Public financing is the single most important component to creating a congress mostly free from greed and corruption. If we had had public congressional financing in 2000 and later elections it would have been impossible for greed and corruption to take control of the house/senate in 2000 and later. We would also have been spared from creating the illegal Iraq war. Decent governance requires the strangling of greed and corruption and replacing it with an honest democracy that will promote peace not war/dominion/corruption.

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The necessary changes in the campaign finance laws will bring about a change in the way Congress approaches the health care system. All that we have gotten from the Republican Congress in the last seven years are the privitazation of Medicare and attempts to corrupt the justice system for people who have been injured by hospitals and doctors. If we can keep the insurance companies from using their 7 trillion a year in income to corrupt the politicians, we have a better chance of passing some real health care reforms. Michael Townes Watson, author of America's Tunnel Vision--How Insurance Companies' Propaganda Is Corrupting Medicine and Law. www.AmericasTunnelVision.com.

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How about we limit the campaign season to a month?

The media is already feverishly speculating on the possibilities for 2008. This is crazy. It would be a lot cheaper if the campaign season was very short, and people would probably pay more attention and get better information (less time for spin).

In addition, all of the primaries should be held on the same day. No way should Iowa and New Hampshire determine the course of a presidential election.

That's my $0.02.

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Most politicians know one thing - if they bring federal dollars to their districts, then a certain fraction of those dollars will end up in their campaign chests as a 'thank you' from their local contractors.

This is how the defense industry works - get a politician to earmark funds for some project, and back that politician all the way - he or she is the insider who keeps the cash flowing. John Murtha, while very notable for calling for troop removal from Iraq, is a classic example of how this works; he has lots of friends in the defense industry. The problem is that most Democrats are just as tied into this system as most Republicans.

The real problem here is the grossly oversized Pentagon budget, but since when has any politician succeeded in cutting back on military spending? It's a matter of 'patriotism'; politicians who attack military spending can be accused of 'putting the nation at risk' (in the classic terminology of Goebbels) and will find that their opponents in the next election cycle are very flush with corporate cash.

Here's one suggestion: this tax year, calculate how much tax you owe the federal government, and then go and pay that full amount to your own state's treasury (they will take your money). Send the reciept to the federal government with a little note saying "No Taxation Without Representation".

The Pentagon views itself as a world apart from democracy. That's the center of the problem. Rumsfeld tried to control the Pentagon; Gates will try to control the Pentagon, but this corporation is independent of it's human components. It's a machine that grinds people up and spits them out, and it's funding should be drastically reduced.

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In Illinois we passed lobby reform 4 years ago in the wake of a corrupt governor. The topic number one in this governor’s election? The perhaps real but none the less credibly alleged corruption in fund raising by the new governor. He won only because his opponent looked no cleaner.

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Mr. Sirrota states clearly what is a serious problem for American Representative Democracy, ie, the nexus of money and politics.

I am very uncomfortable, though with his characterization of campaign contributions as legalized bribery. Candidates and parties have legitimate uses for money.

The ability to raise money from a wide variety of sources is a respectable and proper prerequisite for political aspirants seeking office in a political system representative of a free and market oriented economy.

The ability to use the money raised to assist other candidates and parties compatible to a candidate is respectable and proper in any type of popularly based electoral system.

From my experience, the difficulty with our current system of donor oriented campaign financing- outside of outright illegality like that practiced by Abramoff and DeLay- is that the donor base is rather narrow and candidates tend to be sheltered from the concerns of citizens or groups who are not habitual donors. That is to say, our current system has created an echo chamber in which consistent donors voices are heard over and over again.

Nevertheless, the necessity of candidates to attend to fund-raising and the freedom of donors to deny funding to unacceptable candidates provides an essential feed back loop for the current system and assures the candidates' accountability to the donors.

It is hard for me to understand how a publicly financed election system like the one in use in Arizona or in Maine protects the public from demagogic candidates pandering to corporate interests better than the current one.

The popular picture drawn from Maine and Arizona's experiement with public funding is of the crusading candidate, freed from attending banquets with donors, going door to door to meet people and attend their needs. There is howerver no evidence to show that the public funding programs have actually increased candidates' receptivity to public opinion and there is no feedback loop for accountability in the public funding proposals.

Freeing a candidate from the need of actively seeking funding from numerous and politically diverse contributors could have the perverse effect of lowering the candidate's sense of accountability.

