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Pay to Play the U.S. Way
Thu Anon Coward writes "There's an article on CNN.com that finally shows proof that corporations actually demand access to politicians for contributing $$$. And that political parties promise access based on how much the corporations "donate". Microsoft donated money on the condition that they be seated next to "Sen. (Paul) Coverdell or leadership, Commerce Committee or Judiciary Committee," according to a GOP memo. The memo added Microsoft did not want to sit with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a major critic." How can we fight this? Write letters to the companies saying we won't buy their products because of their undue influence? You think the politicians will actually listen if we write them instead?" The campaign finance debate is probably the most important political issue in the U.S. right now. You should pay attention, even if you hate politics.
Please take not of who has the most lopsided and largest donations. Notice the movie studios at #1 and #3? Care about fair use at all?
I'm certainly not trying to make the Repubs out to be the good guys, but the Dems aren't going to save you from big money influence.
Real election reform
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
I'm sorry that you believe your employer shapes your beliefs for you. My employer does NOT represent me, nor should they ever say they do.
Smaller companies often do not have the money, because of larger companies, to buy themselves politicians. Microsoft may support thousands of people, but this country contains MILLIONS of people and there's no reason a company that supports only thousands should have enough sway to negatively affect the MILLIONS it doesn't support.
Although it is a nice idea. To let *foreign* countries have a say in what the U.S. does in the future, instead of the other way round :)
These solutions can't really be called "European" in the sense of the European Union: Switzerland isn't a member.
The Swiss (if I may generalise horribly) would see leveraging your wealth to get to voters to be a violation of free speech. You are, by merit of money alone, able to drown out others and dominate discussions. I'd be surprised if that same case couldn't be made in the U.S.
As for women and the vote, the earliest referenda on that were held although the Swiss voted in a referendum about giving women the vote as early as 1914 (if I recall correctly), it was simply, democratically, rejected. Discussions started in 1885 on the topic.
Things tend to move a little slowly over there... usually a good thing, I think.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Frightening that in this day of continual, free information, elections are still basically a popularity contest.
And to think, you're not considered an apathetic voter if you see a candidate on television. Sad.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
One thing's for sure. There's free speech, and then there's the modern mass media. TV and radio, and the new economies of broadcast that come with them, didn't exist until long after the Constitution began to yellow. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that we should leave the mass media as uncontrolled as regular speech, but then you'll get an awful mess as a result... like we have!
Not only that, but there is a startlingly common hypocrisy by those who claim that "Dan Heskett" on a street corner, the local paper, the local radio station, and the TV networks, should all receive equal treatment in our society. Everyone knows that what goes on TV has immense effects. Yet there's this smarmy doublethink surrounding it. You have ideologues who claim the sanctity of the current political system vis a vis TV under the umbrella of the venerable Fourth Estate, but who can within minutes (and without considering it strange) rabidly campaign to censor "harmful" and "dangerous" images like a stray nipple or a proscribed word. But I'm sure you believe nudity, cursing, and graphic violence on TV is fine, because, after all, this is America.
And it's easy for us to not examine that thoroughly because it's scary to most people that, yes, really, what we see on TV affects our beliefs, behaviors, and decisions, often in the most literal and pedantic way. In fact, directly. Massively. The whole advertising industry is a 12-figure testimony to this fact. TV and radio have supplanted the community culture that came before them, and replaced it with a uniform source, and that has big consequences. And unlike newspapers, I cannot start a TV station if I'm unhappy with the local coverage. In fact, I think as an exercise, before you start going on about the sacredness of your press and its speech, you should go figure out what it takes to start your own radio station.
Or what the penalties are for "unauthorized" broadcasts.
It turns out, "we" take threats to the current broadcaster's hegemony with the most deadly seriousness. Perhaps because... "unregulated" broadcasting is... in the words of the FCC: dangerous.
This is one reason why the Internet is such a positive invention. But I digress.
New systems, new playing field, new rules. Right now the rules are that you have to pay astronomical sums to the broadcast trust for a few seconds of airtime. They can refuse your business, or not. If one of the broadcast trust members wants to devote an entire channel to Republican propaganda and call it "Fox News", hey, it's good to be the king.
You can hypothesize bad new rules - straw men of censorship and totalitarianism that you hold up when your fundamentalist take on the First Amendment is questioned, but you can't abdicate responsibility for thinking of a better way to have a mass-media embued democracy. In other words, rather than hiding your head in the sand, or crying about the wrong way to do things, consider what good alternatives there are to having political control go to those with the best ties, financial and otherwise, to the media.
The Swiss simply said, if I understand it correctly from another poster here, no political ads allowed on TV and radio. If they didn't, let's consider it hypothetically anyway. You don't quite know how to level the modern playing field, so you just go back to the system the Framers understood - one where all political speech is far more equal, because anyone can afford newsprint, and practically anyone can become their own publisher. Censorship, as another responder pointed out, can take many forms. You are invoking the specter of Soviet Russia where the real danger is more that of the Highway Patroll. You just can't drive faster that 65 MPH, sir. No, no one can. Not even if they're His Majesty Rupert Murdoch the First.
Dan Heskett can curse on the street. In New York, "Danette Heskett" can even walk around on the street topless. Yet we think that broadcasting curses and nipples is so dangerous that the thought of it ending up on NBC where a parent might somehow momentarily lapse in their parental supervision and allow their child to see it sends us into conniptions. And yet we can simultaneously believe that laissez fair is a good idea for political speech in the media.
Astounding, isn't it?
One of the few "conservative" beliefs I harbor is a faith in the right to self-defense. I believe that if we truly grant that ordinary men and women can bear the responsibility to vote, or to raise children without supervision, we have no choice but to assume they are up to the trivial (and millenia old) right of owning and carrying a weapon. Yet, just as with driver's licenses, we acknowledge that for the general safety of all, some basic prudence is in order, and we do some paperwork, and we have some simple ground rules.
In advocating "free speech" as your only guiding principle when discussing politics and the mass media, you are like a pro-weapon extremist who believes that nuclear weapons should be unregulated.
Actually, writing as you are, today, in America, you're like a pro-weapon extremist making a speach on how regulating nuclear weapons is wrong from inside a gigantic, smoking, eerily luminescent blast crater.
Still, from one admirer of the Constitution to another, I hope you will take my arguments in the spirit of good faith and respect with which they are intended.
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That was before the dark time, before the Supreme Court decided that bribery was protected by the first amendment.
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