Become a citizen co-sponsor

Become a citizen co-sponsor of the DISCLOSE Act of 2012 to end secret election spending.

The U.S. Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United v. FEC ruling has unleashed a torrent of anonymous campaign spending into our political system. Corporations have been able to exert a massive influence on our electoral process without being subject to any accountability for that influence.

Progressive champion Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is fighting back by pushing Congress to pass the DISCLOSE Act. And he has asked the public to join him as citizen co-sponsors.

Become a citizen co-sponsor of the DISCLOSE Act of 2012 to end secret election spending.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/disclose_citizen_cosponsor/?r_by=42314-3451380-30XNMQx&rc=confemail 

A Case for Public Campaign Funding

            An e-mail message from the political party I am registered with informed me that it had come to their attention that after several requests, there had not been any donations associated with that e-mail address.  If they were wrong, then they apologized.  However, if they were correct they wanted to know why there hadn't been any donations?  Further, they wanted to know, what would take to get me to make a donation? There were several responses to choose from and I chose to tell them I was supporting the party in other ways and that frost warnings for Hell might break me out of donating slump.

            To say that I’m conservative in my spending and donating habits is not completely true.  I don’t have any spending habits and for a very long time I haven’t donated money to anything other than contributions to my wife’s charitable attitude towards our descendants.  If you listen closely, you can hear me squeak when I walk by.  So when a political party, candidate, or other entity asks me for money they are generally wasting resources.  Wasting resources is one of the reasons for my prohibition on campaign donations. 

            Quite a while back, I made a couple donations of twenty-five dollars each.  For me those were major monetary transfers.  After the checks cleared, the requests for more money ramped up so much that my twenty-five dollar checks could not have funded the effort for more than a few months.  It didn’t matter that there wasn’t any response to the requests.  The requests started to include warnings that each one was going to be the last and that model was repeated periodically for years.  Once you’re in the database as a contributor, the files never seem to be purged of deadbeats.

            When the money isn’t being wasted on ineffective mailings, what is it being used for?  Swift-boat style attack ads or misleading spin-speech?  I don’t like that stuff coming from campaigns that I don’t agree with, why would I fund that garbage for an issue or politician I support?  I know, I know, because it works.  That’s not good enough for me because I don’t have money to throw around like that.  When I consider what I could have done with those two donations of twenty-five dollars each, it really grates on me what the recipients did with them.

            Consider for a moment what could be done with the millions, maybe billions of dollars, of campaign war-chest money if it were to be spent on something other than political indulgences.  A lot of the problems the politicians and campaigns claim they are going to fix could get fixed with the campaign donations and without any additional tax money being spent.  It is all relative to how much money you have to spend.  If you have lots of money, then you can have fun spending on whatever you want including spending some of it on politics.  If you spend lots of money to get things to go your way, then the people who don’t want that to happen – including people with less money -- will use up their limited resources trying to match your contributions and/or you’ll out spend them so much that they will eventually give up and you win.  It’s a game for the super rich and it is good source of income for professional political advisors, for many professional political campaign organizers, and, most certainly, for advertisers. 

            Politicos say that public funding won’t work for political campaigns.  One claim is that there wouldn’t be enough money to run the campaigns.  I agree that there wouldn’t be enough money to run the campaigns the way they are run now.  However, if campaign funding was severely limited, then perhaps, the campaigners would have to stick more to the facts and the issues.  Even if a campaign wanted to run a negative attack, the limited funding might tend to force the attack to be a more truthful negative attack since there wouldn’t be funding for the big shotgun-blasting-mud-slinging-see-what-sticks type of negative campaigning that we have to endure now.   

            Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few nights during the month proceeding the election when the candidates and the campaigns spent some time describing the issues as they see them and telling us what they intended to do to make things better?  You could have some paper and a pencil ready to take some notes for comparisons.  After you did your comparisons, you could decide how you wanted to vote without all the confusion and frustration that we go through every election cycle now.  With the money you saved by not having to make political contributions to save the shade trees on your street or enrich some political candidate’s campaign advisors, you could go out to eat after you get done voting.  You might even have money to contribute to a truly worthwhile cause where they used your money to accomplish something.

