Bernie Sanders is always bragging that he is not financed by big donors and the lobbyists crowd, but instead by the grassroots with the average donor giving around $30. And by the looks of things, Sanders is apparently telling the truth.
The man who has become the public face of rising drug prices says he has donated to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — who has been bashing Big Pharma on the campaign trail — to try to get a meeting so the two can talk it out.
Sanders isn’t interested. His campaign said Thursday that he’s giving the money to a Washington health clinic instead — and the drug executive isn’t getting the meeting.
In this photo taken May 20, 2015, Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., poses for a portrait before an interview with The Associated Press in Washington. For Democrats who had hoped to lure Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren into a presidential campaign, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders might be the next best thing. Sanders, who is opening his official presidential campaign Tuesday in Burlington, Vermont, aims to ignite a grassroots fire among left-leaning Democrats wary of Hillary Rodham Clinton. He is laying out an agenda in step with the party's progressive wing and compatible with Warren's platform _ reining in Wall Street banks, tackling college debt and creating a government-financed infrastructure jobs program. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
This is definitely good news for the Bernie camp. They must be happy with this news.
According to a new report, Bernie Sanders has raised just about the same amount of money mostly from small donors, as Hillary Clinton has, and the bulk of her donor-base is coming from a few large donors and Superpacs.
The Vermont senator’s campaign says he has raised about $26 million for his presidential campaign in the past three months. Coming mostly from small donations given online, the sum underscores the draw of his insurgent campaign among the grassroots of the Democratic Party.
Clinton’s campaign, in its own announcement Wednesday, said she had taken in $28 million. Most of it came from fundraisers hosted by big donors across the country. Many took place in the traditionally Democratic treasure chests of Manhattan and Hollywood. She raised at least $19 million from about 60 events where admission typically cost $2,700, the biggest donation allowed by law.
The Sanders campaign has held just seven traditional fundraisers since launching at the end of April, said Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs, compared to a total of more than 110 for Clinton over the same period.
Politico Reports: Republican donors were horrified in November after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns for president and Congress with nothing to show for it. A year later they’re appalled by how little has changed, angered by the behavior of Republican lawmakers during a string of legislative battles this year capped by the shutdown, and searching for answers.
In conversation after conversation, donors express growing frustration with the party and the constellation of outside groups they’ve been bankrolling. After getting squeezed last year by an array of campaign committees, party committees and disparate super PACs, many of them are still sitting on their checkbooks — a worrisome sign for the party with the 2014 midterm elections fast approaching.
Some donors are looking to take matters into their own hands.
New York City GOP mega-bundler Paul Singer has held a series of informal, and a few very formal, discussions in recent months with other extremely wealthy donors about how best to spend their cash in 2014, including debating the idea of forming a new entity to play a serious role in the midterm races. Its focus would be on improving the quality of Republican candidates in the hopes of avoiding more Todd Akin-like candidates who blow eminently winnable races.
“He wants to win,” one donor who attended a session said of Singer. The donor stressed that the hedge fund billionaire’s meetings, like other informal gatherings among the monied class this year, were taking place well prior to the government shutdown.
Still, some donors think the reluctance about giving among their ranks may have reached an inflection point over the way a number of Republicans in Washington acquitted themselves the past few weeks.
Donors and business leaders, whose words used to carry great weight with candidates ever worried that the money spigot might be turned off, now face a new reality. It’s a Frankenstein syndrome of sorts, in which the candidates they’ve helped fund, directly or indirectly, don’t fear them, and don’t think they need them.
Many business leaders are exasperated by their diminished influence among congressional Republicans since the 2012 election, and by the rising clout of groups like the Senate Conservative Fund, which have run ads against incumbent Republican senators for not taking enough of a hard line on the shutdown.
Where there is agreement — as is the case with donors who believe the Republican National Committee should be shored up — there is also dissatisfaction with the slow pace of progress.
At issue is not just the shutdown, but legislative battles earlier this year, such as the stymied attempt at immigration reform. Several Republican donors said watching that effort run into headwinds among conservative House members, combined with the tortured standoff over the government shutdown and potential debt default, had left a sour taste in their mouths.
Mother Jones posted a very damaging video today showing Mitt Romney talking to a small group of big-time donors. Romney, in the presence of these rich folks chose to talk about poorer Americans, and he expressed his feelings about these unfortunate citizens.
Romney said that these poor Americans are people who believes in an “entitlement” society. He said that they look at themselves as “victims,” and concluded that his job is not to “worry about those people,” because he can never “convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
These voters Romney claimed, are Obama voters.
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
It been a known fact in Texas for many years – Rick Perry does not come cheap. Even Perry himself alluded to his price tag when he said in the recent Republican debate that $5000 would not be enough to buy him. He said, “if you’re saying I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended.”
But in a pay to play system, Rick Perry kept getting the finances he needed to get re-elected. So the real questions started being asked, and Perry’s own Republican contender for the presidency brought the main question to light. Michele Bachmann questioned Perry’s decision to require all girls in Texas to get a vaccine for HPV… a vaccine created by one of his biggest financial supporters.
Anderson Cooper of CNN’s AC360 took a deeper look into Perry’s pockets.
Large donors to the Rick Perry campaign for governor of Texas are beginning to reap the benefits of their donations, or more appropriately, investments. Reports have shown that numerous individuals and couples who’ve invested in Perry, are getting multi-million dollar contracts and subsidies from the state of Texas, and some even get jobs in the Perry administration.
The LA Times reports that over the last 10 years, Rick Perry received $37 million from just 150 people, and of these “donors,” nearly half have received “hefty business contracts, tax breaks or appointments under Perry, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis.” The Times investigation found “donors” like billionaire Harald Simmons, who invested $1.2 million dollars in Perry. Simmons was rewarded with “permission to build a low-level radioactive waste disposal site in Texas, a project that promises to generate hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Other Investors:
Auto magnate B.J. “Red” McCombs, who contributed nearly $400,000 to the governor, is the primary financial backer for a Formula One racetrack to be built near Austin. The state has pledged $25 million a year in subsidies to support the project.
The Houston-based engineering firm of James Dannenbaum, who gave more than $320,000 to Perry, received multiple transportation contracts from the state. In 2007, Perry appointed Dannenbaum to a coveted post on the University of Texas’ board of regents.
A Mississippi-based poultry company run by Joe Sanderson, who gave $165,000 to Perry, received a $500,000 grant from a state business incentive fund championed by Perry to open a chicken hatchery and processing plant in Waco.
With its mix of big-money industries like oil and campaign finance rules that allow unlimited political donations, Texas has a reputation for monied campaigns. And its elected officials have long sought to elevate their political patrons.
Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said donors had benefited more under Perry’s administration than they did under recent governors such as Democrat Ann Richards and Republican George W. Bush, Perry’s predecessor.
Now, Rick Perry is trying to take his investment company called the Rick Perry Presidential Campaign, nationwide, but in order for him to succeed, he must come to the little people to get their votes. Vote for Perry, the millionaires and billionaires need more hand-outs!
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