General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How come Hillary supporters can't present an argument for her? [View all]dreamnightwind
(4,775 posts)We need to make accepting corporate contributions poison in the eyes of the electorate. We need to follow the money as closely as possible, making every effort to link contributors to policies. We need to confront our candidates with this, asking pressing questions about their policy decisions relevant to the contributions they receive. And we need to continue to follow this, examining how closely their contributions match their votes and the legislation they sponsor. I have long wished there was a website that would do this, crowd-sourced through an internet forum. We could demand candidate and office-holder participation, posing questions to them and posting their responses. Refusal to participate should be a huge negative, and should be heavily publicized as such.
I know of some websites that attempt to track donations, and do a pretty good job at it. I know of none that wrap up the whole package in a citizen vetting process that presents it in an easy to understand way. The correlation (or lack thereof) of money to policy, and compared against the politician's rhetoric, is the key, and making it very easy to understand.
C.R.E.W. does excellent work, maybe someone like that group could take such an effort on. It could become the go-to resource to examine candidates, and negate the corporate media's influence. It should be entirely non-partisan, linking money to candidates and candidates to policy.
edit to add:
Another aspect of this could be to crowd-source donations to participating clean candidates, to give them a fighting chance against corporation money and to give them the freedom to break with corporate policy. If the effort is successful enough, the negative stigma of corporate whoring and the positive reinforcement of public money for verified clean candidates could be a way to negate the effects of decisions like Citizens United.