American Manifesto Part Two: Democracy

American Manifesto Part Two: Democracy

How to change the Federal legislature to work for solutions and not re-election.

"Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets,” Abraham Lincoln

The trough at which the federal legislators in America feed is an underground lake like an oil deposit rich and frothing with excess in a pit of blackness and murk.  Its contents are refilled each year by the work of the American people.  Countless unnamed spouts and sources seep in from every avenue below.  We produce in an unnatural opposition to gravity.  Taxes are sucked and slurped upwards to drill bits.  Milkshake straws are arranged in a systematic grid of seniority on the House and Senate floors.  Each is assigned in numerical supremacy openly sabotaging opponents and our democracy for the insatiable hunger for partisan power. 

The aged and wrinkled representatives hold chairs and save seats at the motion-picture school-cafeteria of the nation.  The cinema swirls out and chucks along to keep the oil flowing back to their states.  If the old traveling prospector gets up, each other member of the crowd will move up one spot.  “Oh, how the boys back home will suffer.”  Famines will ensue.  Vehicles will creak to a halt.  The sludge that seemed to always sputter out the pipe down where the people live will finally clog.

Our Shit-Stuck Legislative Sewer Pipes

It is ludicrous that the American people tolerate our current un-term limited federal legislative system.  Politicians claim that if the people want someone new than we will elect someone new.  The reality is the federal legislative system has forced voters to rationalize the re-elections of incumbent felons before choosing to lose committee assignments and the perks of seniority.  The cost of initial election is exorbitant to garner the name recognition, let alone the policy differential to attain a viable slot on the ballot.  This is exacerbated by the lack of campaign finance reform, which hinders fresh thinkers from divergent backgrounds to participate in politics.  Electability trumps capability.

Our founding fathers, aside from being aristocratic slaveholders, implemented congress as people living in their states and local communities who periodically would travel to the nation’s capital to each have their voice heard and come to collective decisions.  With advanced technologies, this is far less than mandatory.  How can a legislator still be part of a state when they have spent the majority of their professional life in Washington D.C.?

Legislators hoard millions of dollars to preserve power and flush the funds out come election time with a diuretic of rhetoric churned into our televisions and radios.  Focus groups are polled to indicate what pressure points to push and which facets of ignorance abounding in the general public can be exploited for the greatest political return.  Issues often outside of the direct control of a representative’s own legislative position are put under the spotlight.  Actual accomplishments and failures are herded together into broom closets of silence.  Newly elected officials make token pleas and then fall into the machine of prioritizing re-election for their Illuminati party membership, not policy implementation.

The core approach is flash and feeling good before informed discourse and true economic and social consequence.  True consequences lead to the partial alienation of potential segments of the voting population.  Spouting out unarguable points or demonizing an opponent are wars fought in absolutes without room for debate.  Catering to divisive lines provides clear direction to those who zest for a simple explanation or instruction on how to vote in lieu of expending effort in personal research for a voter’s own systematically-determined conclusion. 

America’s greatest battle is to be honest with her self.  When we allow millions and millions of dollars every election cycle to be drizzled away on pointless rhetoric in the name of advertising for a vote, we diminish our economy in the name of pseudo-political entertainment.  Both sides of the aisle perpetuate the game by polarizing issues to define candidates and the party into a value-meal type selection process. 

Come through the drive-through America.  Value meal number one has the portion of America who believe we take out more taxes than we pay in.  We have a side order of socialist ideology and personal freedom to blame someone else for our problems.  Today’s meal will be paid by the driver in the car behind you.  Value meal number two has the portion of the America that believes we pay in more taxes than we take out.  We have a side of personal independence and indifference to the collective problems affecting the social masses and the ultimate consequences for all of us.  The rest of America never even goes to the drive through, because the food has fecal matter, witch-doctor genetically-altered coagulants and fuck-us-up fructose.

