| Soleron said: I would like political advertisement, lobbying (including meetings, being taken out to dinner etc) and donations basically eliminated. A small public campaigning allowance could substitute. But the public, media and companies could still broadcast and write anything they want that's not overt advertisement. And the public are then free to tune into/buy or avoid that message, something that is not possible with advertising. |
Which may sound great in theory, but lobbying has a legitimate function and without that avenue of communication you run the risk of a bureaucracy that is completely divorced from the realities of its sphere of operation. Regulatory bodies can't properly regulate that which they can't understand, for example, and they can't understand without hearing back from those they regulate.
I strongly disagree with the notion that it is money or a fancy dinner that corrupts those in power, but rather think it is the power itself that corrupts. Therefore it will never be as simple as having the right system in place or the right people in power. Instead, the only solution is to make it politically untenable for even the worst people in office to abuse the power they have. And this, of course, can only happen if the voting public rejects partisanship and demands accountability with absolute ruthlessness and without regard to how it shakes out for their "team".
But between the sheer, ridiculous size of government and partisan concerns that dissuade a lot of people from even being interested in impropriety in the first place unless it's politically convenient for them, the transparency you'd desire just isn't possible under any configuration. When you have even advocates for a big, activist government like Obama shaking his head and lamenting that the government is just too damned big and unwieldy (mostly as an excuse for not knowing about this abuse or that fuck up, but still...), it would seem that the logical thing to do would be to devolve power away from Imperial Washington so that it is closer to, and thus more accountable to, those governed. Now I don't have any trouble understanding why those in Washington would never, ever propose this and would fight like hell to keep it from happening, but I'll never grok why it sounds so radical to the average person... except for the fact that it has been deemed a radical idea by their beltway based opinion makers, of course.
Which brings us back to PACs. As things stand, limiting the political speech of PACs would only serve to limit the ability of those with marginalized views to make their points heard and so would only further insulate the powers that be. It's thanks to PAC that likeminded individuals who aren't individually fabulously wealthy can pool their money to have a larger voice where they would otherwise be shut out of the debate as defined by the political and media elites. The best example of this is probably immigration skeptics, whose beliefs hardly make them a fringe group in the population at large but who are definitely treated like one by the media and having to contend with a left that wants ever more lower class voters and a big business right that wants ever more cheap labor. Meanwhile, is anyone's mind really going to be swayed by yet another boilerplate ad from some shadow campaign PAC that simply spouts the same talking points you can see on Fox or MSNBC at all hours, anyway? I shouldn't think so, as it's all just static the fiftieth time you've heard someone saying the same thing, so who cares?
