The flawed logic in this article is that most if not all of these action items will require congress to write these into law to regulate the corporations that bathe them in corporate money. Sorry folks but I don't see this happening.

I think a more realistic approach is to pick a company that is a major offender and form a national boycott against them. Our votes don't count for much anymore but our money sure does. Of course getting a large portion of the population to do this will be difficult, but probably not as hard as getting our corrupt congress to act against corporate power.

Good ideas with no one with the clout to champion them. They couldn't get through the current congress and, if somehow they did, the Supreme Court would rule them unconstitutional. If a groundswell public movement were advocating these changes, they would be marginalized and characterized as anti-American socialists. Pundits against would be everywhere and spokespersons pro would be chosen for their ineffective media presentation.

I like the ideas in this article and hope that they can be enacted. I don't believe the first one, however, would actually help with the latest SCOTUS decision. But it's a good idea anyway.

I read the whole decision and concurring opinions and the court didn't base this decision on the personhood of corporations but rather on the application of the First Amendment. They continually used the word 'speakers,' rather than 'persons.'

I hate to say it, but I think the reasoning is actually quite good with a surprisingly strong support for freedom of speech that could be used in support of protesters and other demonstrations which are unreasonably restricted. They based their decision on the idea that the government doesn't have the right to discriminate against different speakers, and that it was up to the public to decide which speech to accept, not the government. They said that individuals had freedom of speech and that included associations of individuals, whether incorporated or not.

They stated that people have a right to receive information. This is an expansion of the first amendment so that there is not just a right that belongs only to the speaker, as has been the case for so long. This is one of those 'penumbra' of rights that many have argued exists but has actually been a difficult position to prevail on in the past. Now it has been enshrined into precedence.

They also made a strong point of this particular law allowing some corporations to have political advocacy speech while disallowing other corportations the same right. They found no legal basis for this distinction outside this particular law. They also said that if there was a problem of corruption, or the perception of corruption, due to undue influence, then that needed to be addressed in a way that didn't infringe on the first ammendment, and that didn't discriminate on the basis of who was the speaker.

All of the suggestions made in the article above, other than the first one, would seem to be in keeping with this suggestion.

You can read the entire opinion yourself at:
the usual stuff then .supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

All the comments so far reflect my view that (with one exception to be noted) all of Korten's well-intentioned suggestions for reducing the money influence on politics are impracticable because, as all commenters note, they are dependent for their enactment on the same political actors who are the beneficiaries of corporate money. If "we" are going to do anything effective, "we" have to alter our own political behavior by refusing to accede to that corporate power. The buying boycott suggested by NC-Tom would be a step in that direction, though boycotts, while sometimes effective, are extremely difficult to carry out.

Simpler solutions at the "retail" level of local campaigns (and maybe nationally) are available if only we would use them. This is where the "exception" in Korten's 10, the last one, could come in very effectively. There is always, and especially right now (with bailouts, layoffs and corruption scandals) general public resentments against corporate operations, and candidates for office can capitalize on that resentment by, as Korten says, informing the public about who is making contributions to whom. This kind of information is available because of the campaign financing regulations almost everywhere requiring posting, and the grassroots parties and candidates have an opportunity, if they will only use it, to "inform" the public on this information and (providing their own campaigns are "clean" of corporate donations) make their opponents' big campaign chests an actual LIABILITY in terms of their ability to secure votes. This liability effect of massive campaign money was seemingly demonstrate in the defeat of Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and maybe it is THIS lesson that shrewd politicos should be taking from NJ, even as they are scrambling to learn the lesson from MA of an "unlikely" outcome there. It might also lead corporations to re-examine the wisdom of campaign contributions to candidates whose elections are endangered by those very contributions. Such calculations could "dry up" the wells of corporate funding in a hurry.

While the Middle Classes are busy trying to turn stones into bread to feed their children we might drag the Corporate CEOs to the Pinnacle of the Temple and see how many angels come hold them up.

