Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Election Reform: Follow the Money
"As an elected official, I think I am the only person I know of who is supposed to take large amounts of money from private individuals who very much want me to do a certain thing and then act as if they haven't given it to me, to ignore the money. I'm supposed to be a perfect ingrate and that's hard to do, given human nature." Barney Frank, D-Mass. During a 2006 interview with Etopia Media
When money talks, as the old saying goes, no one cares what grammar it uses - least of all, our elected officials.
Money, as has been well documented over the years, buys access to the political process, greasing the wheels for the folks with the cash, too often at the expense of the rest of us.
"The money chase is increasingly stealing time that lawmakers would otherwise spend learning the issues, grilling witnesses at hearings, and talking to constituents about local concerns," Michael Crowley writes in the April issue of Reader's Digest.
Elected officials, he says, are spending an increasing amount of time on fundraising, often "timing debates and votes around big-ticket fetes" and other events designed to fill their campaign war chests, attended not by average voters, but by "Gucci-loafer lobbyists for big corporations, labor unions, and other special interests who are all buying face time with representatives."
David Donnelly wants to change this. As the Public Campaign Action Fund's national campaigns director and director of its Campaign Money Watch project, the Roosevelt resident has been fighting to limit the influence of private money on politicians for more than a decade. He's been involved with campaigns in several states - managing efforts in Maine and Massachusetts and playing an advisory role in Vermont, North Carolina and Connecticut - and is now helping push for public financing for congressional races.
"What we've found is that fundraising efforts for congressional seats were very much focused on where there is wealth," he says.
This creates the impression - which is "sometimes the reality" - that "Congress as an institution does not listen to the American people," he says. "It listens to its donors and this hurts the ability of people to have faith in what Congress does." Federal legislation - introduced March 31 and sponsored by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa. - is designed to address this. The bill - dubbed the Fair Elections Now Act - would provide participating candidates with public money in exchange for agreeing to accept only small donations.
According to Roll Call, participants would be limited to "$200 per donor in both the primary and general elections, significantly less than the $4,800 per donor limits under existing law." Participating candidates would then receive "matching funds equal to four times each donation of $100 or less."
The bill calls for a minimum number of in-state contributions - 1,500 for House candidates and 2,000 plus 500 for each congressional district in the state for Senate candidates. In New Jersey, for instance, Senate candidates would need to collect 8,500 small donations to qualify, according to Politico.
"Members of Congress increasingly are spending too much time raising money when they should be dealing with the major issues facing Washington and the rest of the country," Mr. Donnelly says. "They are literally distracted by fundraising and cannot weigh in and consider the complexity of issues - health care, changing the economy to a green economy. These are major issues that need the full attention of lawmakers and we don't have that."
At the same time, the way we pay for elections shrinks the candidate pool, limiting it to the "people who have access to money, the people who know where to find it or have in their own bank accounts."
That gives the money people way too much power, which can squeeze the rest of us out of the discussion. Lawmakers, he said, "spend a lot of time with a certain slice of the electorate" - and it's not likely the short-order cook at Burrito Royale in South Brunswick or the waitress at the Princetonian Diner on West Windsor. "Campaign contributions track class lines in this country," Mr. Donnelly says. "Who has the available money at the end of the month? Not someone who is trying to pay their rent, who is trying to afford their prescription drugs or their health benefits."
It is not "nefarious," he says. It is human nature.
"I'm not impugning anyone's integrity," he says. "It is the system that should be indicted." And then changed.
Hank Kalet is online editor for The Princeton Packet newspaper group. E-mail, hkalet@centraljersey.com; blog, www.kaletblog.com; Twitter, www.twitter.com/newspoet41.
- Posted in
9 Comments so far
Show AllPublic financing should be mandatory for everybody, including presidential candidates. Private donations should be illegal. Period.
If political ads on television were banned, the money problem would disappear. That is where most of it goes. The solution would be to provide free TV time to the candidates, who would have to appear before a camera, without signs or props, and talk to the voters. If they wanted to sling mud, they would have to do it in front of the cameras. Some countries have indeed taken this measure.
