You misunderstand. Political financing in the US is very complex; all I'm saying is that the direct donations by corporate PACs to individual candidates is utt

You misunderstand. Political financing in the US is very complex; all I'm saying is that the direct donations by corporate PACs to individual candidates is utterly trivial. Look at this list: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00009638 http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00009638 "This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2012 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families." So if we look at Microsoft, $800k went from Microsoft and related entities to Obama's campaign. That's a lot of money, and I have no doubt it bought real influence with Obama. But out of that $800k, at most $5k was the money that went directly from Microsoft's PAC to the Obama campaign. And that's well...nothing. It is 0.625% of the total amount given by Microsoft, 0.0007% of the total amount given to candidate Obama. I have no doubt that BigCorp was very insistent about your contributing to the PAC; but they had no intention of using more than the barest fraction of that money to donate to the campaign of individual politicians. They couldn't, even if they wanted to. They would have been intending to spend it on much more effective (and unregulated) channels.