Words&Dirt

“Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.”

––1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 474

“What would the new countervailing power seek to accomplish? As a first step, it would reform the nation’s system of campaign finance in order to get big money out of politics. That would require that the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon be reversed––either because one justice who had been in the majority sees the folly of his ways and joins with a new majority to reverse it judicially (that happened in the 1930s, when Justice Owen Roberts switched allegiance from his four anti-New Deal colleagues on the court to the four pro-New Dealers), or a new president fills vacancies on the court that thereby create a majority to reverse it, or, far less likely, because the new countervailing power summons enough political force to amend the Constitution to declare that Congress may regulate campaign spending.

Getting big money out of politics would also require full disclosure of the sources of all political expenditures. In addition, it would necessitate public financing of general elections, probably by means of a system in which public funds matched donations from small donors. And it would ban gerrymandered districts that suppress the votes of minorities, as well as voting restrictions imposing disproportionate burdens on minorities.

A closely related set of reforms would reduce or eliminate revolving doors between government service and Wall Street, large corporations, and lobbying firms. At the least, all elected and appointed government officials would be prohibited, for a minimum of five years from the end of their government service, from accepting any form of employment with any corporation, trade association, lobbying firm, or other for-profit organization that they oversaw, monitored, regulated, or had any other official relation with while in government.

Finally, expert witnesses, academics, and inhabitants of think tanks would be required to disclose any and all sources of outside funding for testimony, books, papers, or studies that are put in the public domain. That way, if an ‘expert’ funded by Koch Industries asserts that humans have no part in climate change, for example, or a professor funded by the National Retail Federation find that raising the minimum wage leads to less employment, the pubic would have a means of evaluating the neutrality of such claims.”

––Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, by Robert B. Reich, pg. 191-2