The honest answer is that unless we can reduce the true costs to the American people of the political war we will never have enough resources left over to solve our real problems with workable solutions.  If we limited the power of incumbency and the dollars capable of being spent on the campaign process, politicians would be more focused on service to the people during focused segments of their working lives rather than being serviced by the people. 

True campaign finance reform is an overwhelmingly simple concept that would fundamentally change Washington D.C., but how can we get there when the average person in America is so disconnected from the person who represents us?  We are as a man in an ocean speaking to a man on a mountain.  Our representatives legislate from ivory towers and justify funding campaigns like treasure troves to perpetuate an oligarchy in place of a democracy.

Wevote.gov

The paradigms of media and interpersonal communication have forever changed with the advent of the internet.  We now have a common meeting place to speak and interact with our politicians on a daily basis without having to wait on the postal service or a television camera.  We can write feedback instantaneously.  Through an advanced digital polling and proxy voting process, we could give feedback to our politicians on a daily basis before actual voting takes place. 

Originally we elected congressmen and women to vote for us because we could not possibly ask each person in a district or a state what our vote would be.  This one person would carry the weight of all he or she represented.  Now through smart phones, lap tops, iPad tablet devices and the continued merging of a television with the capabilities of a personal computer America has a communication pipeline capable of putting a legislator in the living room of nearly every person they represent to ask how the representative should vote on an issue.  At minimum we can create surrogate digital polling stations in libraries, schools, post offices and other designated buildings in a community.  

Not everybody has a smart-phone, a computer or a TV, but we should not legislate to the exception.  We also can allow the influence of this young paradigm to increase parallel to accessibility. The technological limitations do not affect the beauty of the innate idea that this conduit of individual free will represents. 

We must legislate to the progression.  Touch-screen polling stations can address the gap.  Just look at how popular Red-box is.  We could even imbed swipe card technology into official government identification cards to interact with the polling stations, the same way a credit card bills the correct bank account.

This is the direction we need to be heading.  Washington is obsessed in the preservation of power, of trading votes for continued influence as if the vote actually belongs in full to a Senator.  The vote is the people’s not the representative’s only. 

Yes, it is the representative’s job to be informed on the greater aspects of a piece of legislation, but to ignore the wisdom of the people denotes condescension and disconnection from the all.  It displays an unwillingness to do the work of communicating what the actual issues are and why a Senator supports or does not support an idea in his or her own view.  Politicians would be forced out onto the plank of public scrutiny to defend their own due diligence.  The American people would be able to shine light on the instances when our vote has been bartered or sold and when party allegiance has trumped public will.

Facilitate the re-insertion of the public voice into the legislative voting process through public registration into an advisory-only public voting database: to create the “Facebook” of American political input.  We could call the website something like “Wevote.” 

The votes and information submitted through message boards and direct voting polls would be non-binding.  The results would serve as a point of reference that if a legislator disagreed with the majority opinion of individuals he or she represents he or she would face the true public scrutiny of that decision either through reactions on the website or through reporting in the media. 

We could adapt the system so that only specific issues are set for public vote or that results would be displayed to the public only at certain voting-activity thresholds.  We could always show the number of constituents who have submitted a vote by county or parish.  Although full public disclosure would probably be the norm, there could be an argument to allow for a period of time to collect votes before results would be displayed to avoid a herd-mentality effect of displayed results discouraging me-too voting dominating our macro-level activity.  On significant issues we could hold national polling days similar to elections, but instead we are conducting a national poll at an infinitesimal fraction of the cost.  The unknown may encourage researched participation.  We could operate on facts, rather than inertia like our panic-based stock market.

The “Facebook of voting” platform would also give the politician the opportunity to retort or concur with the sentiments expressed from the people he or she actually represents.  Legislators with actual backbone would have the opportunity to demonstrate their own view rather than getting to act like a jellyfish with politically-correct answers to skirt around actually stating a vertebrate position.

