Discussion for article #222096
Pols may not be rich when they get elected but they become beholden to special interests who donate heavily in order to get themselves elected and in this sordid process they become wealthy and forget where they came from and who they once were. There were once one of us, and now they are no longer.
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My wife and I had a serious discussion regarding the so-called “broken system” we have.
We both came to the conclusion that the system is not broken.
The people are.
At least 45% of the population (and the majority of whites) prefer the Republican Party, which has made no attempt to hide the fact that it vastly favors the 0.01%.
But that is not the worst of it.
The worst is that the other 55% are collectively too lazy, oversmart or smug to take the time to outvote the Regressive 45%.
I am far more angry and disappointed with the 55%. For one thing, the 45% are far too childlike, hate-ridden, old and fearful to even process a “reality” different than that depicted on FOX “news” and Talk Radio. On the other hand, the 55% are more educated, compassionate, well-read and analytical.
They are just too lazy to come to the polls every other year in November and vote out the Republican Party, which benefits from the fact that I.Q. scores and voting percentages are inversely correlated.
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It would be a big help if we went back to publicly funding elections using the tax form checkbox and giving candidates no other financial resources…
Plus, if the airways belong to the public why can’t we make them give equal time to all candidates by a specified number of times. That way they could state what they are for or against and not have the luxury of bashing the other candidates because they wouldn’t have enough air time to do it.
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Which is why keeping Congress’s pay in line with the job description, like Jim Moran is saying, is so important.
If you pay Congress less than the job is worth, you will have crooks and rich folks with agendas as leaders.
Good pay for our congressfolks is the best investment in America that we can make.
Campaign finance is a big part of it: to get elected, you either need to be rich or else have access to a lot of rich people. But inequality and the winner-take-all society are also a huge part of the reason we have so many millionaires in congress. People in ordinary jobs can’t afford to take the time off to campaign unless they’ve already raised a pile of money or have some kind of tacit support from their employer. And unless they’re pretty sure of winning, they’d better have spouse with a good job or a commitment for getting their old job back (which in itself might be kinda suspicious).
And even as a monetary proposition it doesn’t make all that much sense: in the current environment, anyone who can raise enough money to run for congress and navigate the campaign process can almost certainly make more than $174K in the private sector with much less hassle and more comfort.
Some of those 45% have this idea that if they vote a rich person into office, he’s less likely to steal “their” government money.
Rich congressmen don’t need to steal money from the gov’t.; they simply do nothing to fund the gov’t. and then go to their constituents who think defunding the gov’t is a good thing.
EXCEPT when their Soc. Sec. is in play…
Are you suggesting that a monthly check of $174K isn’t enough?
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I share your frustration. That 55% represents plenty who are lazy, oversmart, or smug. It also represents something more complex. Some voters live in districts gerrymandered by GOP legislatures, fall prey to voter-suppression shenanigans, or shuttle between multiple jobs on Election Day; some progressive candidates are swamped by 100-to-1 funding discrepancies, with working-class volunteers who struggle uphill against corporate-funded opponents; etc.
Sometimes, especially in close elections or swing districts, a small difference in turnout makes a big difference in our first-past-the-post electoral system. The lazy, oversmart, or smug strongly contribute to the problem, but they’re not the whole story.
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The politicians, the Supreme Court and the wealthy elite have created a vicious cycle of increasing inequality in our political system when it comes to elected office-holders.
If politicians these days don’t start out wealthy, they become beholden to their donors to get into office to maintain their incumbency. And the dialing for dollars “escapade” begins anew. If they start out wealthy, they tend on average to have less concern and seemingly little empathy in general for the lives of average working-class Americans, say nothing of the poorest among us. Simply by virtue of association with other elites and less association to those of us in the commons, the difficulty is only made worse as wealthy politicians continue to identify less with the hardships of those beneath them on the economic scale. So we end up with a bifurcated system of haves and have-nots. This system is self-perpetuating in and of itself. It’s leading obviousness is all to the basic destruction of our democracy, where one person, one vote should be the epitome of our system of fairness and justice under the law. The space between the politicians and the electorate only seems to have grown wider over time in terms of economic inequality…and so it goes that the erosion of equality and equity overall is at stake in our culture at large.
The idea that voter suppression has been allowed to gainfully grow for rightwing party self-interest, while systematically taking away fundamental rights in many of our states from the obvious leftwing party, is proof that our democracy is clearly at risk of takeover by these moneyed elites and politicians.