Do you think our corrupt, coopted Congress will pass even one of these very sensible, reasonable reforms? I think it will take a mass movement to get anything done. Here's my idea--akin to non violence. We have a constitutional right not to vote. Let the corporate world spend a fortune to swamp our airwaves with their agenda, (even more than they do now) Let them spend hundreds of billions to influence us and when the election comes-- Let us refuse en masse to go to the polls. The punditry in Washington will have to give up talking about the will of the people and give up calling it a Democracy. That doesn't bother them. But it would clear the ground to deligitimise our politcal processes and open the way for us to reformulate what a Democracy would be. If we could do this-- then I predict the almighty corporate world would give in and let us have the Democracy we deserve.

BOYCOTTING corporate power is the most effective and immediate solution to TAKING BACK the power by the people.

After all, WE made corporate power what it is today through our purchases (supply and demand).

Due to it's substantial campaign donations, and negative environmental and health impact, I recommend BOYCOTTING FACTORY FARMS.

A handful of agribusinesses own animal FACTORY FARMS and the meat, dairy and egg industry OWN our government.

WE pay (in taxes) the subsidies government provides to these industries, we pay with our health (diseases caused by animal consumption) and we pay with our polluted environment.

If we want to boycott big lobbyists and campaign contributors and make an immediate impact, WE CAN BOYCOTT MEAT, DAIRY AND EGGS TODAY.

my two cent suggestions
1. change the whole government to a Social Democracy
2. change the whole government to a Social Democracy

There are a few single ideas that could do the job more effectively. How 'bout "Separation of Church (opps I mean Corporate) from State!

The ONLY votes we have left that will count is with our dollars. Every nickel you spend is support for some political agenda. Figure it out and act accordingly. Most people just go ahead and buy everything at WalMart, and that includes most readers of this website.

number will not happen anytime soon

lets hope they prioritize this, because once the corporations control all of american minds, and get their own elected, chances go way down hill

This is one of the only liberal left policies I agree on to an extent. The main flaw being that it only attacks corporations. If we are going to return OUR government back to the people we need to get rid of all outside influences and that includes any organization/corporation no matter what side of the aisle they are on.

To reverse the dominance of money in politics it makes sense first to understand what money is and how it came to provide wealthy elites with the power to control our political institutions. There will be no political solution to this problem precisely because the political institutions are all managed by the plutocracy for their elitist economic and ideological interests. For the same reason, the economic solution will not arise from the power elite, but from grass roots reclamation of our currency and fair and equal access to credit. We must reinvent our means of exchange.

To this end I cannot recommend highly enough Thomas Greco, Jr.'s new book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.

As I've noted in many previous comments here at CD, our currency and monetary system were privatized with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. Our central bank is actually neither a federal bank nor a reserve bank. The nature of money as a debt-based means of exchange subject to interest makes it not so much the basis of an economy as the means to massive systematic economic exploitation. It serves mainly to extract and concentrate wealth. That concentrated wealth then leads to concentrated political power.

To create an economic democracy we need to "reclaim the credit commons", as Greco puts it. His book is an excellent primer for achieving that goal.

"The means that I propose do not rely upon coercion or the forced redistribution of wealth, but upon voluntary, entrepreneurial, and cooperative initiatives organized at the local level but networked globally to achieve the liberation of money and the exchange process and the democratization of finance and economics." (pg.7)

The Corporatists (Democrat/Republican) that run this country wouldn't give your ideas the time of day. Sorry, Fran.

All great ideas, but, if they aren't enacted this year while corporations have not bought every US Representative and 1/3 of the Senate, none of it will ever make it to the President's desk, much less into law. Too late. We, the people, are now wholly owned and governed by corporations. It's official. It's law.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Thomas Jefferson
1743-1826

We've been sold......lock, stock and barrel.

