PROFILE OF A POLITICAL WHORE; Saxby Chambliss Senator (R - GA)

Saxby Chambliss Senator (R - GA)

“Instead of electing the best leaders, we elect the best fund raisers.”

Cycle Source of Funds, 2009-2014, Campaign Cmte only

	Individual Contributions   - Small Individual Contributions  - Large Individual Contributions	$1,468,093 $185,727 (8%) $1,282,366 (52%)	(60%)
	PAC Contributions	$790,573	(32%)
	Candidate self-financing	$0	(0%)
	Other	$198,691	(8%)

Defining a political whore is to simply look where the money is coming from.

·       SMALL Individual contributions from constituents; you – the voter.

·       LARGE; usually untraceable, amounts of money coming from wealthy individuals or organizations that buy, package, and own the candidate.

The way our broken political system works, though, is that the chief place to raise money for campaigns is from industries and interest groups that want something from government. Influence is purchased all the time, whether in explicit quid pro quo trades or not, and such influence peddling just as bad for democracy as bribery.

EZ DIRTY MONEY

The following piece is a great guide in understanding how the 1% play the system and get richer doing it.



The Meritocracy Myth: How the Super-Rich Really Make Their Money

SYSTEM RIGGED BY THE 1%

Sen. Warren's candid attitude fuels her rise


Elizabeth Warren says when asked if some bankers should have gone to jail in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. "You always want to be careful about this as a lawyer," she begins in an interview with USA TODAY, sounding every bit a senator. Then she stops herself. "Actually, no, let me start that one over. Yes!"


She mixes decades of study into what drives people to financial ruin — more likely to be a lost job or failed marriage than profligate spending, she concluded — with outrage over a system she argues is rigged against ordinary folks in favor of plutocrats.


When she led the congressional oversight board for the bank bailout, then-White House adviser Larry Summers invited her to dinner at the tony Bombay Club to explain what she calls the one unbreakable rule for the town's insiders — that is, insiders don't publicly criticize other insiders if they want to keep their influence. She declined to take his advice. Last year, she was among those who helped engineer the appointment of Janet Yellen instead of Summers to lead the Federal Reserve Board.


Warren's willingness to confront the powerful and question the system has fueled her rise as a sought-after speaker and fundraising phenom for Democrats There is her send-them-to-jail response about bankers, for instance.


"I was thinking, you never want to comment about an ongoing investigation; (then) I thought, shoot, there aren't any," she says, explaining her initial hesitancy. "Look, let me put it this way: It is not possible for a corporation to break the law without someone inside the corporation breaking the law. If we want real deterrence in the system, it has to be that individuals are held accountable whenever they break the law."

PROFILE OF A POLITICIAN; Elizabeth Warren Senator (D - MA)

Elizabeth Warren Senator (D - MA)

If you follow the money you will discover where loyalties lie.  This is an example of a politician who garners support from constituents, not outside special interests, and with a significant amount coming from small individual contributions.

More of a politician than a political whore. 

Cycle Source of Funds, 2011-2014, Campaign Cmte only

	Individual Contributions   - Small Individual Contributions  - Large Individual Contributions	$43,074,307 $20,397,757 (46%) $22,676,543 (51%)	(97%)
	PAC Contributions	$712,408	(2%)
	Candidate self-financing	$0	(0%)
	Other	$437,871	(1%)

US #1 IN HEALTHCARE - COST

Healthcare costs in U.S. far exceed costs in other countries, report says


An average one-day hospital stay in the United States cost $4,293 last year, six times more than it did in Argentina and nearly 10 times the cost in Spain, an industry group reported Thursday.

Medical procedures, tests, scans and prescription medicine cost far more in the United States than in eight other countries, the International Federation of Health Plans said Thursday in its annual report.

“The price variations bear no relation to health outcomes; they merely demonstrate the relative ability of providers to profiteer at the expense of patients, and in some cases reflect a damaging degree of market failure,” said Tom Sackville, the group’s chief executive.
 Six Charts That Illustrate Just How Much Higher Health Care Costs Are For Americans

CORPORATE LEECHES

The "bullshit" is piled so high it's amazing these people don't drown in it. They are the very same people that whine about raising the minimum wage for a "working" American to $10.00 an hour while they dish out salaries on others just because..............................??????????????