Here is my prescription.
1) A fund of public money is determined for every political race in the country. A presidential race gets a certain amount, a senatorial race another amount, a house race another, all the way down to dog catcher. This is the ONLY money that can be spent. ANYONE caught breaking this regulation gets jail time, either for giving or getting.
2) Free air time is afforded for the race, as they are OUR airwaves, not owned by the corporations. If they want to complain about it, their permits can be removed, as they cost nothing and are permits to essentially print money. They can shell out in the form of time for the permission to make a mint out of thin air, so to speak.
3) ANYONE caught giving gifts of any kind or giving money to a candidate is considered guilty of attempted bribery. Automatic jail time. Any candidate or any political office holder found to be accepting gifts is also to get jail time. There would be no exceptions.
4) NO moving from a political office to a lobbying position would be allowed. Political office should be seen as a public obligation, not as a means to power or wealth. Any attempt to hold power over other members of the congress or administration would be seen as a crime of influence. If you are asked to come and give statements or testify to congress, then of course that would be allowed. But to show up without permission to try and sway a vote one way or another is not permitted.
So there you have it. 4 simple rules. They would prove that a candidate is able to live within a budget, can make an effective legislator, as if you can't live within such means, then you aren't wanted in office, anyway. Regardless of what the SCOTUS says, money and speech are NOT the same things. One is ideas, the other is a filthy thing that can make people do the wrong thing every time.
This system would keep the money from being the deciding factor in political situations, as the money is a corrupting influence every time. It would ensure that it's the people with the ideas that would get the chance to do the job, not those with the slickest, most expensive hit squads who can smear the other side harder. It would also keep congress critters IN congress doing their job instead of whoring around begging for money and hurting the country for dollars.
This system will NEVER pass, as the congress LIKES dealing with huge sums of money, and don't want to be held accountable for anything, and prefer to be out whoring instead of actually doing the job. All the more reason why we NEED such a system.
Who needs legalized bribery when we can have a fair direct democracy?
http://vote.org/
"Money=speech."
---US Supreme Court, Buckley v. Valeo
"Money doesn't talk, it swears."
---Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"
I agree with most above,
The legal framework that Jethro refers to (giving corporations individual rights) must be abolished. Also the entire voting and elections (and party system) needs overhauling (although requiring amendments of Const.)
The winner takes all free for all system is regressive and disproportionate. It results in de-facto minority rule. I don't regard a system democratic where a person who gains less than 50% of Eligible voters votes wins.
In short, what we have now is a sham democracy, the best that money can buy.
In his book "The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems" (1995), Thomas Ferguson demonstrates that, quoting Noam Chomsky:
[O]ne of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson’s investment theory of politics, as he calls it — very outstanding political economist — which essentially — I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state. And he takes a look at the formation of campaign contributors, and it gives you a surprisingly good prediction of what policies are going to be. It goes back a century, New Deal and so on. So, yeah, it can predict pretty well what Obama is going to do.
Source: Democracy Now! 4/13/09
Recall that the sector of investors providing the largest contributions to the Obama campaign was ... Wall Street. Note from the above comment that voters and voting are not part of the equation. To extend this thinking further, this "investment theory" indicates that progressive change does not occur due to electoral activity, and therefore, places much more importance on the activity of mass movements.
It's weird that we set up a political system which requires fantastic sums of money...then say our representatives are corrupt because they're always hustling for money.
This parallels the world of competitive sports, where athletes have the choice of using performance-enhancing drugs...or of staying home.
We create a system where the players have to act a certain way--then condemn them for acting that way.
One wonders if America will even be able to afford a Presidential election in 2012. This is assuming we're still a functioning republic by that time.
I think you missed the point, Perry...our representatives are NOT corrupt simply because they're always hustling for money. It is the SYSTEM that is corrupt and the representatives are acting just as they should in order to survive within it. WE NEED TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM...and in my opinion public funding of elections (national, state and local) is FAR AND AWAY the best direction to go. I believe it's an idea who's time has come, and the sooner we start some form of it, the better.