Our two party political system isn’t relevant any more…both parties are controlled by the same Wall Street PAC money and Wall Street also owns the press which keeps public attention focused on all the wrong issues…fighting each other instead of taking the real villains to task…435 congressmen, 100 senators, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices, all dependent on the same Wall Street PAC money to get and keep their jobs…545 human beings out of the 300 million that have turned the world economy into a feeding trough for Wall Street greed. No matter who wins the next election, we’re looking at four more years that will be ever worse than the previous four years, regardless of winning party. When do we all wake up and unite to turn things around and save our way of life?
Civic Engagement a) to z)
Together we can make a difference!
Agree about Wall Street’s political influence, but I think you should exempt the Supreme Court Justices from that list. The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they made the Justices a) appointees, rather than elected officials; and b) on the Court for as long as they want to stay, rather than being subject to reappointment. From the moment they join the Court, the Justices are not beholden to anyone, even to the President that appointed them. Time and again, Republican Presidents have appointed Justices they thought would vote in a certain way, only to be bitterly disappointed when the appointee does whatever he or she thinks is best rather than what that President wanted them to do. Justices Brennan, Souter, and Stevens are all fairly recent examples.
I agree with Jeremy. Such practical laws take into account how humans will really act rather than how they should act in theory. In addition to the practical suite of laws, to combat the now self-evident “corruption” of cash (the correlation between advertising budgets and votes is well established), effective caps on the amount of contributions has been suggested. To take that idea further, in order to assist third parties, one could “tax” those contributions and distribute them to minor parties. Australia has an interesting solution that distributes tax-payer money to EVERY party per vote they recieved in the last election. This is a great boon to the two major parties but does help 3rd parties (the Green party in Australia is now a significant swing vote force). It has also helped so-called “redneck” parties like One Nation. My adjustment to this rule would be simply that any major parties no longer receive that slice of the pie and it is shared to minor parties instead. But, in the end, perhaps the parties reflect more closely the people of a country than we’d like to admit.