As Illinois is voting for party primaries, politics was talked about in school a lot today. It is this time every four years where my research into politics and government peaks, and so do my discussions. Sadly I would classify myself in the minority of political views in the conservative town I live in, so whenever these discussions do come up, I’m usually opposed. I find it very interesting about facts and politics (I’ll get more into this later on) as I consider myself a pretty logical person, so naturally I base my views on the facts and unbiased studies. I used to consider myself a liberal, but I think that I could be considered a left-leaning moderate. It was this election that made me realize that. I have always been for more government restrictions on corporations and outlawing the practice of lobbying, and I believed this was a liberal belief (which it is), but then I realized that it is pretty much common sense. As I talked to my conservative friends about the subject matter, they seemed to be unaware of the process of lobbying. This is quite concerning for me as it is one of the two things that I consider the biggest threat to our country. This process is destroying our so-called democracy. A study by a Northwestern and a Princeton researcher shows that,
“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

 
Now that is something that, I believe, every person in their right mind will want to fix regardless if they are republican or democrat because what that study is saying is that no matter if you are democrat or republican, you do not have a say in government. That is why I believe that this is one of the biggest threats to our country today. Oh, and reducing the size of the government won’t work because if you think about it, it will only be easier, AND cheaper for corporations and billionaires to own government officials and essentially the government. Another very fact based thing involved in politics is climate change. The other major threat to our country. Luckily we can kill two birds with one stone here because the only ‘people’ who oppose legislation for renewable energy sources and carbon taxes are billionaires and corporations lobbying the government. So if we outlaw lobbying, we will be able to finally knock out people lobbying against climate change legislation (and not to mention gun control laws) because there is no denying the scientific findings that the Earth’s temperature is changing and it is caused by human interaction. Based on these two facts, I don’t see why everyone isn’t voting for Bernie Sanders. He stands behind these two views and they seem to be very logically solved and agreed upon to be very big threats to our country by republicans and democrats alike (that is why I consider myself a moderate, I want to preserve democracy). But why do people not like him? Probably because the negative connotation of the word socialist. A lot of people don’t even realize that the socialist things Senator Sanders talks about are much, much different than the totalitarian U.S.S.R.. People don’t know that when he says socialism, he means that it is having the upper class pay the same tax percentage as the middle class (because they pay less through loopholes), these people can obviously afford to give a little more. Oh, and if people are opposed to taxing the rich because of their belief in ‘trickle down economics’, it was actually put out that under the Reagan administration the upper class and the 1% took home the money made on the tax cuts and the average man didn’t see a large rise in his income, so the question becomes, who do you want this money to go to, the people that need it, or the people who are destroying America? But still, where are these false notions coming from? In reality he is most alike Theodore Roosevelt, while conservatives make him out to be Stalin. Well, (I’m finally getting back to the facts and politics things I said I would earlier) I thinks it is because of the skewed news media we have and the things people take away from these news outlets (most notably Fox ‘News’) as fact. It bums me out that if people simply knew the facts on these issues, they will probably try to fix them in the most logical way. It seems to me that liberals are the ones that do this the best because how could you trust a party that denies fact? This is where I wonder if I am a product of the liberal spun news. Am I getting facts, or the liberal spin on facts? Am I the one that is close-minded? I like to think not but in reality, I simply don’t know. But getting back to the topic, the source of all these issues is greed. I directly saw the effects of corporate greed. My father who was working for Kraft Foods for over 15 years was extremely close to losing his job this summer, and he is actually going to be let go over this summer. This is because Kraft was bought out by an investment company with billionaires invested in it that buys corporations, and combines them and fires ½ of the people working in those companies so they can make a large, high-risk, short-term profit. I saw my dad’s good, hardworking co-workers get fired, simply so a few billionaires could make a few extra bucks. Why else would the billionaires in America lobby the government? All they want is more money, because for people like the Koch brothers, 50 billion dollars isn’t enough.