When candidates have to raise millions of dollars just to run a competitive campaign, they're going to turn to wealthy donors, and the voice of the everyday American isn't going to be heard. It's time we take the "for sale" sign off the Capitol lawn. We can't afford the price we're paying for corporate-sponsored government.
Jim, Barb, Dominica and Chuck, featured in the video above, can't afford to compete with the influence of corporate donations. When Washington makes decisions regarding their lives, they are not the people getting meetings with lawmakers. Instead, corporate lobbyists come to collect on prior donations made. And the end result means working people suffer from legislative decisions that benefit the rich.
As long as politicians are accountable to the corporations and lobbyists who finance their campaigns, they're never going to be accountable to the people that elected them. It's time ordinary Americans had their voices heard. Our elected officials should be concerned with solving our problems and concerns, not those of special interests who can afford to pay for special treatment.
The only way to make Congress accountable to working Americans is to have Fair Elections, where a coal miner's voice can be heard as clearly as the owner of that mine. We need to put elections back in the hands of ordinary Americans.
It's time we return government to of, by, and for the people, not government bought and paid for by special interests.
Join us today in demanding Fair Elections Now.
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There's a donut shop across from the Y, where people pay enough more for a snack than it would have cost at the grocery store, that doing it once a week would really add up over the course of an election cycle. If political participation were really a priority for ordinary people, so that half the population spent half of what they now spend on frivolous stuff like getting a snack from a donut shop instead of a grocery store, that would greatly exceed what gets spent on direct political contributions by the rich. There's not enough money in campaigns now to support a sustained discussion of complex issues. It's tiny compared to other categories of advertising. TV ads are expensive per ad, but cheap per eyeball. Setting up events where people actually talk about the issues would be much more expensive, and we "can't afford" it because it's not a priority to enough people.
On the other hand, revolving-door jobs, sweetheart-deal government contracts, and the economic effects of seemingly-minor details of regulation, all are a lot bigger than the amount of money in campaigns.
It's legalized bribery..!
In election after election, the electorate has shown with their votes that they don't care who bribes their politicians.
We can't be bothered to pay attention to things like this - so we'll get what we deserve.
Either we are slaves to the rich or we are shooting at them and being killed and imprisoned by them. It's the story of human history.....and America sure as hell ain't changing that....
Agreed. We need to restore the proscriptions of Graft, Corruption, and Influence Peddling. Somehow all this got confused with "fund raising" and Congress has been an "open store" ever since and with the recent SCOTUS decision giving Corporations citizenship, it's not going to get better.