Posted by springears:
But it doesn’t work that way. I mean if you’re talking about the poor people who benefit most from welfare and other public programs, those are the very people who don’t vote. Their voter turnout is even lower than that of the “working citizen.”
At present, American politicians are corrupt because they have to be. They don’t accept bribes as such, they accept campaign contributions from the rich and the corporations and the corporate PACs and lobbying outfits – and such favors must be repaid, or you won’t get contributions when you run for re-election. Sometimes a given corporation will fund both sides in an election, just to make sure the winner will owe them a favor. Politicians cannot opt out of this system; if they try, they will be turned out of office by a better-funded challenger.
All this happens because running for public office is a lot more expensive than it used to be. To win an election, you need TV and radio time; volunteers knocking on doors won’t do the trick. In modern American politics, the pure and honest are mostly filtered out before they reach any high office; campaign-based corruption is simply an inevitable cost of doing business.
If you want to do something about this, work for campaign finance reform. Check out http://www.commoncause.org/.
If you want a real, honest “crusader” in politics, check out Dennis Kucinich, http://www.kucinich.us/, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president (and in most polls, is running dead last, in company with Sharpton and Braun). Kucinich’s worst enemies have never accused him of any dishonesty. He has always stuck to his principles, even when this harmed his career. When he was mayor of Cleveland, 1977-79, he refused to buckle to corporate pressure to sell the city electric utility, Municipal Lights, to its private competitor, Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., even though at that time the city was deeply in debt. Cleveland’s banks, which had a financial interest in CEI, gave him an umltimatum: Sell Muny Light or they would send the city into default. He didn’t, they did, and Kucinich lost his re-election bid, and did not start to make a political comeback until 1994. You might or might not agree with his decision in this instance, but you can’t deny this was the action of a man of principle. (For more on this story see http://www.kucinich.us/aboutdennis.htm#down.) And I cannot believe he is the only such person in American public life.
In his presidential campaign, Kucinich has made a point of rejecting corporate donations to his campaign, which is why it is so poorly funded. (He’s making a virtue of necessity, really – how many corporations would want to fund a leftist like Kucinich?) Howard Dean, on the other hand, has made a point of rejecting public funding for his campaign – which frees him up to accept corporate donations and all donations with minimal FEC supervision. Bush is doing it the same way, which is no surprise.
