Finally, somebody is publishing the truth,

[MadHound]

Got my copy of Mother Jones in the mail earlier this week, and was pleasantly surprised that they were actually publishing the ugly truth that pervades our political system:

Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all."

<http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline>

Yep, we're living under the two party/same corporate master system of government.

[shraby]

1. Make it a law that no one running for office can accept

donations to their campaigns from anyone outside the district they are running in or from the state they are running in and the story might be a bit different.
The contest for President/V. President is different because it is a nationwide contest, but all other contests are local in nature. Senators have the state they run in so their contest is statewide.
Representatives have districts they cover so their contest is even more local in nature.

State government offices are similar. The Governor would be the only state wide contest. I'm not sure about how the various state Senators are selected, but the same applies to them.

[closeupready]

4. Why would beneficiaries of our corrupt system pass laws to end it? Does not compute.

They aren't going to do that.

[Bandit]

2. Where else you gunna go?

:shrug:

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

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[kenny blankenship]

5. The US Senate has always been a rich man's club.

It was designed that way. Hell, originally you bought your seat by spreading patronage around in your state legislature which then appointed you to the Senate. No man who wasn't rich would stand a chance. In the 19th c. the saying arose "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a poor man to enter the Senate" and it's still true today. That's not by accident either. The Framers of the Constitution were a relatively rich lot and they designed the Senate, using the House of Lords as model, to ensure that people of their class would always have a veto power over anything proposed in the "lower" house that was popularly elected. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, under the Senate's original rules, one US senator could stop anything the House of Representatives had passed unanimously - in practice he would need a couple of confederates. The Presidency was initially a figurehead position, the real power was in the Senate. The President has one veto which is rarely exercised; but w a membership of 50 states, the Senate has 100 vetoes which are constantly being exercised. Even though the upper house has been "democratized" by requiring popular elections for Senate seats, it is still composed overwhelmingly of wealthy persons, reflecting the preference of the upper classes for people like themselves to keep a monopoly on the Senate's veto power.

If you can always say what may not happen in your country's legislature, it comes to the same thing -if you guard and exercise this power jealously- as always being able to say what must happen. So it was that the founders of republic created a dictatorship of the wealthy class, while appearing to create a government that enacted the popular will and derived its legitimacy from the popular will.

[BobbyBoring]

6. From the "well duh" department.

This surprises anyone?