What needs to happen for shit like this not to happen anymore.
My proposal: only contributions from individuals to official campaign organizations. Each person can donate a total of $100, split any way they want.
I’m tired of so many decisions being made at the behest of some campaign funder whispering in a politician’s ear. Our democracy is being corroded by all this money.
Hmm no, not any more than constitutional reform was needed to reverse Plessy vs. Ferguson.
This is a thing in Poland for donating to nonprofits, except it's 1% of your tax. It seems to work alright.
The only reason I suggested a tax break is because it would work as a good motivator for people to actually engage themselves a bit. They're paying the money anyway, why not do something with it?
The idea generally... in an ideal world where you simply could not fund campaigns from money except from public donations like this, it'd just even the odds a little bit for non-billionaires.
I don't know of a way to make the existing money and power of billionaires not matter in politics at all, though. There's always loopholes and workarounds.
In the US PACs are required to disclose their donors, so you at least have some idea who is trying to push their agenda.
First: it can't happen "behind the scenes" because almost all the money goes into TV advertisement. You can't hide TV ads.
Second: it just doesn't happen.
Third: It's counterproductive to push such cynical, almost nihilistic, conspiracy theories. If you just accuse any politician of corruption, you remove all incentives for them not to be corrupt.
I have met many politicians, and worked for some. And by and large, they're hard-working, and exhibit remarkable integrity, as in: doing the right thing, even when nobody's looking.
Imagine being a politician who leaves his office to use the payphone across the street for campaign calls. Not because it's illegal, but because they consider it unethical to use government property for this purpose. Even though the call would have 0 marginal costs, what with flat-rates and everything.
Now that politician does a town hall, and he gets is people, red in the face, screaming at the tops of their lungs that he's bought by X or Y, or a lying, stupid, fascist and communist.
I've personally seen a 60+ year old man silently cry in the car after such an event. Yet it wasn't because he felt insulted, but because he remembers a time when the level of public debate was worthy of his dedication. And when everyone argued with basic decency, and with a shared purpose (such as healing the scars of World War 2).
Of course there are cases of corruption. That Maltese EU commissioner last year comes to mind. But it is vastly different than the problem in the US.
That's because the US has largely legalized corruption. First, through corporate personhood and "money is speech", corporations (and people) won the "right" to give almost unlimited money to candidates's campaigns. And just recently, the standards to prove outright corruption were raised. It is now no longer corruption if a politician and some business regularly exchange gifts/money (one way) and political influence (the other way). For it to be illegal, it must now be proven that some explicit payment is directly linked to some explicit political action, in a clearly defined quid-pro-quo.
None of that happens in the EU. The first is easy to check, because, as mentioned before, campaign spending is quite obviously visible. Otherwise, it would be useless. In a competitive state in the US, every third TV ad is for a candidate. In the EU, a typical station runs maybe four or five per day in the last days before an election.
Corruption by direct payments in exchange for favors is harder to quantify, obviously: The absence of cases can mean none happen, or that that none of them come to light.
But specifically for the EU, it just wouldn't work very well. There are so many people involved with any given decision, you would have to bribe two or three dozens to start making a difference. Between the commission, parliament, council, and subject-specific bureaucrats in each of the member states, any unusual actions favoring special interest are bound to be noticed.
There is also no clear indication of any such shenanigans in the laws and regulations actually passed. Yes, I'm sure there are many examples of regulations people might disagree with. But it is hard to characterize EU legislation as anything but pro-consumer. Case in point: surely the European telecom industry would have managed to stave off free international roaming if it were that easy?
Of course there's lobbying. That's how it works. Business are not, after all, the mortal enemy of societies. And consumer- or environmental-protection, pro-science, or pro-transparency groups have over the last years become much better organized, and influential.
The EU specifically is terribly afraid of public opinion. That regulation about cucumbers and their bending was repealed a few years back, even though it didn't hurt anyone (and is now unofficially enforced by the market itself). It was simply used to attack the EU so often, the people working their got annoyed and scrapped it.
Not to mention the first-amendment implications of all-out banning political donations from firms. When people can't assemble their money together, their right to assembly is being violated. If you control when and where people can donate their money, you're violating freedom of expression.
That was the main argument behind the boogeyman Citizen's United decision.
Lets try to fix that: put a limit on the expenses a candidate can incur in his candidacy.
Range Voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig
Single Transferable vote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
Do away with voting booths, attach voting to everyone's tax forms. Give everyone a $5 tax credit for voting. People who don't do taxes can go to a public library and just pull the voting portion off of the tax forms there and mail it in.
Break up corporations in every sector of the economy and either resell the chunks back to the market or turn them all into 100% worker owned and operated co-ops.
There are two possible interpretations why it's happening: The benevolent perspective is that the political right has enshrined the "free market" as not just a heuristic that has served us well, but as an ultimate goal of politics itself.
The less benevolent interpretation is that it is precisely the opposition from consumers and everyone with expertise that makes ending net neutrality so valuable.
Almost any connection of reality, and the power of reasoned arguments, has disappeared from US politics. As seen with the efforts to repeal ACA, there are maybe three or four Republican Senators left who can be influenced with either appeals to reason, humanity, or who simply have a constituency that forces them to do so.
You cannot change this dynamic with arguments. You need to heal the culture wars. Somehow.
Case in point: a judge, who was twice removed from the bench because he fundamentally disregarded the most basic tenets of the rule of law, such as the Supreme Court having the power to overrule other courts, was the prohibitive favourite in his Senate race. He may still win, even though it is proven almost beyond any doubt that used creep on underage girls[0].
I wish I could give similar examples for the other party. But it'd just be an excursive in false balance. However, I wouldn't rule out such behaviour by voters from the other side. It's only that until now, that party and its candidates would not have had the chuzpe to just cry "fake news" and stay in the race.
Anyway: people have become attached to their party as they do to a sports team. They self-sort into states with like-minded people. The culture wars creep into anything, so that even the sports you play or the restaurants you visit will be politically homogenous.
It is quite obvious from above what my "team" is–and I'm not even a US citizen. What I try (and failed spectacularly in this post), is to apply a certain level of intellectual rigour even to "my team's" arguments. I also go out of my way to show appreciation for any acts of reasonable behaviour by people on the political right.
Two examples that come to mind: I had tears in my eyes, and frequently mentioned, John McCain's graceful correction of a citizen at a town hall who called Obama a "muslim terrorist". I have also defended the current President's airstrike against the Syrian government after their latest use of chemical weapons.
[0]: the proof here being his own admission that he first thought his later wife was hot when he saw her perform in a school dance. She was 15 at the time, and he was 30-something.