The most practical response to Citizens United: Abolish Campaign Finance Laws
Public financing isn't going to happen. THe best realistic means to reform these laws is to simply abolish them, allow anyone to give whatever they want and have the simple requirement of transparency. That way, candidates will get funded without selling their views (There will be sugar daddies for a wide range of views), the public knows who is funding what, and the system will not have all these secrete groups. Actual campaigns will spend the money.
If people running for office don't have to walk though a complex system that doesn't work, better people will run. It cost too much money for someone to try to run today because of this complex system. Just make it simple and easy. The only law should be transparency.
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Not run by people who lack the basics of life that politicans have, savings, housing, connections or employment, financial backers, etc.
People struggling to keep a roof over their heads and feed their families are not going to find money lying around for this sort of activity. There's a reason why it was said 'politics are a passtime for the leisure classes.'
Unless a person is connected into something that will pay their living expenses while running, they can't make a go. Thus the problem of PACs once again enters into the equation and an unequal playing field.
I agree with you that federal financing of elections, which was at one time a voluntary donation on IRS tax forms, possibly will never return or has been ineffective. The country has regressed.
Okay, I'm going to rant a bit here so if you have time, hear me out:
With the League of Women Voters and ACORN effectively muzzled and as much disenfranchisement as has occured since the election of 2000, we are going back to the Jim Crow days in some areas. Those were the days when only property owners could vote, and there were all kinds of blockades put in place to prevent voting rights. How were those who had had their property, labor, even their bodies stolen, going to get to be property owners?
That only came through centuries of struggle despite domestic terrorists and the growth of the wealth of their communities through acknowledging their right to to keep the results of their labor with progressive legislation. They were unble to fund elections but the liberal status quo gave way to an idea whose time had come.
Some cities in the last few years have passed restrictions on voting to match the Tea Party standards of 'taxpayers' as to who will vote. The rightwingers have claimed for years, by financing every venue of communication to say these falsehoods, that the poor will simply vote themselves benefits from the more wealthy citizenry. That comes from the Randian 'producers vs. parasites' argument and is not related to the Constitution as most people understand it to be construed. All equal, means all.
They never bring up the fact that the wealthy have rigged the tax codes and contracts from the government to get wealthy and then to keep their money and give nothing back to the commons they benefitted from. The labor of the poor, who built the infrastructure which they benefitted from, whose low wages and lack of benefits also increased their profit margins, are discarded in this equation which made them wealthy.
The ideology of the Tea Party claims since renters are not 'property owners,' they should not vote, not taking into account that the renters are paying property taxes for the owners through their rent. And many of the property owners do not 'own' their property outright, but are leveraged and borrow against what they project their income from those rents are going to be. Thus the rents are based on speculation, and in the end, it is the poor who pay a price that is never acknowledged.
That rant over.
This has been driven through their paid media propagandists and it's paying off pretty well. Your idea that their buying 25 hours of air time a day won't make a difference, is disproven by what we see around us in this country daily.
People are isolated from each other by long hours of work or distance. Media has set the framework for how people see each other, and when voting time arrives, that impression is voted upon. Those who make decisions based on non-media sources are affected by those who are in other venues, such as their school, church and workplace.
We need to make election reforms, but the will does not seem to be there. OWS has survived despite media blackout and negative news stories about the events and not the resonating ideas they propose. They may create a groundswell for changing what we have now.
One of their first demands is to take money out of politics, which you don't seem to agree with here. I applaud your working on solutions and believe your heat is in the right place, but the way you're advocating it is too close ot the money = speech meme. I don't mean to characterize you negatively, it's just the way it sounds to me.