Such a platform would allow for the collective input of the people the Senator or Representative actually represents: both Democrat and Republican.  Just because a Senator wins by fifty-one percent to forty-nine percent over his or her opposing party counterpart does not mean that the forty-nine percent should be ignored during his or her entire term or that a single voter’s views are constrained within the party of the candidate they originally voted.  We should not legislate in absolutes.  That is why the fringes control our government, because fringes are the most involved in political primaries.  There are voters on each side who do not automatically tow the party line, nor whole hardly support the vote we cast.  Yet, we vote.

Americans think and disagree with the party line constantly, especially Generation X.  Too much of Washington is based on party line.  A website showing the views of the public in a Senator or Representative’s district available for the media would liberate congress-people and help alleviate media and common political party scrutiny when a legislator opposes the standard view on a bill or issues as the capital letter behind his or her name.  We would have a lower case revolution stampeding in the volition of the individual to benefit the collective.  The niche issues of third party candidates would have an avenue to possibly being addressed rather than ignored, because the issue could reach the Senate floor, even if the candidate had no shot in hell of ever being elected.

This sort of logic would foster independent thought in Washington on unprecedented levels and scare the shit out of both the Democratic and Republican parties complacent in the current oligarchy.  The parties will never push for something so democratic because it makes the candidates more accountable and third-party membership feasible. 

Politicians would be capable of expressing analytical ideas based on productive policy.  We would expose the electable faces of politics versus the politicians with actual beneficial ideas.  Politicians could transcend party-line mandates that foster mandatory political hypocrisies and be afforded the versatility to express common sense solutions and end the bulimia of bickering about non-issues.

We will have to create and demand this change, if this is ever going to be a reality.  It may be the ultimate victory of the Occupy movement.  No one watches C-Span or remembers or has the time to pay attention to how our Senator votes.  Washington appears distant and pointless.  People are awash in apathy of how little our opinion matters because we feel that our one voice can not possibly make a difference. 

The fact that one vote does make a difference is the very foundation of democracy.  If this type of voting can be done with minimal expense and exponential positive impact to galvanize our truest American freedom, shouldn’t we do it?  What is stopping us, but our own non-choice?

Filibusters would be taken out of the process, because party voting-blocks would be less certain.  (We should also end the sixty-vote come-to-the-floor constipation loophole in the U.S. Senate.)  One party could not stagnate congress based on a campaign Grover-Norquist pledge.  We might get “WeVote” pledges to follow the constituents instead. The speed of government action and implementation would be kicked into overdrive.  The ramifications of who actually gets elected would diminish and so with it the money, pandering, and moral compromises to fill each seat.

What if legislation affecting us was emailed to our in-box with a hyperlink to one website where each of us could securely log in and vote only once as guidance for how our representative should vote on an issue?  What if the subcomponents of legislation under negotiation were voted on so that the American people could syphon through a bill to garner the muscle and trash the fat before it comes to the floor?

What if this was done on city, county, state, and federal levels?  What if in that link a representative for each major party, including the politician could give an “executive summary” bullet-point-type explanation on that proposed legislation for that voter on the website via text or video.  (After the affordable healthcare bill I wonder how often legislators actually read the entire bills before voting anyway.)

We could invite a rotating panel of news agencies, industry groups, scientific communities and specialists to be randomly selected to provide editorials on the information in a consortium of websites and media outlets to provide at least six videos with three for each side with a goal of equal balance between pro and con seeking an informed debate.  If we have focused knowledge from our information outlets that places core pertinence above dragged out bulimia rhetoric designed to get us to view the Viagra commercial between the talking heads, then maybe we might have a more informed and involved electorate. 

If it took less than a minute of our time to voice our opinion, like when ESPN or CNN.com have daily unscientific polls, shouldn’t we at least set up a better system to harness the opinion of the American people to shed some light on how we view issues like changes in where our tax money goes, what freedoms we will be limited on, how our healthcare or education systems are set up and funded as we do on which AFC team has the best set of starting wide receivers in the NFL or what happened last night on Dancing with the Stars?  While true it may be dangerous to equally value the responses of the informed with the uninformed being polled, isn’t that exactly how our politicians get their jobs?

How would Wevote.gov work?

