Since President Obama has taken office his administration and a congress controlled by Democrats have pursued and passed several major initiatives geared toward putting America back on track. Chief among these initiatives have been rescuing banks and financial firms whose impending demise put America on the precipice of a complete economic meltdown, passing a massive stimulus bill to slow and potentially stop the massive amounts of job losses, and starting to wind down the war in Iraq which has cost us dearly in blood, treasure, and international prestige. Most recently Obama and congress are pushing for reforms in healthcare, environmental and energy policy.
All that being said, Obama and Congress have yet to tackle the fundamental issue that created the catastrophe out of which we are now digging ourselves - an issue that Obama himself campaigned on: campaign finance reform.
The role of money in politics and the power that wealthy special interests wield over our democracy are corrosive at best, corrupting at worst.
In a recent blog entry by aprichard on the DailyKos, "Can we make campaign finance a priority yet?" the author outlines a strong case for passing clean elections legislation asap by supporting the Fair Elections Now Act.
An analysis of almost every single major issue we face as a country reveals the undue influence of campaign contributions at their core, where a form of legalized bribery has been used to get lawmakers to support special interests at the expense of the public interest.
- Lobbyists for commercial banks and investment firms, armed with millions in campaign contributions, pushed hard for the massive deregulation of banks and financial firms throughout the 90's and early 2000's. They got what they wanted and in turn started down the dangerous path of spreading risk so wide that flawed financial schemes such as sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps became the root cause of their eventual demise. Recovering from this economic collapse has ended up costing the Treasury and the U.S. taxpayer trillions of dollars.
- The massive amounts of job losses - which is approaching a 10% unemployment rate - came as a result of Wall Street's financial collapse. The Obama administration has had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in a stimulus spending in order to keep people employed, housed, and fed.
- The war in Iraq has been plagued with scandal and corruption from its outset - Halliburton, Blackwater, and flawed intelligence just to name a few. The cost of this war may very well end up costing the U.S. taxpayer 3 trillion dollars and more importantly has already taken the lives of American troops and countless Iraqi civilians! Iraq was a war of choice promoted by those who profit from prolonged military action and the exploitation of valuable resources inside Iraq: defense contractors, reconstruction firms, private security contractors, and the energy industry - all private interests whose campaign contributions to lawmakers are among the highest.
The new reform efforts mentioned - healthcare, environment, and energy - are similar to the issues cited above in that they risk failing to meet the urgent demands they require if special interest money continues to fund the campaigns of law-makers.
As aprichard writes,
Our current system of legalized bribery is quite literally destroying this country. I don't think it is overstating things to say that the military-industrial-congressional-complex, the energy companies, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness, the prison lobby, and Wall Street (did I miss anybody?) are altering all legislation out of Washington and the cumulative effect of this is to systematically drain our treasury, plunder our resources, bankrupt the middle-class, and block all efforts to change course.
The problems we face as a nation will only be solved if citizens pressure their members of Congress to address the underlying cause of the flawed policies that end up costing us considerably more in the long run.
Supporting the Fair Elections Now Act is the most important reform the Obama administration and this Congress can make during these tumultuous times.