This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
"Please Stop Me Before I Vote For A Bought-&-Paid-For Demopublican Again"
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
If we only voted for unbuyable candidates, money would become poison in politics rather than mother's milk.
The solution to money in politics is simple: stop voting for politicos who accept millions of dollars in bribes, ahem, campaign contributions and who court lobbyists. It's really that easy: stop rewarding those who collect millions and start punishing them by refusing to vote for any politician who accepts more than $100 from any entity in any one election cycle.
As with so many other issues, we have been well-trained to expect a centralized authority to save us from ourselves: in effect, we're asking the Supreme Court, Congress, etc. to please stop us before we vote for a bought-and-paid-for politico again.
Nobody forces us to vote for the candidate who raises the most money and blows it on media buys to persuade us that they're not bought-and-paid-for. But think about it: the very fact this craven toady can afford to spend millions of dollars on advertising proves he/she is well and truly bought-and-paid-for.
The only exception is multi-millionaires who spend their own millions attempting to persuade us that they'll be more independent that the toadies begging for millions, but a cursory examination of the record of millionaires in office (gosh, the vast majority of craven toadies turn out to be millionaires) finds that once in power, these "I bought myself" millionaire politicos are no different than the bought-and-paid-for politicos.
Nothing will change until the candidates who raise and spend millions trying to persuade us they're not bought-and-paid-for lose elections, not on their platform or party ideology but on the simple fact that they're corrupt to the core.
Politics will change when the candidate who--
1. refuses donations above $100 from any entity--person, company, etc.
2. refuses anonymous donations or donations from slush funds that don't publicly list who operates and funds the slush fund
3. publicly lists every donation and donor on a website
4. refuses to meet paid lobbyists in any circumstance
5. refuses all gifts from anyone, including constituents--every gift is donated
6. refuses to sign secret "loyalty oaths" to powerful lobbies such as the NRA, public unions, Sierra Club, etc.
--wins the election not on ideology or platform issues but on the integrity of his/her campaign.
You want to clean up politics? It's easy: make sure every candidate who accepts millions of dollars for campaign advertising, welcomes gifts from paid lobbyists and makes secret promises to powerful national lobbies loses every election.
Alternatively, only vote for candidates who run a grassroots social-media campaign that costs next to nothing, who refuse all donations above $100, who leave footprints on the rear ends of lobbyists and who tell all the powerful lobbies to shove it where the sun doesn't shine because they're not pledging anything but not being for sale.
If we only voted for unbuyable candidates, money would become poison in politics rather than mother's milk. We don't need a centralized authority to save us, we can save ourselves if we throw out all the bought-and-paid-for politicos instead of rewarding them with our lemming-like approval of their corruption.
- 13465 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -


Is this a survey?
And so it begins.
http://www.speaker.gov/press-release/boehner-establish-select-committee-...
WASHINGTON, DC – House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is announcing today that he intends for the House to vote to create a new select committee to investigate the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans.
...
The timing is impeccable. The march of Neoclownz begins since Obozo couldn't get WWIII started. Time to remove his ass and deflect away from Obamacare come midterms which they want in place afterwards. The end game for the USA is officially in play.
Oh goodie, Kabuki theatre!
I guess we'd all be surprised if he decided to investigate and audit the FED?
and we could boycott Coca Cola. much better idea, nationalize a patch of the airways sufficient to televise the campaign, no airtime to buy, no money to spend.
Always vote for the most honest candidate with the best hair and great teeth.
Who is "unbuyable" these days?
Dr. Ronald Paul and, uh,.....
The dead.
No matter what offer you make, they won't respond in any way.
Good Luck With That.
By Lord Acton's Axiom, the problem is that anyone will sell their integrity for some price.
They'll probably so rationalize their moral compromise that they might not even know they are corrupt.
Take a lesson from Congress with regard to the minimum wage and welfare.
If you can't raise the wage until people are unemployed, then lower the value of the labor until they are unemployed.
(People will buy the influence and regulations politicians' sell - until it isn't worth the price.)
When what a politician has to sell is worth millions, he and his buyer will be willing to risk it.