Wevote.gov could work as, when we register to vote, our name and social security number goes into a federal database that is tagged to each municipal, statewide and national elected office that our voting district is tied into along with supporting digital references to redesigned federally-uniform web-based utility billing account information in coordination with IRS filings and any government assistance programs to facilitate cohesion and lower administrative data costs.  

The database would set up a user name, our first and last name and the first letter of our middle name as entered on our voting registration followed by a four or more multiple-digit random number to differentiate us from someone who has the same exact name.  The database would use our social security number hidden behind the system backed up by our passport number or drivers’ license number if need be as subsequent checks on verification.  The system would only allow us to log in from one computer at a time and we would set our own password.  There could be timed automatic log outs and flags for repeated failed log in attempts.  We could also set up our own usernames the way banks do. 

This log in may benefit by being tied to other government systems, which would encourage people to keep their log-in secret and dissuade organizations from block-voting through shared log-ins because other data besides a vote could be compromised.  If we had a centralized digital system, with secure log-ins; the proliferation of the myriad of governmental services that could interface and benefit Americans is boundless.  Number two behind voting would be the IRS to entwine all financial transactions an individual has with the American government.  We just have to balance security risks with public benefit.

This system would be designed so that only registered voters can enter the system as themselves and possibly be connected to other government digital systems to incentivize log-in privacy.  Polls and voting issues that are presented in our profile are tied to what voting district we reside.  This way people in California or Iran can not skew voting polling results in Pennsylvania.  It also prevents duplicate voting. 

Banks can do this to secure our financial data, why couldn’t the government do this in a similar manner to assist us to express our democratic right to vote?  Which one is more valuable?  Which have people died for?  We could possibly limit log-ins to only two or three designated IP addresses for security purposes. 

Surely identity theft is a major concern, but just as with the technology used in banks, I think those more informed on data security than myself could safely design a system capable of securing the web-based system given the resources for maintenance and adapt the system over time. 

The system would not publically report how we voted unless an individual set the record to be public, but the website would have a disclaimer that the government could not be held responsible if a voting record did become public.  This would help to avoid law suits about privacy.  This entire process would be optional.  (What are voter turnout rates now?)

There would be a message board where if we participated we would be forced to write information using our real names, which could be hidden in the database.  This will prevent people from coming in from some offbeat political slant or political action committee and slandering under the guise of someone else. 

The idea is prompt feedback and public discourse.  There are countless political websites that already provide message boards, but there is a veil of secrecy about who is writing what and how a fifteen-year-old from Moscow could be the true author.  How is a legislator supposed to take any posting or poll seriously if it is not tied to the beliefs of someone he or she is representing?  There has to be a filter to reach Washington.  These other websites are also non-independent and attract traffic based on manipulating opinions on political topics and the number of mouse clicks in part to sell advertising.

There would be no advertisements except for government programs including volunteer opportunities in the community and the country.  This could include governmentally-subsidized health and welfare nonprofit organization. The site could coalesce volunteering in American on an unprecedented level.  The website could galvanize communities in humanity and action.

Photos would be optional and uploaded from passport, driver’s license or government identification card only via a unified federal system.  There would be no avatars.  No mandatory political-party affiliation designations.  Just Bob J. Summers from zip code 70058. 

There would be moderators for profanity and spamming.  Email addresses would not be disclosed unless a person elected to do so.  You could get banned from the website from posting inflammatory or obscene information on message boards, but not from voting.  There would be a list of curse words and inflammatory language and so forth and the issues of first amendment rights versus spamming could probably be sorted out by an independent panel administering the website, in a reasonable example of tempered freedom of speech, a bit like that from an audience member in a courtroom or a newscaster on the publically funded airwaves. 

The reality is there would probably be a master input forum with input from certified media members and elected officials debating specific issues through web-videos and math, where the polling would take place in a multiple choice, yes or no selection process.  Then there would probably be a mass input forum that may resemble a giant hall of humans yelling at each other.  The valuable part is galvanizing the polling.  In reality the website may be better suited without a comment forum and to simply be a polling place, allowing external direct offices and websites for elected officials to facilitate that commentary, because retaining and processing that much data would be enormous and possible turn into an ocean of white noise.

