Every election year, corporate interests gain a stronger hold on our federal government. As this hold gets stronger, legislation affecting them gets more difficult. It seems to me we are already almost at a point where the American people is effectively locked out of the political process. We vote and elect our representatives, but they are at the beck and call of corporations, not constituents.

The real question follows. There are two basic ways to think about solving this problem. The first is to address each individual issue and fight the corporate interests in the realm that specifically affects them (for example, the debate over healthcare regulations). The second is to eliminate the corporate interests from the process itself by stemming their influence on our politicians.

The first is very difficult, if not impossible, to go about. Corporate interests are not voters, they do not pick candidates based on the sum of their position on different issues. They support (roughly) every candidate with money. That means that every individual issue that a politician addresses is the swing issue to the corresponding interest. If they side with the interest, they keep their money; if they side with the people, they lose their money. The incentives are simple and clearly favor the corporate interest in every case. There is no competition between corporate interests, there is only competition between the voter interest and the corporate interest and the voter interest on a particular issue will almost never be strong enough to be a risk to the politician (as we have seen, even health care does not appear to have a strong enough voter interest to cause politicians from either side of the aisle to side with them). Corporate interests, apparently, always win.

The second approach might be even more difficult, for a very simple reason. The only thing that every corporate interest can agree on is that they want to maintain or grow their power. So, while any given issue might put a politician at risk of losing the money of the corresponding interest, the issue of corporate influence on government puts a politician at risk of losing all corporate money. In short, the sort of measure that might potentially save our political system from corporate influence will necessarily draw the combined negative attention of every corporate interest and all of their power.

So... can this be fixed? Can anything conceivably be done? Or is our system beyond repair?

I will quote a guy from Mises.org that I found quite interesting and seems a good way to sparkle the discussion:



And you think that turning something into a public service (like healtcare) would get rid of evil corporative interests? Quite the opposite, some corporations would side with the state and get benefited in an extremely unfair way.

banned!

in the end, i'm not sure that any system built for only two parties can truly work fro the people.

in canada, we have a first past the post system just like the states, that works fine for two parties, whoever has the most votes wins. but here we have 4 or 5 parties in every riding, that means you can be elected with 20 something percent of the vote, or a majority government can be formed with well less than a majority of the votes.

need campaign finance reform so that you don't have to be rich to run for office. You need equal "face-time" by teh mainstream media in order to get your "platform" out. That would go a long ways towards giving this democracy back.

Why do you think someone making millions of dollars a year, runs for a job that pays 250,000 a year, and spends 10s of millions of dollars doing it?

And what do you think the people and companies that are spending all that money want in return for their investment?

Fuck them. Let's have the best person in office instead of the best-financed.

need campaign finance reform so that you don't have to be rich to run for office. You need equal "face-time" by teh mainstream media in order to get your "platform" out. That would go a long ways towards giving this democracy back.

Why do you think someone making millions of dollars a year, runs for a job that pays 250,000 a year, and spends 10s of millions of dollars doing it?

And what do you think the people and companies that are spending all that money want in return for their investment?

Fuck them. Let's have the best person in office instead of the best-financed.

i agree with a lot of this. not sure about the exact wording or method, but the principle at least.

I also agree with Aliveguy1. More discussion!

The stupid amount of money you guys spend on campaigning is the problem.
to get that stupid amount of money, politicians have to turn to corporations.

Most European countries have laws controlling campaign expenses, how much can be spend, who can donate, not allowing TV ads. Each candidate gets an equal time on TV, and is limited to that.
In exchange, it's publicly refunded as long as they get 5% of the votes at least.

Private funds are used to run the parties in non-campaign time (and there's been scandals when said private funds remotely looked like involving favors given in return..), and advance money for campaigning I guess, but that's it.

it's not perfect, but it's certainly more democratic than your system that really is a moneycracy.

I put a decent amount of thought into this thread. Wish it got more responses.

I think I've responded in other threads that the Supreme Court would have to redefine the 1st Ammendment in order for any serious change (outside of the FCC leaning on broadcasters to require free time for the candidates). Wasn't McCain-Feingold gutted on free speech grounds?

that's awesome

To answer the question, yes, the political process works.

For lawyers.

more on topic

I think the very same argument could be made if you were to reverse politician and corporate interest.

The best way to address this, and I know I'm going to sound predictable here, is to reduce the scope of the federal government so that it stops being of any benefit to to bribe them. (That and shorten election cycles to a few months, not 2 years.)

constant campaigning surely makes for efficient government.

F**ker-nutter, I typed that wrong. What I meant was, the election process should only take a few months, not years. No one should be able to declare or raise cash until say... 6 months before the election.