Here's a few examples of the absurd compensation awarded individuals who are not much different than you or I but happen to have CEO after their name.


At the top of the charts we find

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, who pulled down $78.4 million; ($25,000.00 an hour)

Bob Iger at Disney, who made $34.3 million; ($11,025.00 an hour)

and Rupert Murdoch at Fox, who received $26.1 million. ($8,365.00 an hour)

Time to rein in grossly overpaid CEOs | Al Jazeera America


Corporate America’s well-oiled compensation machine is running like a dream.

Browse the proxy statements of the nation’s largest corporations and you’ll find the instruction manuals for this apparatus explaining how to finely calibrate the pay of top executives with company performance.

The Coca-Cola board, for example, lays out the formula that set the 2013 cash bonus for Muhtar Kent, its chief executive (base salary x base salary factor x business performance factor). It explains how a failure to achieve certain goals helped limit the bonus to $2 million, but also describes how Mr. Kent got millions more in stock and options. It notes that under his leadership, Coke had “continued to gain value share globally in nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverages,” and tells shareholders why the board might require him to fly on the company jet (“to allow travel time to be used productively for the Company”). What was all that worth? A tidy $18 million.
At this point, most people have become used to hearing about these bloated pay packages at the top. We’re also used to hearing the rationale from these folks and their boosters about how they are paid what they are worth.

To the contrary, they are grossly overpaid. First, many CEOs were running large successful companies in the 1960s and 1970s for pay that in today’s dollars averaged about one-tenth as much as the current crop of CEOs get. We can also look to Europe, Japan and China and find plenty of successful CEOs of large companies who work for a small fraction of the price of American executives. And there are plenty of CEOs who get these outlandish pay packages even when they drive their companies into the ground.

The relevant question is not how much a CEO contributes to the company. That is not how economics works. After all, how much does the firefighter contribute who rescues three kids from a burning house? We don’t pay our hero firefighters multimillion dollar salaries. We pay firefighters on the basis of how much it costs to hire another firefighter who can also do the job.

The question is how much does the CEO contribute compared with the next person in line for the job? Given the experience of large corporations in other countries, there is every reason to believe that there are lots of next people who could do the job as well or better and for much less. (Anyone who believes that CEO pay actually reflects the CEO’s value to the company should read Lucien Bebchuk’s outstanding book, Pay Without Performance.)

The problem here is grounded in the corruption of the corporate governance structure. In principle, CEOs should be treated like any other employee. Companies should ask if they can get away with paying them less or getting a lower-cost CEO of the same caliber in Germany or China.

PROFILE OF A POLITICAL WHORE; THE LESSER OF 2 EVILS

“Instead of electing the best leaders, we elect the best fund raisers.”

Neither of these guys get much from small individual donors so it's more a matter of who you want to sell out your vote to.

Scott Peters Representative (D - CA)

Raised:	$1,847,775
Spent:	$386,824
Cash on Hand:	$1,489,652
Last Report:	March 31, 2014

	Individual contributions      - Small Contributions      - Large Contributions	$127,135       $932,861	(7%)       (50%)
	PAC contributions	$661,251	(36%)
	Candidate self-financing	$46,003	(2%)
	Other	$80,526	(4%)

OR

Carl Demaio (R)

Raised:	$1,608,926
Spent:	$354,475
Cash on Hand:	$1,254,452
Last Report:	March 31, 2014

	Individual contributions      - Small Contributions      - Large Contributions	$118,136       $1,231,694	(7%)       (77%)
	PAC contributions	$138,824	(9%)
	Candidate self-financing	$4,000	(0%)
	Other	$116,272	(7%)

Defining a political whore is to simply look where the money is coming from.

·       SMALL Individual contributions from constituents; you – the voter.

·       LARGE; usually untraceable, amounts of money coming from wealthy individuals or organizations that buy, package, and own the candidate.

The way our broken political system works, though, is that the chief place to raise money for campaigns is from industries and interest groups that want something from government. Influence is purchased all the time, whether in explicit quid pro quo trades or not, and such influence peddling just as bad for democracy as bribery.