This website could be the circulatory system to connect Americans.  This website would empower the essence of our democracy, our right to vote.  We should fund the platform accordingly to function the way in which we intend the pipeline to operate and demand our voices be heard in a conduit that may not have been possible for past generations, but is possible for today’s America. 

The costs to our country in time savings alone of shortened election cycles and the thousands of paid hours of legislators and their staffs pent up in Washington D.C. could pay for the website in probably the money we spend for a few weeks of the wasted time we spend funding lobbying in Washington and state capitals each year.

The political lobbyist greatest power is wielded by catering to our elected officials in D.C. through campaign contributions for “ear marks” and recommended contracts.  Paybacks are neutered by public input and greater public insight to what actually transpires.  A website like this has the potential to permeate through our country like Facebook and ultimately serve as a model for every democracy on the planet.  The U.S. government could contract to create the software and website and then sell the technology to make money on all these other countries wanting to implement a similar democratic system throughout the next century.

We could get interaction directly back from our representatives in a focused manner.  Wouldn’t it be nice to see our Senator or Congressman reply to a poster’s insights or poll results and discuss ideas or add follow up poll questions rather than simply running for office?  We could require quarterly town hall Skype conferences for each legislator for their constituents.

Why should an elected official be in an ivory tower when the internet can put the human in our living rooms?  Why should we have to pay for them to travel to each county, when video conferencing is less expensive?  Why should a politician be functionally limited to communicating with only the voters more likely to elect him or her?  Set up a group Skype web-camera in the current town halls with a podium for less technologically savvy Americans to participate.  Allow questions to be submitted in advance for logistical purposes.

Why should a politician be more concerned with getting re-elected than expressing his or her beliefs and ideas?  An official does not have to agree with the majority, but the public has an obligation to ask what our representative’s opinion is and a right to find out the answer.  We have the right to ask political opponents as well.  We deserve a concentrated tool to gather our input.  If cronyism blocks it, occupiers can build a pirate replica site to advertise the potential power until the ivory tower is drowned in the flood.

I think most politicians as human beings would applaud unraveling the political entanglements of the prerequisites for election as a Democrat or a Republican to the United States Congress.  This website represents freedom for the individual and death to the party like the prison gang they swore a blood oath to survive in our D.C. jungleland. 

The easy assumption is to cast our politicians as culpable Disney villains worthy of blame for our political failures.  I see only us.  I see humans generally wanting to do good, but maybe operating in a dysfunctional paradigm.  The WeVote.gov would change the paradigm. 

The idea that we need a buffet of televised debates full of prepared verbal responses to fit into ten to fifteen second sound-bites to guide us to our future is crazy with an asset like this at our disposal.  Pre-canned responses are better set for video clips on a website like “Wevote” to just get all rhetoric that clings like the fat on the muscle of true ideas out of the way so we can move on and build. 

We could also have independent CPA firms with internal control information technology specialists audit the entire system perpetually to assure the public to link a voter’s confirmed actions with how their vote was recorded on a piece of legislation.  This can be done with analyzing source code, databases, phone calls to the humans in place to confirm activity, cross referencing IP addresses with zip codes of residence for reasonableness and other procedures.  The audit results could be posted on the website for the world.

The greatest evidence for transparency could be a full disclosure by name of how each person voted to reconcile the tally.  However, we do not utilize such open mathematical statistics in the systems we use to vote with now, yet we vote.  Need we be so fearful?

All Politics are Local

In local politics this type of website would usurp local papers, bar rooms and barbershops as the proprietary places to learn about the local person running for school board or city council.  Local people could present our ideas in an even format where everyone could go and see.  Elections would not have to be dick-measure or female-clique Queen-Bee-swarming contests based on who can get the most yard signs displayed based on who their father was.  Ideas would have a place other than the late local news or who was the most popular in high school. 

