The US political system has been completely broken my whole life. And for my whole life, nice liberals have been telling me the reason is that there’s too much money in politics. We need campaign finance reform to get the money out of politics, and all will be well.
I’m now convinced this is completely wrong. The problem isn’t that there’s much too much money in politics. It that there’s much too little.
Politics costs money. It always has and always will. Moreover, the money spent on elections may be the least important part. There’s also media, long-term party building, organizations outside of parties like MoveOn and the NRA, and “Impeach LBJ” buttons. Even if running for office cost nothing, progressives would still be at a profound disadvantage, because officeholders would be operating in an environment created by Big Money.
So what’s the answer? I’m convinced it’s for lots and lots of people to give little amounts of money—not just to candidates, but to the whole machinery of politics.
Getting people to do that, of course, is the trick. But there’s a plausible solution. In William Greider’s book Who Will Tell the People, he suggests every US adult should get a government voucher for a certain amount of money—say, $100—that they would be free to give to any political organization they want. This could be Mike Huckabee, or the ACLU, or a local soup kitchen, or even teeny-tiny websites named after something George Orwell said.
To put this in perspective, the 2008 presidential campaign will cost over $1 billion. That sounds like too much money in politics! But if all of America’s 200 million adults allocated their $100, that would be $20 billion spent on politics every year (not just every four). From that perspective, $1 billion sounds like much too little.
I’d welcome thoughts on this at my site, because I’m going to write a big piece soon about why this is important and how it might work. In the meantime, here’s an interesting paragraph from a new piece in the Atlantic about Barack Obama’s fearsome fundraising machinery:
In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat. Goren berg says he’s still often asked who the biggest fund-raisers are. He replies that it is no longer possible to tell. “Any one of them could wind up being huge,” he says, “because it no longer matters how big a check you can write; it matters how motivated you are to reach out to others.”
Today’s Washington Post, riding along with Hillary yesterday in West Virginia:
2:57 p.m., Yeager Airport, Charleston, W.Va.: A steep descent brings Clinton’s plane to Charleston’s hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane’s wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.
Reasons to hate flying, number eleventy billion and three
Assuming this is for real …
A New York City man is suing JetBlue Airways Corp. for more than $2 million because he says a pilot made him give up his seat to a flight attendant and sit on the toilet for more than three hours on a flight from California.
Gokhan Mutlu, of Manhattan’s Inwood section, says in court papers the pilot told him to “go ‘hang out’ in the bathroom” about 90 minutes into the San Diego to New York flight because the flight attendant complained that the “jump seat” she was assigned was uncomfortable, the lawsuit said.
Mutlu was traveling on a a “buddy pass,” a standby travel voucher that JetBlue employees give to friends, from New York to San Diego on Feb. 16, and returned to New York on Feb. 23, the lawsuit said.
Initially, Mutlu was told a flight attendant had taken the last seat on the plane, but then he was advised she would sit in the employee “jump seat,” meaning he could have the last seat, the lawsuit said.
The pilot told him 1 1/2 hours into the five-hour flight that he would have to relinquish the seat to the flight attendant, court papers say. But the pilot said that Mutlu could not sit in the jump seat because only JetBlue employees were permitted to sit there, the lawsuit said.
When Mutlu expressed reluctance to go sit in the bathroom, the pilot, who was not named in the lawsuit, told him that “he was the pilot, that this was his plane, under his command that (Mutlu) should be grateful for being on board,” the lawsuit said.
You always knew this was probably how he behaved off-camera … (adding: not safe for work, if anyone around you objects to highly paid tv personalities spewing profanity).
Update: YouTube yanked the vid, but Gawker has it here and the Huffpo has it here.
Gillian Anderson, of X-Files fame, is raising funds for her Neurofibromatosis charity by auctioning off “doodles” from various actual celebrities, as well as some lesser-knowns like me. The full list is here; my contribution is here. Bid early and often, it’s for a good cause.
The World at 350 A Last Chance for Civilization By Bill McKibben
Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.
It’s not just the economy. We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so inextricably tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.
All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.
There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.
Tuesday night, while John King was going all Minority Report on the big touchscreen electoral map, suddenly:
King just smoothly turned and talked to the camera while the thing rebooted. Looked like this has happened before more than once.
Full disclosure: I have a financial interest in Apple, a Microsoft competitor, obviously. But still. Reminded me of last year at the cricket world cup, when the stadium scoreboard decided that New Zealand batters 8 through 11 had scored a “floating point division by zero”:
Update: people who know more about this stuff than I do blame it on individual programs, not the Microsoft operating system. Fair enough. So the title of this post should be something more like “CNN Meets Software Written By Hired Professionals Writing Stuff That Is Supposed To Work With Microsoft, But Who, Despite Being Presumably Competent And Well-Paid Enough in Their Field To Be Hired by CNN and the International Cricket Council, Somehow Still Can’t Make the Stuff They Write For a Living in High-Profile Tasks For Near-Global Audiences Not Put Weird Things Up On the Screen, Which Microsoft’s Great Operating System Nonetheless Cannot Be Blamed For, Obviously.” I regret the error.
The news of Obama’s rock star visit to the House floor today, chatting up superdelegates, is bouncing around the blogosphere — but usually while overlooking this tidbit:
Clinton spent Wednesday in D.C. trying to lobby uncommitted House superdelegates, but she asked them to come to her… Obama showed up on their turf…
Even when reduced to begging, there’s still that same overbearing sense of entitlement that has crippled the Clinton campaign from day one.
Tuesday night in Indiana, Clinton insistently celebrated a narrow, short-term, meaningless victory, declaring it meant she was now “full speed” onward to her goal — precisely as everyone else was finally starting to see she can’t possibly win.
An overweening sense of personal entitlement… a prideful insistence on success in defiance of obvious facts… say, who does that remind us of?
And if that image offends her remaining dead-enders, let’s review: in the wake of 9-11, it wasn’t just George W. Bush telling the world “every nation has to be either with us or against us.” It was Hillary, as you can hear for yourself.
In October 2002, during the debate about giving Bush authorization to invade Iraq, it wasn’t just Dick Cheney telling the world in that Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda. It was Hillary, as you can read for yourself.
And in February 2005, it wasn’t just John McCain claiming that democracy was taking root in Iraq, and that the insurgency was in its last throes. It was Hillary, standing physically shoulder-to-shoulder with John McCain, as you can see for yourself.