Corporate Influence

The January 23 issue of High Country News includes an article entitled Billboard corporations use money and influence to override your vote.  The Editor’s Note column on page one is headed with “An era of increasing corporate power” and you can read the editor’s comment online under the title Billboard corporations and other big industries make their own rules. 

Another example of corporate power and influence on government can be seen in the 2012 session of the South Dakota legislature a bill to undue what some people believe was a legislative mistake gets tabled in committee.  HB1098 would have restored state permitting power on uranium mines and reversed last year’s legislation. Cheryl Rowe, Lilias Jarding, and Rebecca R. Leas wrote letters to the editor of the Rapid City Journal expressing support for this year’s proposed bill.  Other opponents of last year’s legislation from the area near where the uranium mining would take place also testified before the committee.  However, one of the bill’s main sponsors decided that the bill needed to be “refined” and that she would resubmit the new bill next year.  

The following article is taken from the West River Electric February 2012 issue of the “Cooperative Connections” magazine, page 15:

It is worth it to do a little research into the reversal of the so called ban on incandescent light bulbs.  For another explanation of whether or not there is a ban on incandescent light bulbs plus lots more information on the topic look here.  One article referred to this recent US Congressional activity as a victory for the US Tea Party.  Was it in fact a victory for the Tea Party or was it an example of the effectiveness of political influence capabilities of Koch Industries?

Okay, ignore my inference to right-wing conspiracy and ask yourself some questions. 

1.  Who benefits the most from the examples of political influence listed above?

2.  Do you like looking at the local scenery that you can see through bill boards or would you prefer to just look at the scenery without the bill boards? 

3.  Is it worth the risk of polluting our drinking water in order to make it easier for Power Tech to mine for uranium in the Black Hills?

4.  If you can save money and help the whole world save energy by changing to a light bulb that is more efficient, why wouldn’t you?

5.  Who benefits if you don’t change to the more efficient light bulb?

I would like to read you answers.

Naming Rights and Financial Contributions

Some Republicans I know are Republicans because they are loyal to the only political party they have ever been members of.  They can’t conceive of not being Republicans.  A few others have realized that they are disenchanted with the direction of the party and they have made a partial step away from it by claiming to be independents.  The same things can be said for numerous Democrats.  It’s like growing up in a religious denomination and being told that every other denomination is wrong; it’s scary to think that the group you are a member of might not be all that righteous.

In truth, what appears to be happening is that certain factions within groups have ascended to dominance while the other members have languished in their complacency.  The attitudes of society have overtaken the idealism's of the groups we thought we knew because we grew up in them.  One reason for this is that there are professional people who are paid to devise ways to make these groups more effective political tools.  Those professional manipulators have expanded their abilities at an accelerating rate with the assistance of technology and money.  The more willing these individuals are to “sell out” their own group’s core ideology for the sake of other agendas, the more money they can attract.  While you were sleeping, your religion and/or your political party changed into a tool for people with money that want to be powerful.

In western South Dakota, there are lots of good people that have belonged to one political party all of their lives.  They are good neighbors, good citizens, and the kind of people that you would like to have watching your back for you when times get tough.  They sort of shake their heads when they learn that T. Denny Sanford makes another large contribution to help fund some organization and, in appreciation, that organization changes its name to include Mr. Sanford’s name.  It seems harmless enough and it isn’t as though T. Denny invented the practice.

On January 21, 2010, the US Supreme Court assisted the manipulators with the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision.  The Supreme Court decision appears to be confirming what has been happening slowly for a long time and at a much faster rate during the last eleven years.  Money trumps everything else, if you have enough of it.  If things weren’t lopsided enough already, one group is looking to make it more so.  This group wants to eliminate the continuing restriction against direct political contributions by corporations.  Perhaps the Republican and Democrat parties are in for name changes in the near future; judging by their actions they are already sold out to or beholding to their moneyed and corporate contributors.