These "solutions" are nothing short of telling the chicken to run for cover AFTER its head has been chopped off.

tammons and phoenix20 are both on to something, common sense approaches to this SC-corporate coup. But it's important to remember that corporations have been deciding elections for decades, with or without this ruling. Everything they've been given the green light to by SCOTUS they've already been doing, though the ruling means they don't have to hide behind elaborately disguised methods for buying elections and politicians. They can do it all right in the open now.

The problem with the common sense solutions--massive numbers refusing to vote at all (tammons) or massive numbers voting for candidates who take NO corporate money, have the least amount of money to campaign with, and so sending a message to corporations that money won't buy off democracy anymore, etc. (phoenix), is that they would only work if those numbers of voters, or non-voters, were high enough. If we could get a 10% voter turnout, or so, maybe that would send an effective message. If Kucinich, McKinney or someone else routinely ignored by corporate media could attract huge numbers of voters with next to zero media exposure, that could work.

But none of this can happen because HUGE majorities are, sadly, addicted to TV and that's where most political advertising goes on. People will be glued to the TV and exposed as relentlessly as ever to big buck ads from corporate candidates, as they've been for 40 years, only more now than ever. We have to appreciate what a tiny minority we are here. Many of us don't watch or even have TV, or we've developed highly sophisticated bullshit filters, so we're not fooled by the corrupt money-driven politics we're constantly lathered up about here. We probably constitute less than 2% of the population. We can tell each other not to vote, or only vote for impoverished candidates, but 98% aren't going to hear us or care if they do.

This is what the corporations understand. It's taken about 50 years to get Americans totally addicted to TV, and to gradually embracing its central message that if it's not happening on the tube, it either doesn't exist or is illegitimate. TV has become the core of our sense of reality, regardless of how perversely distorted that reality is. (Since the entire culture is hideously perverse, why shouldn't TV reflect that?)

Can we get ads on TV exhorting voters not to pay attention to slick campaign ads that twist the truth, tell outright lies and misrepresent everything? We can't compete with corporate money on any level, and that's what the enemy understands. Since it's almost about nothing but who has the most money, we've lost until we overthrow the system by which this corrupt arrangement obtains. If we had millions of guerilla actions to sabotage this insidious arrangement the Supremes have hardened into law, we might get somewhere. But we probably can only get together a couple hundred. We could march around Washington some more with orange jump suits and black hoods, silently protesting how we're being tortured by this authoritarian system. That's been working real well.

Any solution that requires action from your corrupt corporatly bought and paid for politicians is a non-starter.

You have three tools as a consumer and voter that you can use.

1) Dont vote for any politician that takes corporate money.

2) Dont buy the products of corporations that buy politicians.

3) Throw out your idiot box, cancel your cable, get up off your fat ass, and get involved in the solution.

If you dont TAKE ownership of your own government, someone else will BUY it out from under you.

We need to start using the drip system.

Don't
Re-elect
Incumbent
Politicians

I'd stay away from the out-of-office professionals, too.

as if my senators and representatives are ready to act in my interests, they just don't know what the good ideas are?

don't they know about single payer, for just one example?

are they waiting in their offices in the dark, kind of sad, because they just don't see any solutions? am I to be the one to tell them about it?

'Hey, senator, here's a thought: stop the war...'

'Oh, yeah...okay, we will...thanks!'

'Stop making drones, stop using tasers, stop destroying mountains and rainforests, stop polluting rivers and oceans, stop producing metal-and-plastic electro-crap, investigate and prosecute 911, free those in Gitmo...'

'Ooh...good ones! Slow down so we can get all these...'

As long as we allow them to claim title to the land upon which we live, and to do so at gunpoint, there isn't much need for them to be responsive or compassionate, or much hope for change...

The more likely solution is that any federal employee in DC plus lobbyists will instantly be transported to Galaxy 34x9 to spend a content life helping the poor.

Republicans = God, Guns & Greed
Democrats = WD-40 to make it slip -- Duct tape to make it stick.

Why vote? I am planning on staying home and masturbate or did Bush ban that too.

If I may add a #11, it's this and I apologize for being somewhat off topic.

Stop allowing progressive sites to turn into Huffington Posts !

Another progressive site, Alternet, which I had recently joined only a few days ago just turned into a censorship site similar to Huffington Post where I was banned for discussing the double standards of treating Democrats from Republicans differently for being corporate. Maybe Alternet is in glitches for its format change but we'll see. We cannot afford to allow progressive sites to be privatized ala Huffington Post. Conservatives have been very good at framing progressives as the upper class elites in the past. It took a long time to prove conservatives wrong and the last thing we need is a quick defending of their ill framing.

Edit: It appears that Alternet is acknowledging glitches so it's not necessarily gone but we'll see how its new format turns out in about a week or two.

Missing the bigger point - 9 out of 10 of these ideas require the help/cooperation of the very ones responsible for creating the Corporate State to begin with.

That ain't gonna happen, because here's the Plan: create an economic earthquake, strip the middle class of as much stuff as possible - thereby creating 'demand' - then sell it all back to us during the long, slow 'recovery.'

That's what happens when consumers are 70% of the economy, and they've consumed enough. It's the only way to force us to resume consumption at sufficient profit levels...

All good ideas. In the mean time stop buying new stuff the corporations are selling. There is enough second hand leavings at garage sales, thrift stores etc. Learn to ride out this calamity while also working for a general strike. Study the sacrifices made by people who were active in the Civil Rights struggle against Jim Crow laws. Look at the sacrifices made during the struggle to end the Viet Nam War. The world of profit before people's needs will not be changed without diamond point cutting through the lure of being "first world" citizens while the third world children, mothers and fathers live a daily life of sacrifice in order to keep starvation and disease at bay.

Only one way is adequate: Abolish the Congress.

Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.

One way to erode corporate dominace period is to take the money out of their hands.

Fran, the fastest, surest, and easiest means to correct the supreme court's treason against democracy and for corporatist/fascist EMPIRE would be for Obama to simply gut and bleed-out the political facade of this still mostly hidden and mostly unknown to average Americans EMPIRE, by pulling the plug on both sides of the phony single R&D Empire Party during his "State of the (supposedly democratic) Union" Speech --- if he only had the guts to do so, and by doing so he would save much bloody revolution, though he would likely be killed by the ruling Empire for doing so --- just as JFK was, and FDR almost was.

David Brooks’ column in today’s NYT conflates current American populism as “punishing the elites” --- whereas it’s really the same as colonial American populism in ‘exposing and confronting EMPIRE’ with democracy.

Here's how Obama could win a second term, or four like FDR (if it were still legal) and be as popular as George Washington for winning the Revolution against the British Empire, if he has the guts to level with the American people (and coincidentally save our democracy):

Here’s the single, seminal, and underlying ‘cause’ of all these problematic ‘issues’ that Obama has to level with the American people about to restore his credibility, and coincidentally save our democracy: ---- its not health care, nor the economy, nor the wars, nor the hundred other distractive symptomatic 'identity issues' that are ALL caused by the exact same hidden metastasizing tumor of cancer.

It begins with an 'E', but “its not the Economy stupid” ---- it's EMPIRE.

In his "State of the (democratic) Union' he should forcefully point out that today we're almost totally controlled by a previously well hidden corporatist EMPIRE --- now made more visible by the supreme court's treason of literally handing over our country to the Empire overtly.

While this problem can not be solved by any quick legislative or other means, that he will actually 'lead' and solve this (and all our other problems caused by Empire) and he will do it by moving to the Green (independent) Party (which does not accept corrupting corporate Empire money), and then Obama should challenge all those he is addressing in Congress, who have the guts to represent us (and the U.S.) to follow him and shun the hopelessly corrupted and 'bought' Dem/Rep single corporate Empire's two-faced phony party.

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine

Something every voter can do (especially the ones reading this): stop voting for candidates and parties that accept
corporate/corporate pac money.

Vote Green Party!