Why Congress won't reform

Why Congress won't reform

www.nctimes.com

In toto, there is an excellent chance that Congress will top last year's pork bill for defense spending. For fiscal year 2007, the Republican Congress enacted 2,646 defense earmarks for $10.5 billion. Given the course the Democratic "reform" Congress is on, that will be an easy mark to beat. Should this occur, it will be done in spite of the promise from both the House and Senate Democratic leadership to cut pork spending in half.

(visit the link for the full news article)

I think its called lip service.

Orwell called it doublespeak.

I call it lying to, cheating of, and stealing from the American people.

The most telling observation of all in the article is this one:

In the final analysis, it is not the members of Congress we should attack for their phony reforms. They are only doing what they know we want them to do. When we change, they will.

In the immortal words of Bob Marley, "Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!"

www.nctimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

The only way we could save from this is by some for of campaing contribution reform, McCain seems the only one that is in favor of that or at least he says.

Until that is accomplish you are going to have this problem, because the people that have have you money to be there are the ones that are going to be asking you for help in the form of contracts or influence once they get there.

I think you are right about this. The lobbyists legitimize their bribes by giving them to the politicians in the form of campaign contributions, as I understand it.

Public funding of political campaigns doesn't work either, imo, because we taxpayers, for the most part, don't want our tax dollars going to elect the corrupt politicians who are ripping us off in the first place. I don't check that box on my tax return, do you? And how do we know how many of these private citizen donations to political campaigns are being funneled by lobbyists to get around contribution limits? I can't help thinking it is all a big scam.

Maybe we could come up with a system that requires lobbyists to earn the votes of our elected representatives instead of buying them. If all lobbyist funds were put into a general account held by the federal government, not by a political party, the funds could then be distributed to qualified candidates equally, maybe based on a minimum level of popularity in the polls. This would eliminate the fundraising game and stop this ridiculous "whomever raises the most money wins" circus. All the current system does is guarantee that the politician who ends up getting elected is the most beholden to special interest lobbies, hence the most corrupted and least likely to make decisions that reflect the will and best interests of the people.

Lobbyists would then have to approach politicians based on the merit of the project they are lobbying for, not on how much they can contibute to the slush fund. Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe not for business as usual in DC, but definitely for the people.

I am thinking off the top of my head here, which is never good, and this idea is probably a piece of swiss cheese at best, but we have to start somewhere.