Step up or you'll see where ignorance is taking you...

As an assignment of my US Government class I had to read all my peers blogs and one of them actually called out my attention the most. The Blog is titled Apiodicy, and it is about the ignorance that we carry constantly about our nation politics and what our government representatives were, are, and can be. Also it kind of mentioned the amount of power the president is getting due to the lack of interest that we give to it. I totally agree with her in how the government is intruding into our every day right to privacy. I believe that our government at a “slow but steady pace” is taking control of our surroundings forcing us, the people, to take the decisions that they want us to take. The Corporate Controlled Media is an example of how the government is persuading your decision making on national topics that affects our lives. Due to this control propaganda everyday uninformed citizen’s are mislead, therefore they decide to not question their elected officials on issues that could affect our constitutional rights and our future as a democratic nation. With this said, we need to step up and start getting more informed about our nation’s issues and what exactly our constitutional rights are, and doing so we may become an actual important part of the decision making for our nation instead of being a government controlled marionette relying so much in the government to guide us in the decision making process. We need to realize that all our nation’s matters, directly or indirectly, affects us in one way or another.

Political Campaign Finance Reform

Do you know why and how the money for the electoral campaigns is regulated? Well, money has been related with the elections since the origin of the electoral process in the United States. The elections started with candidates like George Washington. When he ran for the Virginia House Burgesses in 1758, his election manager “prized” each one of the voters with a half gallon of alcoholic beverages as a token for Freeholders on the Election Day. Since then, during each electoral campaign, more and more money has been involved during the electoral campaigns. In 1971 the Congress passed a comprehensive redo of the campaign finance regulations with the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). But the FECA was too broad, so in 1974 was amended with the introduction of statutory limits on contributions and created the Federal Election Commission (FEC). In 2002 the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) was signed into a federal law. The BCRA is commonly known as "the political effort in the United States to change the involvement of money in politics, primarily in political campaigns.” This Act revised some of the illegal on expenditures set by the FECA, and prohibited unregulated contributions, which usually referred as “Soft money.” But it doesn’t matter how many laws the Congress passed,there are always going to be a loop hole and the candidates are going to use it during their campaigns. For example there is a limit of $2,300 on contribution per individual, but during the last campaign for the presidency of United States in 2008 between Obama and McCain, they were able to accept over $70,000 per individual on behalf of their campaigns. They divided the donations to “meet the law requirements” and gave the rest to their political party’s committees. So as you can see, at the end it does not matter how many laws are created, the truth is, that the size of the pockets of the candidates will determine who the winner is during the elections.