. . . says Dr Steffie Woolhander, a GP, professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Programme (PNHP) about legislation emerging from the Senate:
A scare article or an accurate description of democracy in action?
How does allowing vested interests to make contributions of $1.5 million to the chairman of the committee drafting legislation serve democracy?
If it’s accurate, how do you stop this crazy shit?
They don’t work for us. They are paid for services performed, by the donors. Without campaign funding changes it will remain the same. But the system gives a boost to those who are in and receive money from them. Expecting them to change the laws and thereby jeopardizing their seats ,is asking a lot. It would take a huge push from the voters to actually make a substantive change to campaign financing. I do not see it happening. At every political discussion ,the audience has to bring up campaign finance reform. You have to threaten not to vote for any politician whe won’t go along with it. Otherwise we will not get our country back.
Well now we know how much health care is worth to Americans: $1.5M. What’s that, about $205 per person?
Somewhere between that and a half penny. Closer to the low end.
Whenever you involve the government in anything, intersted parties are going to try to influence the government to favor them. They’d be fools not to. They will always do it, and any reforms or rules designed to stop it just change the ways they do it, and make them more and more hidden and esoteric. Money, like flowing water, will always find an outlet.
The only way to keep corporations from trying to influence government is to keep government small enough so that there’s no reason to do it.
Corporations and special interests try to influence government because otherwise the government will prevent them from doing certain things. If the government is small enough that the corporations don’t care about the government, then the government would be so ineffectual that corporations will be able to do whatever they please. IMO that would ruin the country faster than government intervention ever could.
That doesn’t seem to be the experience in the rest of the industrialized world?
I’m a lot more concerned about the influence Goldman Sachs has inside the Federal Reserve and with our Financial Policy Makers
Cite for a government in the world today where this is true?
It seems to me that smaller governments in the world are actually more likely to get pushed around by people with money and large corporations than large ones.
Perhaps it’s both a blessing and a drawback to live in a country where the government uses a Westminster-style parliamentary system:
– The drawback is that in most cases* the elected Members of Parliament don’t necessarily serve their constituents–they serve their political parties, and vote the party line in the House of Commons. A member’s vote doesn’t always accord with the wishes of his or her constituency’s people, but that’s how things work.
– The blessing is that this system allows individual Members of Parliament to be nearly impervious to lobbying. For a lobbyist/special interest group to be successful in getting what it wants, it must spend lots of money and energy and time lobbying all the party’s parliamentarians as a group–it cannot persuade individual members to vote against their party’s wishes with promises (or actual delivery) of campaign contributions, or other pork.
Nah, public program was voted up by a majority of Dems on the conservative Finance committee. It gets better from here, especially seeing as the final bill will be prepped by Dems only:
Harkin: No place for GOP at Senate health-bill table
I don’t think that’s democracy in action; that’s closer to meritocracy, where the “merit” is how much money you have.
You divide the $1.5m by the U.S. population (to get $205 you would have had to have divided the U.S. population by the $1.5m), estimated at around 307m that is around 0.48 cents for each American (essentially the half-penny answer given above.)
a.k.a. plutocracy
To count past ten, I have to take of my socks. To count past twenty, I have to take of my underpants. Sometimes simply arithmatic is beyond me. I can’t even blame it on bad education. :smack:
Somalia?
The only way to have a government too small to be worth influencing is to have one so small it can’t do much of anything at all. A failed state in other words.
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Smaller != ineffective. It’s a lot harder to bend the rules this way and that to favor various interests when the rules are fewer and simpler. You pass law after law, all of them thousands of pages long and so byzantine that the lawmakers admit they don’t even bother to read them, and it becomes quite easy to get this or that provison slipped in to please this or that MegaCorp/Big Union/Special Interest.
Is that a question? Because if you don’t think corporations in Europe/Japan/etc. are actively engaged in trying to get government largesse and favor by all means, legal and otherwise, you are sadly mistaken.
Unfortunately campaign finance reforms tend to run into free speech issues. Seems to me we’d need a constitutional amendment and government funding of campaigns.
In short, not gonna happen. The US would have to collapse utterly and a new government form I think before we saw any substantive moves on campaign finance. The people who would change the laws are the very people who benefit from the status quo and like their perks.
Clearly it is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” anymore (if it ever was but we are way farther into the abyss these days…congresscritters barely even pretend anymore to be for their constituents beyond pathetic lip service that by rights should see them struck by lightning for such false utterances that they care about the people).