Suppose your favorite photo of a child was marred by their posing next to a crazy and hated ex. Most people would matte the photo in such a way that the offending person was removed, which is precisely what our National political conversation—pundits, news media of every stripe and persuasion, donors, and candidates themselves—is currently conspiring to do about the subject of money in our electoral system.
The entire edifice of our democracy rests on and is distorted by our privatizing our electoral system-- turning over to the minority with the most resources the most significant public act of our self-governance . The quest for funds insures that all candidates will inevitably weaken and distort their values to stay in office. The principled will be forced to do it to accomplish their laudable goals and the unprincipled will continue to serve themselves by disguising their chicken-shit as chicken salad. The sad truth is that it makes no difference in outcomes to the public.
President Obama’s first campaign generated 40% of its revenues from small donations and was widely lauded for that democratic outreach. However, the remaining 60% was largely derived from the —hedge funds, finance,and insurance sectors whose contributions secured them unbelievable protection for their sins in creating the financial debacle of 2008 where not a single executive, CEO, banker, or fund-manager who knowingly jimmied and extorted the financial system either went to jail or paid as much as a penny in fines.
The entire system of lobbyists, fund-raisers, present and post-career bribes ( being hired by the firms one regulated while in office) and the blanket agreement never to discuss the role, uses, and corruption of money in any other terms rather than who-has-how-much and how good they are at raising it—serves as exactly the kind of exclusionary framing the opening paragraph describes.
Americans are urged to accept this situation as a given, unchangeable, terrain where human nature meets ambition. Consequently there is no platform offered anywhere for a serious discussion or investigation of alternatives. Why, for instance, do we take it as a given that corporations should be allowed to spend their treasure on elections, influencing public policy for the benefit of their stock-holders? Why do we never publicly examine virtually the rest of the developed world’s elections (Europe, the Netherlands, Scandinavia) which are fully financed by the tax-payer. Under that system, every candidate receives the same amount of money and appear on every TV network in unstructured debates (no pompous moderators, no flacks, no support teams). They are able to question one another before the public. This entire exercise takes all of six weeks, by which time the people have decided, and the dog-and-pony show is retired until the next election.
We have Wolf Blitzer—a man shocked by the ordinary—and his dopplegangers on ABCBMSNBCNN running twenty four hours a day, creating a climate of hysteria designed to galvanize viewers so that they can use good ratings to raise their advertising revenues and serve their real masters by delivering profits to their corporate parents.
This system has produced virtually unending war since Korea. A growing divide between the 1/10 of 1% and everybody else, and the dumbing down of an electorate for whom nothing is ever fully and adequately explained. (He said-She said “debates” serve only to frame arguments in the most simplistic terms and make actional decisions impossible. As a consequence the whole halting game of the dumb leading the blind continues unchallenged with the growing torpor of a play by Samuel Beckett.
If 500 names on a petition and $2500 could qualify candidates for the ballot, new faces and new ideas could emerge from our population and offer the public ideas and examples of real substance to chew and digest.[Yes, Cassandra, some of them would be wing-nuts and a waste of time, but they would fall away rapidly] Such dialogue might open up other currently shadowed areas to our mutual benefit. For instance, political democracy without Economic Democracy is a fiction, a mental pet. If workers spend their days disenfranchised and with no input into workplace practices (where they spend most of their waking hours) why do we expect them to believe that democracy will solve any other worthwhile problem? We need to revitalize hope and trust across the board, not only in our electoral system. However, we could radically improve our elections by:
* Removing the money from politics by funding our elections ourselves, so that candidates can graphically realize that We the People are their employers, not just their hall-pass to Washington.
* Prohibiting corporations from spending their treasure to influence public policy. Their employees (real people) are enfranchised to vote, it should stop there.
* Nullifying Citizen’s United and its guarantee that our elections system (contrary to the belief of the justices who voted for it) will be run by dark, unaccountable money.
*End the shameful practice of gerrymandering which virtually guarantees safe-seats to candidates and removes all incentive to compromise by homogenous the voting pool as either all Democratic or all Republican.
*Finally admit that electronic voting machines are incredibly vulnerable and have been hacked before (as successful law suits in Maryland and New Mexico have demonstrated) and return to paper ballots.
Failing such reforms, we should admit that we do not live in a Democracy, but Corporatocracy, and admit that we have become the richest, most powerful, Third World Nation on Earth and try to evade the notice of our Army and Political class..