This lack of accountability and feed back make me resistant to the proposals for public financing of campaigns. Instead of seeking legal remedies, I think political solutions to this problem would be more effective.

Outside of clear cut bribery and influence peddling a la Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, Ney et al, I think feel that the characterization of campaign contributions as legal bribery is unfounded.

Political operations need money for legitimate political purposes and the current privately based financing system provides a feedback loop and accountability that strengthens rather than weakens the legitimacy of government.

Public funding guarantees funding and weakens the feed back loop and accountability.

The current system produces an echo chamber effect that has weakened the representative nature of our democracy.

The prudent use of organized public advocacy, of political activism and targetted fund raising like Emily's list are more dependable reform efforts than adding another bureaucracy that would extend the government's control into another area of political and economic freedom.

Robert Chapman
Lansing, New York

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Hi~
Alan Keyes suggested that idea in the 2000 election. You should not be able to donate money to someone for whom you are not able to vote. Corporate money should be completely banned also.

God Speed,
David

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As well as pushing for federal reform we can also get our individual states (i.e. Arizona, etc.) to create public financing laws. I agree that finance reform is the first, and most important, step. The only way to challenge corporate corruption is to remove corporate influence. Also; aren't the airways ours? Why can't we get some kind of functional and free broadcast plan wherein candidates get airtime to intelligently express their positions instead of these ridiculous and demogogic sound bites.

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A Progressive grassroots machine needs some tangible unity issues before it can tackle reform of the US electoral system.

Start with demanding a public holiday for Presidential elections. A bribe? Yes. But it will increase voter turnout and paint any opponent of the idea as anti-commonfolk.

More ideas like this will be needed to divide the Privilege Party into conquerable chunks.

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Scoundrels, greedy individuals and corrupt practices flow to money like ants to sugar and there is more money to be had in government than anywhere else. Without a high degree of consistent vigilance by an independent press and an informed and concerned electorate it's just about impossible. Sorry to rain on anyone's reform parade, but the problem starts with lazy, uninformed and uninvolved voters. Until that changes, it's just tilting at windmills.

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Greed and corruption are like baseball and apple pie. Money, especially the dirty kind, will always find its way to politicians.

And why do we have to hear about this Obama character every five minutes?...My original theory was that progressives like people with annoying names. But if that were the case, why don't they mention Paris Hilton nearly as much?

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We to have an open source campaign for this issue. A group like Common Cause needs to say "we're going to start a campaign in the coming months" around a certain powerful bill. They need to ask for our help in terms of donations and grassroots support. Then they need to ask supporters how they should proceed, and continue in an open source manner involving the grassroots. Then a well financed Grassroots campaign should take lift off with the help of independent media and bloggers. Learn and Build from the Save The Internet Campaign. This is an issue people on both side of the fence can and will get behind.

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"Money is very important, but it's the way they approach politicians. AIPAC, for example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is the only foreign lobby that isn't required to register as a foreign agent. They hold regional meetings around the country, at which they invite supervisors, mayors, city council people, public officials from the area, to come to these luncheons and dinners, where the speaker will be a US Senator or some very important government official, who will come into town, unknown to the media, with no notice to the media. He or she will make no other speeches, give no press conferences, and will leave. It will be reported in the local Jewish paper, but it will not be reported in the state where the person lives, except perhaps in the Jewish press there. And there's no interest in the media in following up why, for example, Senator Christopher Dodd, when he comes to San Francisco, or Mario Cuomo when he speaks out in Danville, why does he not have a press conference and talk to the media here."

“The Israel Lobby was indomitable before the Christian Zionists were brought in. They were brought in, by the way, by Menachem Begin, who, when he got elected in '78, invited Jerry Falwell to Israel. This was also the time when they started talking about Israel as a strategic asset of the United States because before that, the US/Israel relationship was never questioned because the people who ran Israel, the Labor Party, were basically Democrats, and when Begin was elected, it created a real problem for American Jews because he had been identified as a fascist by people like Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and so on. So they had to find a rationalization for continued support of Israel. And as General Matty Peled, an Israeli general who was a friend of mine, said, this is when they introduced the idea of Israel being an asset, because they had to find a justification for Israel still getting the support from the United States.”

"and (extremely important; Begin gave Falwell a Lear jet as a gift, a jet which allowed Falwell to begin wholesale fundraising efforts which were the beginnings of Christian Zionist power, so it is fair to say that the Israeli right established Christian Zionism)"

You also have something else called blackmail, which the Left never considers as a reason for somebody doing something. But the Anti-Defamation League is a major spying organization, the largest private spying organization in the country.”