Voters could have a centralized mechanism to read the bio of a school board or sheriff candidate without being limited to a name and a yard sign color scheme.  Voters want to know more about the history, background and most importantly thoughts of our local politicians, but we want an efficient tool to learn this information, make our decision and move on.  Don’t show me your family or hugging a puppy dog, show me that you can think and what you are going to do and why.  Show me your capacity.   Show me why you are extraordinary rather than electable.  Show me your core skills and your capability for expansion.

We no longer would have a fiscal reason to pay to send our local municipal, city, county and state officials to Washington to lobby our federal delegations.  Our mayor, our brother, our self, should be able to have video conference and chat meetings built into the schedules of our federal legislative groups.  We should not have to pay hotel and dinner bills in D.C. for our local engineer to go plead for a grant on plump per diems.  We should use technology and math.

Term Limits prompt Action

How can we reduce our politicians focus on getting re-elected?  Term limits should restrict senators and representatives to two six-year lifetime terms in congress as either a senator or a representative, but not both.  Federal politics should not be a lifetime career.  Twelve potential years is plenty.  Service should be an honor and a privilege to get the voice of the people out.  Politicians should not be ordained as the voice of the people and assume a career to learn how the game works to achieve the smallest accomplishment in policy. 

"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation." Henry Kissinger

The problem is federal-level politicians spend millions of dollars and countless moments of our collective lives producing television commercials and radio spots to communicate their indispensability.  We need each political race to have spending budgets based on census data limiting allowable spending on television and radio advertisements. 

District size would play a role in structuring the volume of political bombardment we endure, particularly in swing states for national elections.  The politician will be forced to focus on what and when they say what they say, not on how many times they can disparage their opponent.  If you are interested in the decade based census data go to http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/.

A modern census-based system linked through uniform web-based utility billing software and the digital IRS would assist in leveling the playing field for new candidates.  Such a system would not limit volunteers from going door to door, but would limit the flood of our airwaves with the inane and utter garbage of modern politics.  We can never control what a politician says.  We should not based on the first amendment, but there is a fundamental flaw in a system where the most money wins rather than the best ideas supporting by a reasonable threshold of money wins. 

This change would neuter massive war chests.  We would disconnect a person’s political power from being dominated by campaign contributions rather than voters.  Funding elections should not be like bets at the horse track to win political favors for the well-endowed.  Campaign funding should not compromise a politician’s independence to push for beneficial public policies or preoccupy their job.  They so often do because the money is so critical to sustaining long-term political power, because the potential spending power of an opponent is fundamentally limitless.  (What politician ever says no thank you to a contribution claiming his funds are already sufficient for his or her campaign?)

If we were to implement the registered non-official voting web-based portal, all candidates for a public office would be allowed to be presented on the message boards of that web portal and have their own blog inside the website designating them as a qualified candidate for a specific office for his or her pool of voters.  This way the incumbent and the new candidate would have equal space in the website funded by the public dollars not by a party nomination or affiliation. 

Voters could go to one place to get un-filtered information directly from candidates rather than wading through the candidate websites full of rhetoric without a way to retort.  A candidate could still plaster their section of the site with the same trite politically correct auto-tuned pop vocals, but at least the format would not be a clear channel playlist, but our own iPod’s where we can change the artist and is functionally more accessible as candidates enter and exit races, especially new candidates.

The site could also utilize centralized comparison tools for candidates in a given race to provide substance by displaying voter-requested queries in definitive yes or no, multiple choice or some limited word count responses to cull bullshit and focus on putting candidates in the crucible to garner results. 

A candidate would not be allowed to put his or her slogans all over the place based on administrative filters and spam-banning, but we could respond in our own way.  The freedoms a candidate is granted as a member of the district to participate in polling and message boards would still be granted.  I think this type of forum would be manageable and a massive step ahead of what we have now, which is defused communication to promulgate ignorance and maintaining the status quo.

