That is the question I see at the end of every discussion that focuses on our current political realities. More and more people are waking up to the truth and the truth is becoming harder and harder to ignore. I believe the solution is simple or at least I believe in a simple solution.
You might ask well what is the problem and get a lot of varying answers, but I believe almost all can be traced back as mere symptoms of an underlying problem.
Let me share with you my solution...
The problem:
The link between the people and their representatives is broken.
Thats it and everything else can be attributed to this. Its so bad that if you were to look at polling data and compare it to Congressional voting in almost all cases we would get better results from people's cold opinions than from the actual actions of Congress. Given all our faults and failings as a people the fact that our random opinions make better politics than what we get is incredibly glaring.
How did we get here?
Over a pretty long period of time stretching back most obviously to the 80's with pieces going even farther back. In simplest terms what happened was politicians were manipulated to allow more money to be channeled to special interests through tax code and other legislation, who then used the money to buy more access and legislation. Most of this occurred in very small pieces with a clause here and a law there and only recently have we seen it really become so fast and aggressive that its no longer easy to ignore.
So how do we fix it?
Well now that we have defined the problem fixing it becomes a lot more obvious. We need to make it so politicians are no longer being purchased for their votes and the way to do that is public financing of election. The need for all the money is to finance these insanely long and expensive federal election that force politicians to have to take money from special interest and thus buying their votes. Get rid of the expensive campaigns, the outside ad groups, and re-regulate the lobby system.
This will remove the outside influence from the system and force the politicians to have to actually listen to their constituents again to keep office, instead of the current system where you listen to the money and the money buys the election. Now this isn't going to solve all our problems over night, but we can not solve any of our problems until we do this.
The movement behind this I call The DeRevolution: Not trying to take the country, just trying to take the country back. There is absolutely no policy in this because policy is for government and we just need to take our government back and then policy can be decided as it was meant to be, through representation of the citizenry from politicians actually beholden to them.
The point is a clear simple movement with a clear simple solution. No personal politics or partisan divide. Every American can feel part of such a movement because it truly does represent them and only those that are actually benefiting from our current corrupt system have anything to lose.
So if you really want an answer to that question in my title here it is, but it will take ALL of us through action and just general support to turn this drop of an idea into a sea of change.
So join the DeRevolution: We are not trying to take the country we are just trying to take the country back.
(Yes for those that noticed I did a similar diary last night, but it was late and I believe this is important enough to try again)