When it is worth the cost of a hamburger - not so much.
Don't hire the smartest and most ambitious politicians.
That's the worst thing you could do.
Hire the stupidest.
What the stupidest has for sale won't be worth buying.
And if you honestly expect real solutions from your politicians - real brainy solutions - then I suggest you run for office.
I'll vote for you.
If you expect real solutions from you politicians.
You deserve the 'solutions' you will get.
The first 50 names in the classifieds would make the best politicians we've seen in decades.
Particularly if it were the obituaries.
1. Break up the US into smaller sovereign units.
2. Allow people to vote with their feet.
3. If people in these smaller units want limited government, fine.
4. If they don't, forget about trying to save them from themselves.
ZeroHeroes don't want to understand the intrinsic problems of managing the collective, they don't want to understand the treacherousness of the OPM biz. Starting with they always want bigger.
The methods of mitigating the damage are obvious and few. What do ZeroHeroes get from recycling the same old babble over and over?
Millionaires, billionaires,and corporations (both union and private) are people too and you are impeding their right to free speech.
So fuck you all! its a free speech free for all, and if free speech buys crooked candidates, then thats the price we pay to protect the consitutional rights of the aforementioned millionaires, billionaires, and corporations!
I am willing to let you speak freely...
...so long as you are willing to let me ignore you.
But if you clothe your employees in uniforms with badges -or without- and come to declare your speech to be law, one of us is going to take a dirt nap.
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter as most people will only vote for the people on the ticket, and neither party has been able to nominate any candidate that is "worthy" for many years running.
The only solution is to allow NOTA (None of the Above) on all ballots (primary and general). This requires a lot of work and diligence, as none of the parties want this. (Power to the People!)
It is NAIVE to think that the U.S. will revert back to a constitutional republic through ELECTIONS. Those in power (financially and politically - NOT the elected legislators) will NEVER allow it! Even at the local and state level, elections results are RIGGED - which is extremely easy to do with today's electronic vote counting. (If you doubt it, just ask an programmer!) And paper ballots, while an improvement, are not a solution since they can be faked or made to disappear.
These private interests control the MONEY SUPPLY and CREDIT (as well as the IRS as an enforcer), and therefore can destroy anyone who opposes them. If you think they will give up their power easily or willingly, then you are CRAZY !!!
Even if a new unbuyable "Ron Paul" type candidate were to be elected president, how long do you think he would last? The powers that be (PTB) would either block all his reforms OR simply kill him. However, such a person could NEVER even obtain a party's nomination, as the real Ron Paul demonstrated at the "Romney convention".
The fact is that we are allowed ONLY to ELECT a president: to choose among the candidates they offer us. We are not allowed to SELECT our president.
As the author MARK TWAIN wrote, "If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it."
"To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology"
- Mark Twain
Being a programmer for 30 years, I agree.
I don't trust any elections now.
When the masses lose everything during this upcoming reset, many politicans are going to be existing at the bottom of a lake with concrete shoes.
I've got a better idea.
Because politicians are humans and humans are inherently corruptible then it is almost impossible to elect a trustworthy parliament. What CHS describes here can only fail.
Therefore, the only reliable solution is to take humans out of the picture by electing policies not politicians.
Without politicians, big money has to convince the voting masses per policy, rather than a tiny few elected representatives. This makes manipulation orders of magnitude more difficult, particularly given the to-and-fro of modern information delivery which is no longer one-directional or as easy to control as it was in the older traditional media (things can go viral on the net, regardless of budget and often against the wishes of big money).
No more bitching about politicians because they wouldn't exist. No more bitching about parties because they wouldn't exist either. The ludicrous concept of trying to cram the enormous diversity of peoples' opinions into a few labeled parties would disappear. You'd vote at a policy level, not a party level which means no longer having to compromise with a party of least worst fit.
We're still using a political system that hasn't changed in hundreds of years and it is simply incompatible with modern society. Everything else has evolved drastically due to technological development, so it's about time our political system did too.
Software engineers could whip up a secure, robust policy pitch, debate and voting framework that's web enabled (maidsafe) and runs 365/24/7, within a short time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracy