Elections Financed by the Rich Discourage Citizen Participation

It is less than 2 weeks until the election here in the United States and already 40 million people have cast their ballots. 

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However, there are many social activists who are not enthusiastic about voting because none of the candidates are discussing the issues they are fighting for on the streets.

There are a few reasons why the U.S. is called a pretend democracy: a democracy we should not export to the rest of the world because it doesn’t do anything to protect and serve the people.

One of those reasons is that the elections are financed by a small group of very wealthy people. These rich people and their donations are the ones that determine what the campaigns are talking about, and they are not talking about the needs of the people.

In this election, Democratic candidate Joe Biden has raised US$800 million and Republican candidate Donald Trump has raised US$700 million, two amounts that added together give US$1.5 billion, which was spent on pandering for votes.

The surprising thing is that Biden is the one that is supported by the richest and by Wall Street. While Trump is the one supported by the most amount of donors with smaller amounts of donations. Kind of the populist candidate, very strange.

Besides being financed by the rich, both of them are supported by Political Action Committees (PAC), which were projects created by the rich so they could circumnavigate the laws trying to hide their money out of elections and they could actually engage in elections.

So why aren’t those young people activists in the street wanting to vote? Because they know the elections are founded by the rich, they are not hearing anything about ending racism, about what is going to happen with the poor, or about what is going to happen with the needs of the people growing in the United States.