These days, even if we want average or moderate-income people elected to office to represent us, they end up being swarmed by ads from out-of-state billionaires that demand fealty, or out-of-sync party loyalists that want self-funding politicians to make life easier on their own party coffers…The ultimate disparity leads to average income candidates running into defeat more often than not, and not based on anything they represent policy-wise. The ability to be massively overspent by outside interests and a deluge from wealthier funders whose dishonesty is never really fully examined (because they’re not running for office), alone creates their downfall and wasted effort. Ergo, less average Americans choose to run for elected office. It’s a corrupted system being built by the well-to-do to create cynics and dissuaders out of us all.
What gets lost in all the outrageous moneyed politics are the policy prescriptions advocated by these individuals. Lost is the degree of seriousness those policy ideas could be debated when they have no hope of ever being heard or getting a fair playing field to begin with. We are all losers then…and suckers being raised on the constant stream of well funded propaganda ta’ boot.
The only thing that would change anything would be a new set of campaign finance reforms to offset the income inequality among the politicians and those they are elected to represent. If we really want politicians to look more like the people they represent, you have to get wealthy incumbents to get on board and risk opening up the playing field to less economically endowed opponents. Risking the addition of an opponent on a fairer playing field, when they really don’t have to do anything but sit on their butts and just rake in the money, is what’s wrong with our current system. Not enough of them are courageous enough to open up the process by enabling less wealthier individuals to compete. That’s why the people, the activists, the truly informed among us, must do the work of enlightening our politicians to do the right thing or face defeat for their intransigence. But that’s the rub. Its a conundrum. A vicious cycle these rich pols, billionaire donors, business-friendly Supreme Court Justices and party elites have created for themselves to maintain an inequitable, unimaginably undemocratic status quo. And its an incredibly difficult thing to change now that SCOTUS has a virtual vice-grip on the balls of the people to maintain the current system of political gain for their rightwing acolytes.
Let’s get rid of the Citizens United ruling by a Constitutional Amendment! It will take a long arduous time to fix this, but its well worth it.
I’ll consider this my 10 postings for today since it was soooo long. OK? End of rant.
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Not sure being crazy rich is the main problem. I suspect its lack of empathy for the less fortunate and being in bed with corporate interests. I’d take a Kennedy who doesn’t need the money over my relatively “poor” Republican congresscritter any day.
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The airways are not public property, except for the tiny sliver that has NPR and Public Television. The rest of the bandwidth is bought and sold to the highest bidder.
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Sorry, but that is not nearly accurate. The Democratic coalition is not merely composed of more educated, compassionate, well-read and analytical voters. There is also a poorly educated/working class/minority component which makes up a big percentage of the coalition. What’s more, from the statistics I’ve seen, that latter component is the part of the Democratic coalition that more often skips voting in off-presidential elections.
That’s why Texas pays state reps and senators $7,200 per year.
That is not a misprint. $7,200 per year is what those jobs paid in 1945. There has never been a raise since then. So only the wealthy or someone with a wealthy patron can afford to run for those jobs.
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Exactly correct - thanks for pointing out the contributing factors.
And those poorly educated/working class/minority component is so busy trying to survive while at the same time getting kicked to the curb by our ugly politics they don’t believe their vote counts - not too mention so many of those same people, have to be to work early in the morning and can’t get to the polls to vote and are probably too damned tired at the end of the day to go to the polls.
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I’m not so sure about the ‘less democracy’ argument. The history of the US is about increasing the enfranchisement of our constituent populations, although it doesn’t translate into electoral change, and was never meant to. I think controlling capital is just another aspect of the inclination to power that attracts or binds people into politics. If you can achieve one, then it certainly opens the doors to obtaining the other, and vice-versa. The political process is about convincing an increasing number of others to give you their influence, be it capital, votes, or time/effort pursuing your own policy… any one of these things looks much like the other over time.
In order to win an election, you need to be able to take 2-3 months off work.
I would dare say that nobody who isn’t self-employed can do that.
Some are very rich (like Issa-crook), and some are only moderately well-to-do. The problem is that they must kowtow to the rich to get elected and re-elected. They spend all their time hustling campaign money from the very, very wealthy, so just about all they hear are the problems of the rich and well connected. Everything else is sort of an abstract problem they read about somewhere, like all the poor people or the problems of public education. They end up servicing their wealthy patrons first and if there’s any time or political capital left over, they might indulge the electorate at large.
Except that the public broadcast section of the bandwidth (a/k/a AM, FM and TV) is licensed to serve the public interest. Donated airtime to debates and a strictly limited number of political advertisements can be a condition of the license.