The current contribution caps on individual donors should remain or in some cases probably be lowered.  We should eliminate all corporate campaign donations.  Corporations are not citizens and should not be allowed to bully the political process through donations to fund Super P.A.C.’s and individual candidates as if the bill of rights applied to a corporate entity as if it were an individual.  The Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision is a cluster fuck and will require a constitutional amendment to adapt the definitions of the first amendment that allow the negative externality to consume our democracy.  

How much of our nation’s resources are wasted on constant campaigning months and months ahead of the actual election?  Candidates could utilize this centralized website as an inexpensive mouthpiece to the people and to the media early on and throughout their campaign and reduce the need for television and radio. 

If we redefine the two major ways politicians use slush funds, maybe politicians will not focus so much on getting those slush funds, but on our problems.  When we demand accountability for our education and healthcare systems representatives may actually pay attention to the plurality of voters rather than lying securely in a blanket of seniority pandering to the tenth of a percent that finances the bulk of their campaign.

Shorten Campaign Cycles

In England the prime minister is elected in a couple of months not two years.  If we regulate these caps on spending and the timing and the pre-election processes for races we can reign in the starting point and focus campaigns so that it is not about wave after wave of commercials to get a candidate in office and reduce costs.  The digital polling itself will truncate the cycle with empirical data for predictable results to shorten primaries and campaigns.

Limit political action committees and reform groups in the same manner as filing campaign reports on any issue or candidate they are supporting or criticizing.  We should require the media agency to file what was paid for each advertisement to a digital governmental monitoring agency that would be financed through fines.  The campaign spending web-based monitoring software would track the dollars spent with a database with spending limitations that would notify all the market’s major media outlets that cap has been exceeded.

Television ads would require a candidate number be displayed in the ad in some prominent manner alongside their name.  Continuing to run those ads under that candidate’s assigned funding pool would result in fines.  All Political Action Committees would have to be registered with the monitoring agency in order to place the advertisement with a registered media member.  We also may have to have a factor for the weighted number of advertisements rather than direct-dollars, because well-endowed people could buy the media outlet and undercharge themselves.  

To prevent pooling of advertisements in favor or disfavor of an issue or politician, a politician must approve or disapprove all advertisements before a major media outlet is permitted to run the advertisement under his or her number if the advertisement includes the candidate’s name or their opponent’s name in an election with only two candidates.  If it is not a run-off election and there are more than two candidates at least one political candidate in the race must permit the advertisement to be associated with the candidate’s allowable spending pool in order for the media market to be permitted to air the advertisement with out being fined.  This would end super P.A.C.’s from hijacking primary elections. This may not work on pro and con resolutions, but it should work on candidates.  Similar limitations could be placed through nationally broadcast satellite and cable channels with tiered-dollar thresholds.

The approval would not have to be received in advance, but if it eventually was not the media outlet it self could be fined.  This works in that in the world of pseudo-anonymous negative campaigning by either the right or left extreme sides of the aisle the default benefactors of negative campaigning are one or all of the remaining candidates in the race.  If one of those potential benefactors is not willing to associate themselves with the messages conveyed in the potential advertisement then I believe the restriction on that party’s first amendment rights are only limited to registering their own candidate in the race.  In many cases advertising space near elections are purchased far in advance of the air-date.

As long as the political action committee can have a person meet the registration requirements for the race then their views should be allowed to be heard.  It is possible that political action committee’s could start a system of registering fringe candidates to funnel funding of purely negative campaigning at one of the real candidates, but the reality is that the media outlet has an obligation to its viewers to decide whether to air the ad or not.  Frauds could also be exposed and discussed via the voting website, which could backfire on the negative campaign financiers.

If people really were fed up with the exploitation of that loophole then by law, election registration qualification standards could be raised to increase signature requirements and other such standards to adapt.  Also opposing media outlets could report what is actually occurring.  The potential for public backlash against that station for airing such advertisements in the full view of public scrutiny may deter that media outlet from accepting to air the advertisement in the first place. 

