convention in August. However, CNN.com currently lists 395 superdelegates dispersed throughout the Democratic Party.
Additionally, this money versus political mess is easily witnessed in a broader and more obvious setting in the form of special interest groups.
This painfully over-friendly term refers to major companies and representatives of major companies “donating” substantial amounts of money to both individual politicians and entire political parties.
We’re talking tobacco, healthcare, defense contractors and other immensely powerful and wealthy industries dangling finances over the heads of those who make decisions that affect our lives in every way.
Many, or most, of these politicians are effectively dictated by big business. It’s dangerous to our economy and our government.
Ironically, there’s not much that can be done about this major and fundamental disagreement between institutions.
What certainly should be done, however, is a leveling of the playing field for politicians’ campaign finances, an immediate elimination of the entire superdelegate concept and heavy restrictions on how politicians and political groups receive finances.
The ideals of capitalism and democracy are both effective and useful ones, just as those of government and religion, but as we can observe, they are negatively affecting one another.