Once the health care debate is resolved, we are going to hear a great deal about the need to reduce the federal budgetary deficit. Presently the dire straits of the economy have muted this discussion. But both Congress and the Obama Administration are preparing for a post-recession reduction in government...

The struggle for campaign finance reform has not yet generated a mass social movement. As the researchers at the Center for Responsive Politics noted: "The historic social movements that have been responsible for the evolution of American democracy focused primarily on electoral participation - especially voting rights broadly defined -...

Serious political dysfunction shows up in two possible ways in a political system dominated by private wealth such as ours. Political contributors get their way in the adoption of policies that benefit them, whether or not they harm the society as a whole. Alternatively, when reform would seriously impinge on...

Advocates of publicly funded political campaigns are handicapped because changing the way electoral efforts are paid for is a "process" issue. Treating campaigns as a public good would reduce the relative influence of donors and increase that of non-donors. But such a system could not ensure any specific legislative outcome....

Last month, Arlen Specter and Dick Durban in the Senate, and John Larson and Walter Jones in the House of Representatives introduced the Bi-Partisan Fair Elections Now Act (Fair Elections), a bill that would for the first time provide public funding for Congressional candidates. Welcoming its introduction, Nick Nyhart and...

As a response to the financial crisis, the Bush administration's Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) was woefully inadequate. But its implementation brought to a close a nearly thirty year period during which market deregulation was the touchstone of economic policy. Now, market fundamentalism is dead. As a result of the...

It might seem that $25 million is a lot of money. That is the level of campaign donations made by environmentalists and those associated with alternative energy industries since 1990. It sounds as if it should have made "greens" important political players.

That it did not illustrates just how...

We have reached a historic juncture in the regulation of American financial markets, and not just because Mary Schapiro will soon become the first female chair of the Securities Exchange and Commission. She inherits an agency that missed the Bernard Madoff scandal, not to mention Enron and WorldCom. At the...

Barack Obama's victory shows that the United States has changed profoundly. But the way our first Black president-elect paid for his electoral success suggests that it is unlikely that his administration's policies will be sufficiently progressive to meet the needs of the people of the country.

Obama was the...

The crisis in the economy's financial markets has now cascaded into a severe economic downturn. In response, policy-makers have been forced to give up the fiction that markets are self-regulating and that there is no need for the government to intervene in their functioning. It has provided resources to financial...

As soon as public hostility to using taxpayer money to prop up Wall Street appeared to subside, this week's stock market sell-off demonstrated that the financial crisis continues to intensify. Public anger will reignite once people realize there will be calls for more bailouts in the future. When they do,...

The devastating financial crisis that has dominated our news recently is rooted in the politics of deregulation. Over the last twenty-five years, Wall Street has been able to achieve its primary political goal: the erosion of the regulatory mechanisms put in place by the New Deal. These were government controls...

Al Gore has challenged the United States to obtain all of its electrical energy from renewable and carbon-free sources within ten years. That challenge is as welcome as it is unusual among prominent politicians. However Gore fails to grapple with the obstacles that stand in the way of our avoiding...

Party conventions are not supposed to be privately financed. The Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1974 -- the same act that offers public funding for presidential candidates -- provides grants to support the conventions on the condition that no other funds be used for this purpose.

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The power of wealth in the political process was endorsed last week by the Supreme Court. Its decision to strike down the "Millionaire's Amendment" to the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Act (BCRA) was all but overlooked because of the media's attention to the Court's DC handgun
decision. But the majority...

Will he or won't he? Barack Obama is hedging on an earlier commitment to limit himself to public funding in the post-convention campaign should he become the nominee. Pressed on it in the Cleveland debate with Hillary Clinton, for example, he promised only to "sit down with John McCain and...

So far the primaries have had an old-fashioned, Norman Rockwell quality -- a patina of retail politics as campaigners go door to door and prompt record turnouts in small states. Even in the more urban Michigan, where it wasn't exactly a horse race, at least it was heartening to see...

Reform movements have historically understood the need to look to the federal government to solve social problems. That remains true today. Avoiding environmental catastrophe will require public sector initiatives; reversing the trend towards increased income inequality will necessitate new governmental income-support and labor market programs; the same is true if...

Three very disturbing patterns emerge from an analysis of the 2008 presidential campaign. The first is that none of the leading candidates for their party's nominations will be publicly funded. Second is that both Republican and Democratic candidates depend on large private contributions, not small donors. And third, the financial...

Polling data make clear that there is a gaping disconnect between the American people and their trust in this country's political system. The United States retains the appearance of a democracy, but its substance has been steadily diminished. Private wealth in politics has alienated the electorate and has imposed a...