Imagine no Insurance lobby..no banking lobby..no Pharma lobby.. no Oil lobby

SoCalDem

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Fri Jul-31-09 04:14 AM
Original message

Imagine no Insurance lobby..no banking lobby..no Pharma lobby.. no Oil lobby

Edited on Fri Jul-31-09 04:26 AM by SoCalDem

With the fantastic communication system we have, there is NO need to do much more than to create "political channels", and fire them up before elections.

Any viable candidate could have "access" (in equal doses, of course, with the other ones). They could lay out their agenda, without screaming heads interrupting them every 7 seconds. there could be actual debates too..real debates.

Election season would last 6 months..and 6 months only.

No paid tv ads would be allowed..only print ads..and ads that were proven false would be pulled.

This would be at no cost to the candidates. The only out-of-pocket expenses they would have, would be for a modest staff and print materials. With a 6 month campaign, there would be a lot less needed. With the internet everywhere these days, they could use it, and for a lot less money.

Lobbyist money should be illegal. It's quid pro quo, any way you slice it. There is NO way that a corporation "gives" a person the bazillions of dollars they do now , to "win a job" that pays under $200K, unless there are mega-returns on the horizon. Lobbyists are to politics, what steroids are to baseball. Cheating.

Public funding is ultimately cheaper than paying bribes dressed up as bad legislation, to billionaire business people.

SCOTUS made a huge error when they allowed "personhood" to corporations. Corporations "are" people, but each one of the people making up that corporation already HAS a vote. The only justification for giving corporate personhood, is to negate all those individual votes, in the form of massive campaign donations. Why would a corporation want to do that?

Take Walmart for example. Do all those downtrodden workers at walmart really NOT want health care, higher wages, better hours & working conditions? They don't have a chance against the all-powerful corporation that owns them.

Candidates we should be voting for, cannot compete, with things the way they are now. There are people "out there", from whom we will never hear, because their good ideas will never make it into the electoral arena. Corporatists like the legislators they currently own and operate.

By opting in to the "service economy", we have tied ourselves to the corporatists, like never before. Someone wondered aloud the other day, about why we don't have millions of people taking to the streets over the health care issue.

We don't have them because the jobs-situation is so bleak, that most people cannot afford to miss work to protest. They are hopelessly indentured. People are in debt, they have mortgages, they have kids who need health insurance, they have car payments, college tuition... they cannot afford to be seen "making waves".

Long ago, the powers that be decided that the welfare, comfort & personal security of the people were nowhere near as important as the balance sheets of a few powerful tycoons, and with the exception of a few rare times in history, it's probably always been that way, and always will be that way.

We all spend the first 2 decades under the influence of our parents & family, the next 3 decades under the thumb of our employers, and the remaining decades, at the mercy of our government. We are led to believe that we have freedom, but without the security to elect fair-minded, honest people to do our bidding, those freedoms are very limited.