Huge Corporate Donations Flow Upward—To the Democrats!

Nov 26, 2018

Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has campaigned against financial loopholes that allow companies to give unlimited amounts of money to the politicians of their choice. Other Democratic candidates have said something similar.

Cuomo, who has been governor since 2011, has blamed the Republican hold on the New York state Senate for not stopping this loophole. Well, here’s a surprise–that is no surprise! Cuomo is actually the largest recipient of this kind of money–by a huge margin. Cuomo has gotten five times as much from these LLC companies as Republicans have gotten. And that doesn’t count direct corporate donations. In the 2018 primary, only one percent of Cuomo’s donations were less than $250 and some of them were $1 or $5 from people using the same address as his campaign offices!

New York has some of the “easiest” campaign laws in the country. One in four states limit individual donations to $5,000 for a single campaign. In New York, the limit is already $65,000. And the state allows LLCs, that is, limited liability companies, to be formed to give any amount in donations for political campaigns and these are completely anonymous!

Voters may want to push back against huge corporate donations, as they have shown in ballot initiatives and polls. But the better- known politicians, in both the Democratic and Republican parties, have obtained millions of dollars in campaign funding everywhere, supporting all kinds of media blitzes and television, newspaper and radio advertisements that are out of reach of newer political figures or those from third party campaigns.

Just one more example of political hypocrisy that makes the idea of “democracy” in voting a myth, not a reality.