But what if people like our old friend Fred Phelps decide they want to run? Do you give them free air time, the same as everybody else?
Theoretically I like the idea of limiting campaigning and/or funding but I just don’t see any practical way of making it better than it currently is.
Because what you really want in a complex, technical society is to know as little as possible about the people you are voting for.
Are you under the impression that hundreds of millions in campaign and political advocacy propagandizing by corporations and their wealthy owners on behalf of their favored candidates and agendas helps people “know” the candidates better or understand the issues better in any objectively useful way? That the likes of the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson are ever so useful in – as conservatives like to put it – “helping more voices be heard”? Seriously?
All it does is allows them to buy public opinion and, consequently, own the government and its policies. This is precisely one of the major root causes of the problems that Piketty laments, which are especially egregious in the US for precisely those reasons. Namely the US corporatocracy and the growing gap between the rich and poor, exacerbated by the wealthy receiving privileged tax treatment and being able to leverage their wealth to gain far higher returns than the rate of economic growth.
Or consider economically divisive factors like executive salaries. The average guy on the street has been persuaded by the Koch brothers and friends that tax cuts are a terrific tool for trickling down the wealth. In fact, it was a series of tax cuts that were especially epitomized by the Reagan tax policies that enabled the astronomical rise of executive salaries and left the middle class behind in the dust, benefiting from neither better pay, better tax treatment, or any particular economic miracle trickling anything down on them.
Then the claim was that executives were being compensated for their awesome performance, yet their performance was objectively no better than in the past, and the obscene levels of compensation are often seen even when the company falters and is obviously in trouble. The real reason is the incestuous relationship between top executives and the board and compensation committees, where the members of one are often executives at another company and vice versa, and the massive salaries became feasible when they were no longer taxed at high marginal rates – a policy cheerfully voted for by the average voter directly against his best interests. So the divide between rich and poor continues to grow, and the corporate and billionaire ads continue to “help” people know who to vote for in this complex, technical society, so that they too can become wealthy. They’re still waiting, and getting poorer.
Recently there was a piece on NPR about a new trend: support groups (highly paid support groups) that help CEOs cope with their jobs. I found myself laughing, because of course, one of the justifications of the huge salaries of CEOs was that they were brilliant wizards of industry and finance, far above mortal men in their keen intellects and business acumen.
Well, if so, why do they need the support groups? If they are taking advice and counsel from people who are merely paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, rather than millions, why don’t we just hire the people in the support groups and take out those greedy CEOs?
The answer of course is that CEOs are people who are just a little greedier and luckier than their compatriots, and … very easily replaceable and … not worth the money at all …
Their ads are no more or less useful than the candidates’ ads. If their ads aren’t helping, then we should get rid of the candidates’ ads too. No political speech for anyone on the airwaves.
Public opinion cannot be bought. People are not so stupid that just spending more pushing one point of view causes people to support that point of view.
That’s a case that Democrats have made, often with success, utiliziing the free market in political speech that our free country allows. Republicans have made their own case, often successfully as well. It depends on the circumstances which view is going to have a majority at any one time.
Yes, I do. Or tell me - do you not learn anything about Republican candidates or their policies from the people who spend money on your side?
This is one of those divides between liberals and conservatives/libertarians- liberals seem to think that advertising is a bad thing, that it’s a way for the powerful to brainwash the powerless. Conservatives and libertarians tend to see advertising more as information transmission - a valuable market function. And liberals tend to over-emphasize the power advertising has to control behavior. History is full of products that failed in the market despite massive ad campaigns, and products that rose from obscurity to huge sales despite mediocre marketing. This is doubly true in the era of social media. The power to shape a message through marketing is tempered by the growing power of people to directly tell each other what they think.
Maybe you need to explain in detail how your system would work. I assume it would shut down organizations like Media Matters and the various liberal and conservative think tanks, which are often just veiled fronts for candidate advocacy? What do you plan to do about editorializing? What if a major editorial writer is, say, the wife or husband of the political director of a campaign? What if an editorial writer is a former campaign manager for a current candidate, or a spokesman for a company that will be affected by the legislation being written about? Gonna stop that too?
And of course, campaign financing is about more than placing ads. Someone has to pay for the campaign staff, for travel, for printing policy materials and maintaining web sites and all the rest. Gonna stop all that? Or publicly fund it?
I hope you understand that money finds a way. There is too much power in Washington, and power corrupts. That’s why campaign finance reform did nothing to curb the amount of money spent on campaigns, which reached record highs in the last election cycle. All it did was drive that money through intermediaries like ‘bundlers’ and new types of political organizations. The end result was to make the financing less transparent - not to restrict influence.
So only the rich get privileged tax treatment? How about homeowners? How about people with families? People who get EITC?
The rich are certainly gaining advantage by manipulating the system, but it’s not because they are spending money to get the right people elected. It’s because they freaking own Washington. And they don’t care who gets elected - they’ll work with corrupt Democrats as readily as they will work with corrupt Republicans.
And while I know that the Democrats are totally freaked out about the Koch brothers (but apparently not about the billionaires on their side who slide massive amounts of funding into liberal causes and think tanks), the fact is that the real influence peddlers are not the ideological firebrands like the Kochs, but the quiet lobbyists for the big corporations, unions, and financial institutions. They’ve insinuated themselves into the fabric of Washington and made themselves part of the legislative process in a way that allows them to steer legislation in their favor. They’re the real danger, but they’re not ideological so they make poor political foils.
