If the state media provided equal resources to election candidates it would be a reasonable start.

As someone who has stood in two previous elections, paid for out of my own unemployed pocket, I can tell you the job can be done with a pretty small budget, but if I’d simply had free access to the state media, and been given the same amount of time and space as other candidates, my campaigns would have been considerably more effective.

Another possibility is a sort of cash for votes deal - where the government rights out a check for however many votes you win. No votes = no cash; fifty k votes = fifty k bucks, say.

I know the taxpayer picks up the tab - but if the taxpayer wants to control her government, as is her right, and duty even, she shouldn’t mind too much if the government spent a buck on the person she voted for.

That’s just a couple of possibilities - there must be others.

After all, we can sequence every single piece of DNA and redesign it to suit ourselves - so why shouldn’t we be able to come up with another way of funding election campaigns?

In our credit-based economy, conservatives decry regulation an abomination of liberalism. But is extending credit (never mind the fantastic grotesqueness it has reached since the dissolution of the gold standard), in essence, a conservative impulse in the first place? No, by definition, its opposite. Just as regulation (that means control) is by definition, not a liberal action, but its opposite. But more than that switcheroo, in so many ways we are bullied, hoodwinked, or just plain b.s.ed into accepting the idea that opposites cannot and do not balance each other, but must forever engage in mortal combat, where neither sees the yin in the other’s yang and vice versa. Conservatism/liberalism: the dynamic between them is the very sine qua non of their continual relationship. Now, with the bail-out (where the poor taxpayer is duped into believing that it is to his ultimate benefit to save the skin of the rich–who made their money off the backs of the poor by predatory lending practices/extensions of credit in bad faith), the bete-noire of conservatives–government intervention (in their eyes practically the very definition of liberalism) –is now deemed the prudent, fail-safe (that means conservative) means, in fact, the only way to re-establish order.

I’m not thinking of horses so much as pigs in lipstick. Or rather, the silk purse they’re trying to make out of the sow’s ear.

Gary’s right: it all comes down to those vices that get turned around to appear as virtues. And there is no separation between political and economic power: politics is about who gets what, and money is about what is of value. Nobody wants something that’s worthless, which is what it all eventually becomes when there’s nothing left of what you’ve gobbled up in insatiable greed.

ddjango,
“i blame the perps and not the victims” is mine not davd’s.
what’s ur problem?

I think the simplest starting point is to disconnect the link between election campaigns and big business. Sure this would place the burden of election campaigns onto the taxpayer, but at least that would serve to focus the attention of election candidates in the right direction - the taxpayer.

I don’t suggest this will totally cure the problem (corruption will always be a possibility), but once our elected administrators are no longer dependent on big business they might actually spend a little time doing what’s right for their new employer - the taxpayer.

Free Democracy is a solution
http://www.freedemocrats.co.uk.

As for David’s “i blame the perps and not the victims.” . . . u r both, and blind, to bat

The solution to our climate crisis seems simple.
Repower America with wind and solar.
End our dependence on foreign oil. A stronger economy.
So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy?
Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy.
Lobbyists, ads, even scandals.
All to increase their profits, while America suffers.
Breaking big oil’s lock on our government …
Now that’s change.
We’re the American people and we approve this message.

We can’t get there from here and I am very sure the word adapt will be used. You know adapt to our way of thinking.

That case and others like it prompted Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart to protect renters who have done nothing wrong.

“They’re playing by the rules, then they show up and their stuff is out on the street, and that’s just wrong,” Dart said.

People who don’t pay their rent can still be evicted, so can homeowners who don’t pay their mortgage. The sheriff is trying to help innocent renters. But the Illinois Bankers Association is angry. The group accuses him of ignoring the law and carrying out vigilantism.

This bankers association what a vision. “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Hint hint

thus US elite cld misteach and disinform amers to their heart’s content w. just few scattered protesting voices.

That few scattered protesting voices is getting louder and the real fight is about to start. “Think of this as kind of a war”

Fertile land, timber, iron ore, crude oil and all the other goodies coveted by other nations were ours to keep, safe from invading armies by 3000 miles of ocean and nearly continual conflict on the continent.

Contrary to the pop culture referents of many, we did not build this country on rock and roll but instead created, over 200 years, what could have been a path to a better future for humans and out planet.

That great piece of real estate came with a great price however. Its isolation from European high culture and the attendant realization that there is more to life than money and power and conflict was lost to us. We became the shipwrecked children in William Golding’s Lord of The Flies, unable to achieve more than our culture immaturity would let us.

Perhaps what Gary’s piece reflects is the terrible sense of loss many of us now are experiencing as a result of having come face to face with our shortcomings and the death of the American dream.