The war in Iraq was clearly a war for Israel. The oil companies want stability. They're going to make money. They look at the long run. High prices, low prices, they're going to make money. They control the market. Saddam Hussein would play ball with them. Why the United States would not play ball with him is because the Neo-Cons, which is part of the Lobby, didn't want that. It's interesting. Without the Lobby, and without the orchestrated incubator story, we might not have had an intervention in Kuwait because at the time the Senate was split down the middle, and when the incubator story came out, even Amnesty International believed it. People said, oh these horrible Iraqis, and then there was no debate anymore.

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If the new Democratic Congressional majority cannot find the collective stomach to take the big money out of politics, once and for all, a cycle or two from now, they will be back on the sidelines and democracy will suffer yet another direct attack from the previous party of congressional majority.

People are sick to death of democracy for the highest bidder at the lowest price. That's not even democracy.

Our job, as members of the unwashed mass, is to hold our representatives feet to the fire until they get it done and--if they don't--to hold them accountable. We have no more important responsibility as participants in the government for and by the people for which so many have given so much.

Follow the money, send the cheesy porkbarrel hawgs packing, regardless of party, family or corporate affiliation.

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I agree 100 percent in public financing of elections. Somehow we need to break through the mindset that has people realizing we have a broken system but those same people aren't willing to do what's necessary to fix it, i. e., pay for campaigns through general taxation rather than via well-healed corporations and/or heavy weight unions or other well-financed special interests. Some special interests are good things no doubt, but why have a system where we have to barter to be heard by our officials. Let's all of us as American citizens pay for campaigns.

I was at a movie recently, the new Will Ferrell one, and there was a young, "progressive" woman who witheld part of her taxes. She didn't want to pay for war and other negative things, and one of those things she listed was the presidential campaign fund. How wrongheaded is it for a progressive to oppose public financing of presidential campaigns? That's the one thing I do with relish every year, check off the presidential campaign fund. I WANT to pay for the campaigns. But the movie demonstrates how upside down we have things relative to public financing.

Then, again, I think we are missing a pretty key point in this article, and that is that as with the presidential fund, I'd assume that under our current Constititution, as it has been intrepreted, it would have to be a voluntary thing. Basically, if a candidate is willing to limit his or her spending they could get the funds. That still leaves a big loophole for people like Bush (and Kerry) to go through. And you'd still have millionaires like Corzine of New Jersey who finance their campaigns out of pocket. While we applaud rich liberals who do that, even in those cases do we really want to rely on rich liberals as our only hopes for getting relative clean government? I think not.

To be able to limit campaign spending, which is the real answer, we've will have to elect a lot of Democratic presidents (or good government Repubs) to the presidency and make it a litmus test that whomever they appoint to Supreme Court supports limiting campaign spending. Yes, that limits speech to a degree, but it also enhances speech for regular, everyday Americans who don't have a lot of dough and/or don't affiliate with special interests, but who, nevertheless, deserve to be heard as loudly as anyone else regardless of their ability to grease our corrupt campaign system as it now exists.

The other alternative is to amend the Constitution to allow Congress and legislatures to limit campaign spending. Now that would be a bold stroke for the Congressional Democratic leadership to get behind such a movement and really begin a debate in this country about how the big monied interests are in fact reducing the speech of the non-well connected. It is legalized bribery as the article here states. Constitutional amendments often seem like tilting at windmills, but to get Democrat leadership behind such an initiative and to really begin a real debate on this topic, now that would be neat.

Repubs have for years yacked about line-item veto and balanced budget amendments, but the one amendment that would make the most difference toward really good government impetus would be this one. Let Obama raise this issue or some other candidate. Let's tell it like it is. The Big Monied, affluent, well-connected and organized have much more freedom of speech in our political process. Their speech is limiting my speech. Of course we ought to be able to limit spending, and this amendment would allow legislatures and Congress to do that, and surely some progressive legislatures would start the ball rolling if we'd authorize them to do so.

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The only solution is to lessen the power of the centralised government. They have too much power and its a truism that power corrupts. Eliminate these foreign wars, eliminate these federal gov't programs leaving children behind, eliminate these courts intervening in state and local affairs, and eliminate many jobs at the IRS and replace the tax code with something simpler like a flat sales tax, a VAT, or something that normal people could actually read or understand. If there is power/influence then money/corruption/gangsterism will be involved.

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