Attack Citibank and Goldman Sachs and you’re attacking Republicans as well as Democrats, because they all play the game. It’s hard to get your ‘base’ riled up or to raise funds by opposing things your own guys do. That’s why the Kochs are useful to Democrats. But far as dangers to the fabric of democracy and good governance go, the Kochs aren’t even on the radar.
Actually, executive salaries took off due to reforms by Democrats that limited executive cash pay, which caused companies to begin compensating executives through stocks and stock options at a time when the market was skyrocketing. That set a new bar for the amount of compensation executives could demand.
Well, that’s certainly the left’s spin - CEOs don’t do anything to earn their pay, it’s all a big scam, yada yada. Anyone who has worked in management in large corporations would probably beg to differ. Good CEOs are worth every penny they are paid. When you have to make decisions every day that cause millions of dollars to be shuffled around, having a track record of even marginally better decision-making than your competitors can be worth huge amounts of money.
If you want to look at executives that are abusing the system, why don’t you have a look at all those ex-politicians who land cushy jobs at high salaries even in industries in which they have no qualifications? Why do you think they have those jobs? They have them because they trade on political connections to steer legislation in favor of the companies they work for.
Chris Dodd spent much of his time in the Senate lobbying for favoritism for the motion picture industry. Then he retired, and became head of the Motion Picture Association of America - the organization he constantly supported as a politician. Tom Daschle was defeated in the Senate, and went straight into a high paying gig with a Washington lobbying firm. Peter Orzag did two years as budget director for the White House, and then went straight into a multi-million dollar salary at Citigroup.
If you’re looking for corruption in Washington, the effect of the Koch Brothers or other external funders is trivial. The real power is more subtle than that.
And if you get rid of all that funding, all you’re going to do is put more power in the hands of incumbents - incumbents who have already twisted the political process so much that in an era where congress has nearly single-digit approval ratings, something like 90% of all incumbent senators and 95% of house incumbents will be re-elected. And you think the problem is too much outside influence?
You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m guessing you have no clue what a CEO of a large company actually does. I can tell you that in the company I work for, anyone who makes it into the executive band is working their damned asses off, AND has a track record for being smart and making good choices.
My wife is an executive. She gets to work at 7:30 in the morning, gets home at 6-7 PM, then after supper she answers work E-mails for a couple of hours. She has to make decisions constantly under pressure, on which people’s livelihoods depend. Her ‘spare time’ is often taken up with conferences, travel, formal events, etc. And she tells me that her boss works twice as hard.
While I’m reading a novel in bed or surfing the SDMB, she’s studying some report or going over financials or reviewing a job application or doing some other type of ‘relaxing’ company work.
In my experience, that’s the norm. As you climb up the management ladder in a company, the workload gets greater and greater and the demands on your life outside of work hours increase. The people who make it to CEO have demonstrated the ability to handle that kind of workload and make solid, smart decisions under stress, over and over again. It’s a rare person who can do it.
Why does anyone need a support group? Why doesn’t everyone just see a private therapist? Because group support is different. Being able to bounce stuff off your peers in a controlled setting can be valuable. Or maybe someone’s just trying to make a buck and cater to CEOs, and the business model will fail - probably because the CEOs have no time for such stuff.
Funny, ‘greedy’ isn’t how I would describe the people I know in upper management. And they aren’t ‘lucky’. They’re generally people who are very smart and who work hard. They do it in part for the pay, but mostly because that’s just the kind of person they are - a Type A individual who wants to step up to the plate and take a swing at bigger things. Some of them are just natural problem solvers and love the chance to work on bigger things. My wife doesn’t give a hoot about money. She’s in the position she is because that’s what she trained for, what she loves, and she wants to be great and have an influence on the industry she cares about. She has passion, not greed.
The way I suggest – free airtime plus public debates plus whatever the press decides to print about the candidates – would educate the public about them at least as well as paid TV ads do now.
What if the media is overwhelmingly favorable to one candidate over another? The media should not be allowed to play kingmaker unchallenged.
HOW MUCH would the media have to favor one candidate over another for it to equal the INCREDIBLE advantage that the wealthy have over the rest of us? I imagine it would have to be a case of only one channel being available, mentiioning only one candidate and favoring only one point of view. Well that may be overstating it … but not by much.
The media is far more powerful than millionaires buying 30-second ads. They literally set the entire narrative of a campaign.
I can see why Democrats would like that seeing as how the media is overwhelmingly pro-Democratic.
“The media” includes both Fox and MSNBC.
And a lot more than that. The NY Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Boston Globe… The Post is the most right-wing of those four, and is at best centrist. The only right wing paper with major circulation is the WSJ.
Nobody reads newspapers any more. They are a moot point.
…the Boston Herald, Rush Limbaugh,…
The New York Post, the Washington Times, the Chicago Tribune . . .
Most people outside of the big media centers get local papers, not one of those. And those in big media centers have lots of choices, some of which have already been mentioned.
Thinking you are learning something from ads for your side is like thinking you are learning about world affairs from watching the Daily Show. A snippet of truth will sneak in, but the main criterion for selection is not accuracy.
The average campaign ad, for either side, contains negative information - in the sense that you are probably less well informed for having listened to it.
$100 million of attack ads don’t make us better informed than $50 million or $10 million.