Bob Herbert writes in today's NY Times: Stop Being Stupid.
Mr. Herbert: "Look around you. We have behaved in ways that were incredibly, astonishingly and embarrassingly stupid for much too long. We’ve wrecked the economy and mortgaged the future of generations yet unborn. We don’t even know if we’ll have an automobile industry in the coming years. It’s time to stop the self-destruction."
Yes. Completely right.
But it won't happen because we have one other stupid thing going: Congress, whose members share one prime directive --- get reelected. Election campaigns require major, occasionally insane, funding. So members of Congress gear their priorities and actions in the public's behalf to getting and satisfying funding sources, above all else.
If members of Congress can take actions that don't run counter to the preferences of their backers, maybe they'll bother. But how often do funding sources, like major banks, insurance companies & other corporations, want change --- change of any type, let alone major change.
How stupid is this? Do we really want to continue to let the institutions paying Congress to determine our country's priorities? Many of these banks, insurance companies and institutions are running aground financially themselves. Yet we continue a system that lets these semi-competent agents of sloth dictate what our elected reps will do.
If we don't remove the need to please backers to get their money from Congress, they're not going to behave any differently. It's called self-preservation, a most powerful instinct. Surely Obama understands this as well as anyone.
Fund all Congressional campaigns federally. No private donations to any election campaign. Remove the incentive to please backers because a campaign is automatically backed by fed funds. Free Congress! from having to please funding sources, that is.
Only then can we expect the people in Congress to think and act more broadly than they do now.
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sciencechick
mimi11
Trudge164
Organian
Strong American Schools
Rose Norton
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"All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity."
But I doubt that exclusive public funding of campaigns would fix the problem, for several reasons. First, it's not an easy solution to adopt. Given the First Amendment's protection for all forms of political activity, including contributions, it would take an amendment to the federal Constitution to put it in place. And, as the backers of the Equal Rights Amendment (remember that one?) found out, this is not an easy thing to accomplish.
Second, and more fundamentally, eliminating private campaign contributions, even if feasible, would not solve the underlying problem. The corporate special interests would still find ways (lobbyists, "gifts" (bribes), indirect contributions) to induce the legislative process to go their way.
As long as the profit system exists, it will always find loopholes through which to evade any attempt to restrain its efforts to influence government to act in its interests. Rather than putting a bandaid on the problem with campaign finance reform, we need to do away with the profit system altogether, and replace it with a system whereby society owns all natural resources and major enterprises, and runs them in the interests of society as a whole.
We could say the same thing about national health care or our increasingly-less effective educational system. Easy to fix? No. Worth doing?
And we could plug the lobbyist loophole much more easily, just by passing laws that say members of Congress cannot accept anything. Federal employees work under those restrictions now and have for some time. When you tipped your letter carrier this holiday season, how much did you give? Years ago, I discussed this with mine, to make sure he wouldn't get in trouble. He told me his limit is $25.
We don't have to look that far to see how publicly financed campaigns work --- that's the law in Canada. And in Japan, not only are campaigns publicly financed, but so are operating expenses for the offices of members of the legislature.
I guess what bothers me most is that all too often in this country we identify problems, see solutions, then see the obstacles to those solutions. Do we then rise to the challenge and overcome those solutions, as we did many moons ago when we put a man on the moon? Nah ... too tough. Let it slide ... and this country continues to slide into mediocrity. I pray Obama does not share this tendency.
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