The media outlets in this country will fight against this change like hell.  Political advertising revenue is a major component of every station’s bottom line profits.  The argument exists that if someone paid a media station to put elect Hitler, Gandhi, David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, Abraham Lincoln, Billy Graham or Jeremiah Wright for Senate; wouldn’t the media outlet have the right to decide weather or not to put the ad on its airwaves?  There are lines between a private media company, public airwaves, and first amendment rights?

Is the decision not to put the ad on even if a group is willing to pay above market rates for the same advertisement a violation of a candidate’s free speech?  Putting an advertisement on a media outlet is a privilege, not a right.  We need to stand up for what we want, not what Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney tell us we want.

This is not a limit on free speech.  This is a limit on spending.  The same message can be communicated without limitation through other outlets just not through television, radio, or the public voting site like “WeVote.gov.”  The rest of the internet can not be regulated in this manner and I do not think it should be. 

The issue is that the quantity of the unlimited spending leads to a lack of focus on the issues to getting elected.  The fact is television and radio are regulated through Federal Communication Commission licensing and the public constraining this form of spending is within our rights. 

This sort of spending change combined with the term limits and web-based polling interaction would lead to a new breed of candidates more focused on results rather than maintaining political power.

Politician Compensation

The last part of the separation between federal politicians and the people they represent is how much politicians get paid in salary, stipends, and benefits.  Federal legislators should not be paid more than the median income of their state based on census and internal revenue statistics.  The idea whether being a legislator should or should not be a person’s primary job is debatable. State level pay is often fairly limited.  What really separates government public servants from those they serve in terms of compensation is in the areas of guarantees and health and retirement benefits, particularly those that extend beyond their term.  However, the moderation of compensation for candidacy further links ones motivation to service.

We will later discuss healthcare and the fallacies of social security, but the bottom line is that politicians will never pursue real solutions to healthcare or retirement until they are subject to the same risks of uncertainty as the people they represent.  The American people should be allowed collective inclusion in mutual benefit for encumbering the macro-level costs current politicians take for granted.

These changes move towards a more fluid and versatile political system with dynamic input and accountable reaction on a timely basis.  People who want the responsibilities of governance will lead.  People who want to treat the privileges of governance as rights will be shown for who they are and expunged.  By standardizing the entry portal into the political arena of local politics more “average” citizens will be able to entertain the possibility of running for office.  This will naturally foster the expansion of novel alternatives for addressing our political quandaries from school boards, mayoral elections, and state representatives etc. 

Being involved in the political process will not require a life-changing commitment but a temporary experience of service.  People with exceptional ideas will actually have an opportunity to add them to our political discussions with out having to write a million dollar check to a marketing firm to create twelve different ads most of which just demonize an opponent and enrich America’s media companies. 

Offer every legislator on a state and federal level access to web-based college level course-videos on the subjects of macroeconomics, environmental science, medicine, history, and law.  Mandate limited versions of these courses for those serving on specified committees and create a continuing professional education program for all Senators and Congressmen and women.  This will foster a broader spectrum of knowledge in chambers dominated by law school graduates.

The idea that a person does not have to be in congress for four terms before he or she can actually have an intensity of authority or power will liberate the shackles of political gamesmanship.  We would allow America the dexterity to adapt and answer today’s political questions with an efficiency and effectiveness based on the quality of the idea not the tenure of the man or woman who was allowed to chair the committee.  For the primary measure of tenure is time, which is not directly correlated nor the primary characteristic of a productive idea. 

Productive ideas are most often promulgated by the exploration one does during times of necessity.  When the complacent comprise the majority of our legislative bodies, those bodies become lax, and lethargic.  The legislature becomes an organism of inaction, resistant to the exercise mandated by the very struggle that makes one prepared for the challenges of daily survival.  The collective’s only hope of reviving its representative body, given systemic indolence is the discipline of task and of action.  We must face into us with a compulsion towards effort, like that of an athlete tearing the fibers of his bicep, to improve the whole.

"It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it." Albert Einstein