Democracy vs Plutocracy - 2 key reforms

The present campaign finance system amounts to legal bribery. Only monied interests can afford to pay to play. The majority of campaign money comes from less than 1% of the population. The big donors didn't get rich by wasting money - they know big contributions buy both access and ideologically sympathetic public officials. This generates legislation and public policy with an immense return on investment.

The same monied interests can afford the armies of Gucci-wearing K street lobbyists, outnumbering the lower priced, harder working lobbyists for all the progressive groups, even including organized labor, manyfold.

This system tilts the playing field on every issue, and excludes from elected office normal people who are neither rich nor have rich friends, unless they are exceptionally talented, charismatic and persistent.
To be truly democratic, campaigns should be fully financed by equal public funds for all qualified candidates. Private campaign contributions should be treated as bribery, even if the recipients don't use the money for personal consumption. Most pols (except for the occasional Cunningham) are not in it for the money, but for power and glory. Most congressmembers could make much more in the private sector.

The rich already own the private economy, they should be satisfied, but their appetite is bottomless - they  feel entitled to own the government. The Nixon Court decided in Buckley v Vallejo that campaign spending is a form of "free speech." In reality, it is prohibitively expensive speech that excludes and drowns out the 99% who can't ante up.  It is free speech for dead presidents.  Money Talks.

Clean Money Clean Elections (CMCE) is the best feasible solution until we get a Court that will reverse Buckley. This is a voluntary system of full public financing, enacted first in Maine,where most Legislators now run clean, without private contributions. CMCE passed recently in CT; Citizen Action of NY has persuaded Eliot Spitzer to endorse CMCE for NY State and is organizing a serious campaign to pass it.  http://citizenactionny.org/...

Under CMCE, candidates who qualify by showing substantial support from constituents, and declining all private contributions, get a fixed, equal amount of public funds, sufficient to run a competitive campaign and get their message out.  If opponents opt out or independent expenditures are used to attack them, clean candidates get additional funds.

We need CMCE on the federal level as a TOP priority in the new congress. For more info go to http://www.publicampaign.org/

But even if we succeed in enacting public financing of campaigns, the plutocracy will not just fold up their tents and steal off into the night.  They will reinvest their funds in buying public opinion.  

In 1987, the Reagan Admnistration revoked the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to provide "a reasonable balance of opposing views" on controversial public issues, as a condition of their licensed, government enforced monopoly over a segment of the broadcast spectrum.  

The spectrum is properly a commons, belonging to all the people - private corporations are licensed to use it on condition that they serve "the public interest, convenience and necessity."

Repeal of the FD was promply followed by the metastasis of the cancer of rightwing talk radio, with a range of views from Limbaugh on the right, through Gordon Liddy, to Mark from Michigan on the paranoid extreme right.

Deregulation under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, not only signed but supported alas by Clinton, generated a feeding frenzy of media mergers and acquistions by the likes of Murdoch and Clear Channel.

Even popular progressive voices like Phil Donahue and Jim Hightower were thrown off the air by the corporate overlords.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (NY-22), whose race was the closest in the whole Congress in 1994, is one of the exceptionally talented, charismatic and persistent politicians I alluded to above.  He is as outspoken in his progressive views as Bernie Sanders, and the voters in his meandering rural district love him for his truthfulness, his courage and his authentic populism.  This year he ran unopposed.

Hinchey has founded "the nonpartisan Future of American Media Caucus, which holds briefings designed to give members of Congress new perspectives on pressing media issues."

I am quoting his article on media reform in The Nation, Feb 6 2006. http://www.thenation.com/...

Hinchey continues

   I've also introduced the Media Ownership Reform Act (HR 3302). MORA would restore the Fairness Doctrine--a provision, overturned by the FCC in 1987, that required broadcasters to offer alternative points of view on controversial issues. MORA would reinstate a national cap on radio- and TV-station ownership. It would also lower the number of outlets one company can own in a local market and require more independent programming. In addition to restoring some of the key regulations that have been axed since the 1980s, the bill would insure that broadcasters meet the needs of local communities and would mandate public outreach and public input into programming decisions.

Along with Net Neutrality, Hinchey's media bill is another essential priority, if the Democratic Congress  wants democracy to flourish.

(I adapted this diary from a couple of extended posts I wrote on the thread http://www.dailykos.com/...)