The Obama Money Trail
As promised, I have taken a screenshot of Senator Obama’s finances through opensecrets.org to contrast his top contributors with those of Senator McCain. Let me make the disclaimer that I will look at this in a positive context so feel free to disagree with me at any point. Senator Obama has received the lion’s share of political contributions compared to Senator McCain but the majority has come from his strong white-collar base with small donations at periodic intervals. Senator Obama’s money gives him significant advantages over Senator McCain but I found it intriguing to examine his list of top contributors. I highlighted the two segments that were significant, the first was the Education sector and the last was the Technology sector. Opensecrets.org does all the hard work by tabulating the data available from the Federal Election Commission:
This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2008 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organization’s PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
I don’t encourage people to vote for a candidate based on who supports them but this should show the American people who the biggest technology companies in the world want to win, i.e. Google and Microsoft. I am just guessing…but Senator McCain is not the most technologically literate person and has actually admitted not knowing how to use a computer.
The second trend focuses on the Education sector which if we compared Senator McCain’s top contributors, we see that he has received no donations from some of the top educational institutions in this country, I wonder why that is? Maybe because these institutions know Senator McCain is not going to be good for this country.
Lastly the only organization I don’t like out of that list is Time Warner who are noted as being “big bad” business. They are currently facing a string of lawsuits with regards to their practices without a care in the world according to dmnews.com:
Time Warner Cable is facing lawsuits for alleged failures in customer service, but the company appears to not be making any specific moves to address litigious consumers.
Beyond this Time Warner issue, the majority of the top Contributors indicate to me that Senator Obama is the right person to lead the United States into a technologically competitive world where education is the key.
June 12 2008 10:40 am | American Politics
June 13th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
In the US, you’ll always find that the teacher’s unions *always* go 100 percent for the Democratic candidates. Indeed, about ten percent of the delegates to the Democrat convention are teachers; that’s a much higher proportion than in the population as a whole.
It’s fairly rare for any union to back a Republican.
June 13th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Hey Gordon, I was not aware of that but given the history of unionization, it would make more sense for them to support the Democrats in general than the Republicans.
June 14th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Crian,
What’s more, the percentage of workers in unions has fallen greatly. But the government worker unions have bucked the trend, and they are now the most powerful unions.
AFSCME is the largest, I think. They were important back in ‘95 when the Republican congress was fighting with Pres. Clinton over the budget. When they failed to agree on spending by deadline, the government shut down. AFSCME had a very effective plan in place (lots of suffering government workers on TV) and helped turn opinion Clinton’s way.
Of course, after the issue was settled, the congress passed and Clinton signed a bill paying them retroactive wages for the time they were idle. In other words, they got a paid vacation.
June 15th, 2008 at 2:20 am
These small contributions are just the tip of the iceberg. Look beneath the surface and see
where the big money is coming from. He is fronting some
high stakes high rollers.
June 15th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Hey Gordon, that paid vacation doesn’t sound very fair but I think SEIU is the largest union with about 1.5 million members with AFSCME just about 1.4 million members according to their web pages.
Living in Worcester, MA, I remember seeing SEIU strikes but I was wondering what your general opinion on unions is? In one of my finances classes here in Ireland, my lecturer was telling me that Europeans have more progressive labor laws…
Hey Alice, so where is his money coming from? The screen shot I took represents PAC’s for the most part. Since each person is only allowed to contribute the maximum, I don’t see Senator Obama receiving huge corporate favors compared to Senator McCain. Also if you look at his top contributors, you will see that most of the big money’s PAC’s are in his corner.