Show me whose hand you eat from, and I'll show you whose song you sing.
That's the proverb that comes to mind when looking at Barack Obama's recent and not-so-recent flip-flops on everything from publicly financed elections to the recent FISA bill legalizing warrantless wiretapping and email snooping by the government. The bill also gives companies like Verizon that cooperated with the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping after 9/11 immunity from lawsuits.
In Obama's announcement that he would opt out of the system of public financing, he claimed that the system "is broken" because of loopholes that McCain has exploited to raise money from lobbyists and special interest groups. With public financing, Obama would have received $84 million in taxpayer money, gained from the $3 check-off on federal tax returns, which he could spend starting at the close of the Democratic Party's convention until election day.
To deflect criticism of Obama's flip-flop on the issue, apologists for Obama and the candidate himself have made much of the fact that 45 percent of his money comes from small donors (defined as those who donate $200 or less). He claims that these small donors "will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful."
continued here:
Who Owns Obama?
That's the proverb that comes to mind when looking at Barack Obama's recent and not-so-recent flip-flops on everything from publicly financed elections to the recent FISA bill legalizing warrantless wiretapping and email snooping by the government. The bill also gives companies like Verizon that cooperated with the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping after 9/11 immunity from lawsuits.
In Obama's announcement that he would opt out of the system of public financing, he claimed that the system "is broken" because of loopholes that McCain has exploited to raise money from lobbyists and special interest groups. With public financing, Obama would have received $84 million in taxpayer money, gained from the $3 check-off on federal tax returns, which he could spend starting at the close of the Democratic Party's convention until election day.
To deflect criticism of Obama's flip-flop on the issue, apologists for Obama and the candidate himself have made much of the fact that 45 percent of his money comes from small donors (defined as those who donate $200 or less). He claims that these small donors "will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful."
continued here:
Who Owns Obama?
