THE FIVE PERCENT CONGRESS
Well folks, the secret is out. The dots have been connected, and men and women of our Congress are standing around with their privates exposed. When 95% of the country favors stricter background checks to purchase weapons, and restrictions of military style weapons and the Congress does nothing, it’s crystal clear that it is the Congress of the 5%. The weapons lobby can wrap that in their flag and smoke it. But how has this come to pass?
Personally I don’t think that people who run for office are necessarily more venal, selfish, and ambitious than their neighbors. I give the benefit of the doubt to many if not most members who put up with the rigors of public life, that they do so out of a desire to be of service. What then, accounts for the timidity, lack of courage, and general weasel-principled behavior of so many? There’s a one word answer—money. (Which has one caveat: self-interest.)
We have failed to notice that we have privatized our elections. Somehow that astounding fact has eluded us. We celebrated the number of small donations that supported Obama’s Presidential campaign, but in total they amounted to 40%. The other 60% was donated by the Nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations, many of whom should have been jailed for the criminal fraud of the 2008 economic collapse.
The 5% Congress is simply responding to the demands of their donors. It’s a symbiotic relationship. The 1/10th of 1% pays for the elections of both parties, like a shoe store featuring multiple brands---“We got it all folks.” The politicians have to get elected to win the keys to the public treasury in order to be of value (meaning to pay back their obligations) to those who put them in office. They do this by writing tax law, invisible to their constituents, but which have benefitted their donors at the expense of the rest of us.)
Political candidates hold focus groups to find the buzz words to get our vote and win the keys to the public treasury. (We delude ourselves about how different from one another candidates are, forgetting that they are all flowers growing from the same compost. ) As a test, articulate the differences between Democratic and Republican corporate policy.
There are FOUR FACTORS, changes that could change the game radically. They will be neither easy nor quick and they will have to be instituted from outside, by political pressure because neither Congress nor the Senate will ever concur to remove the trough from beneath their noses.
FULL FEDERAL FUNDING OF ELECTIONS would make clear that We the People are the employers of our elected representatives. It would save those poor souls from having to raise $10,000 a day, every day, and free them to concentrate on the public business.
CORPORATIONS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO SPEND THEIR TREASURE influencing public policy for the benefit of the shareholders. All the employees of a corporation are free to vote. The corporation is not a person (no matter what the courts may decree). There is no biology there. They represent concentrated political and economic power that are a threat in a privatized election system.(Ours)
THERE SHOULD BE NO ANONYMOUS CONTRIBUTIONS to candidates. All PACs and SUPERPACs should be totally transparent so that Voter know who is actually supporting their candidates. Let the light in.
GERRYMANDERING MUST END. All voting distrticts should be rearranged to approximate as closely as possible the actual demographics of the Nation, including spectrums of political parties, race, gender etc. This would have the beneficial effect of forcing candidates to find middle ground, and build consensus. It may make it more difficult to win elections, but that’s not our problem. Our problem is creating a system that works. An end to gerrymandering would go a long way towards ending the rancor of our political life.
FINALLY:
NEW DIVISIONS OF MEDIA CORPORATIONS SHOULD BE NON-PROFIT.
For those readers who did not mature in the era of clear, useful, unadorned “news” reporting, delivered by composed and dignified personalities like Huntley and Brinkley, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite, it might be useful to know (and for those that did, to remember) that there was once a time in America when the news hour was nearly universally watched and trusted. Each network news division was equivalent to the elegant hood-ornament of a stately automobile, symbolizing the quality and probity of the corporate parent, a sort of free add-on to the corporate logo. In the 1960s, William Paley, Chairman of CBS, once addressed his news division and told them not to worry about money saying, “I have Jack Benny to make money.” In that day and age, the Church of the news was safely separated from the State of entertainment.
Of course there never was a perfect America without conflict and compromise, but generally the news then was regarded as a sacred trust, which most people understood to be the critical lynchpin holding a functioning democracy together. Indeed, how could an uneducated or misinformed public possibly understand nuances of public policy, discriminate sincere from insincere candidates and good ideas from bad, if they did not understand the issues?
In the 1970s and ‘80s those once sacred barriers eroded and collapsed. The unexpected success of “60 Minutes” changed everything, most pertinently the nature of American news broadcasts, which were transformed into entertainment-disguised-as news. The public’s need-to-know was no longer the deciding factor in magazine reporting on dramatic events, scandals and closed-case murders, that might be years old by broadcast time. As a consequence, news outlets have a common incentive to reap the largest harvest of eyeballs in pursuit of revenues. Being forced to deliver profits, unerringly lowers the bar of relevance to concentrate on ‘drama,’ ‘fear,’ and ‘suspense’ stories with sure-fire hooks to hook distracted and over stimulated viewers. The elevated audience numbers justify increased prices from advertisers creating more corporate revenue.
What Is To Be Done?
It’s in the deepest, long-term interest of the American people to have news they need to know presented in the most objective, least feverish manner. It takes no more than 25 seconds of comparing nearly any American anchor to their Canadian or British counterpart to see how hyperbolic and shocked-by-the-ordinary our newsreaders are. It seems fair to say that given it’s critical nature, the People might bear the burden of the cost of objective news by demanding that networks make their news divisions non-profits (and less ad-saturated) and offering them a tax break to offset that loss of revenue. This could be one way for citizens to reclaim some control over their own airwaves and create a factual basis for public policy. It would certainly contribute to less rapid-fire, opinion-heavy soliloquys between men and women who appear to be contestants in rapid-speech contests.
In regards to on-line media, as there is in the above ground media, some system of fact checking needs to attend every news-oriented website. The cost of using the public infrastructure should be telling the truth. Claimants must be able to ‘source’ information, and if they cannot or will not, that lack of sourcing should be made public and if egregious, they should be banned from the air. Free speech is not lying.
Huge internet corporations like Facebook, Yahoo, Instagram, and Google should be held responsible for the ads they take and the information that they ‘forward’ on their websites. It is counter-productive to plead that one is simply an unregulated valve for conversations, when their massive platforms are being used as a trampoline to catapault destructive misinformation into the midst of our election machinery. Their scale alone should make them subject to regulation. If we do not regulate we will have to subsidize, and in at least one instance, the nation is already subsidizing the costs of the Russian intrusion into our last Presidential election.