Obama to Opt Out of Public Financing

Its a sticky situation...

From ABC's Political Punch:

In a web video to supporters "the people who built this movement from the bottom up" -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, announced this morning that he will not enter into the public financing system, despite a previous pledge to do so.

"We've made the decision not to participate in the public financing system for the general election," Obama says in the video, blaming it on the need to combat Republicans, saying "we face opponents who’ve become masters at gaming this broken system. John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we’ve already seen that he’s not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations."

On the one hand Obama has managed to comply with the intent of public campaign financing by collecting tons of small donations. On the other hand he did say that he would use the public campaign finance system in the general election. It is however important to note that there is a certain amount of "he said she said " when it comes to what each campaign is claiming the other said. What we have here is the monetary equivalent of a disarmament agreement. If one side or the other refuses to disarm themselves of party or 527 money the whole deal is off. What I want to know is who refused to forgo one or the other. However given the fact that the meeting mentioned in article took place without any neutral observers we may never know the facts. However given the fact that McCain has been a champion of camapaign finance reform while Obama has complied with the spirit of publicly financed campaigns I'm going to write this off as a non-issue until something can be proven one way or the other.

Thanks to Memeorandum and Divided We Stand for linking to this post.

The Song Remains the Same

But this time its a Dem accused of taking bribes in return for earmarks. Is this just the tip of the iceberg?

From Citizensforethics.com

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) today sent a complaint to the Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District for Louisiana and the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, asking for an investigation into whether Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) violated federal bribery law by including a $2 million earmark for Voyager Expanded Learning in a bill a mere four days after receiving $30,000 in campaign contributions from company executives and their relatives. CREW also asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate the matter.

Call me cynical but part of me is just waiting for the Dem's to start showing the same degree of corruption we saw when the government was under GOP control. We need meaningful election/ campaign finance reform. However until that happens I'm going to continue backing publicly financed campaigns on a state level.

Public Campaign Financing

One of my all time favorite blog posts by me is An Open Letter to America which is about the merits of publicly financed campaign. I've always felt that it had really good mix of righteous indignation, passion, common sense, and wasn't too badly written. I bring this up now because as The Nation points out there are currently two bills on The Hill that if passed would make public campaign financing law.

From the Nation:

With the nation's first billion dollar presidential campaign, pay-to-play scandals occurring at breakneck speed (think Jack Abramoff and Norman Hsu), results in elections that are flawed by suppressed votes and machine error (and a War that Stays the Course despite the millions who went to the polls in November 2006 with a demand to end it), the public has had it with politicians who don't listen to them, care about them, or respond to their concerns. This climate of discontent has led to a rethinking among champions of public financing and clean elections about how to channel their efforts into a larger, more holistic pro-democracy movement. The key question for these reformers is this: how do we fashion a movement that taps into voters' frustrations and captures the imagination for a cleaner, more democratic way?

Certainly there is good momentum in this direction. In Congress – where, for example, the entire Alaskan delegation is either under indictment or soon will be and the pressure for constant fundraising is unsustainable – there is a convergence of democratic values and ideals and more pragmatic considerations wrought by fundraising fatigue. ("The result of this nonsense is that almost one-third of a senator's time is spent fundraising," former Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings wrote in a Washington Post op-ed lat year.) There are two excellent bills with impressive co-sponsorship, the Durbin-Specter Fair Elections Now Act (S 1285) and in the House, the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act of 2007 (HR 1614). Both bills would allow candidates who show a qualifying level of support and opt-out of further private contributions to receive public funding. According to Senator Durbin, "Support is increasing for the idea of public financing in fair elections: seventy-four percent of all voters support public financing… 80 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of Republicans, and 78 percent of Independents."

I support publicly financed campaigns because ideally they'll allow anyone who has drive and quality ideas to run for office without having to erode their principles in order to get elected. So please take some time today to think of someone that you've met that deserves to be in office, read/skim HR 1614, and then consider bugging your congresscritter about it.

h/t to TMV

An Open Letter to America

Dear America,

America is sick. In fact we've been ill for so long we've forgotten what a clean bill of health feels like. Our diseases' symptoms are rampant corruption, influence peddling, and apathy that have rendered Americans almost senseless. What should be an outrage is now the status quo. Those that we have charged to lead this great nation have instead carved up this nation with the intent of selling it off to the highest campaign contributor. And we allowed this to happen. We even make jokes about it. But its not funny and it will destroy this great land if we allow it to continue.

Believe me when I tell you that I am not overstating anything. What your average American has failed to realize is that in addition everything I have stated that the current march of globalization will soon have our leadership beholden to foreign owned corporate and special interests if this is not stopped.

The good news is there is a simple solution. The bad news is that our current leaders, corporate powers, media conglomerates, and special interests will do everything within their power to make sure that this solution is never implemented. And what is that solution? Public campaign financing. Meaning that we, you , me, and everyone else pays to have our leaders elected that we ensure that our leaders are solely dependent on us to get into office, that they are answerable only to us. Right now as I speak campaign finance reform is being discussed on the hill and what you and I both know is they are trying to figure out how much they can get away with and still make it look like they've actually made real meaningful reforms. Right now they are figuring out which loopholes to insert into the law, how to maintain the status quo, how to line their pockets at your expense, and how to reward their paymasters.

Benjamin Disraeli former prime minister of Britain once said, "I must follow the people, am I not their leader?". If we call for total reform loudly enough and long enough they will give it to us. Its already happening on a state level. But it won't be easy. Pundits, talking heads, and media figures will rail against it. Why? Because special interests pay their bills too. They're just called sponsors instead of campaign contributors. And you'll hear the fans of these public figures parrot their words endlessly from coast to coast. You'll hear the words socialist and socialism bandied about endlessly as insults. Ignore them. This isn't socialism, its surgery. Because we have a chance to cure the cancer of corruption, take back this country, and give us a huge advantage over our competitors whose governments' corruption currently exceeds ours.

The new American system won't be a corrupt pay to play system. Business and special interests will have to plead their case and prove the merits of their ideas to get changes made. In the new American system you, your neighbor, your minister, and your high school economics teacher will have as much of a chance of being elected as any millionaire. And isn't that the way it should be? Shouldn't our leaders be elected because they have integrity, quality ideas, and the courage to back up their convictions?

And how much is this going to cost us? According to Public Campaign about 10$ per person per year. Its a bargain at ten times the price. The real question is how much is this current system of corporate fellatio costing us now? The cost cannot easily be measured. And it also cannot be measured in dollars alone.

"Look back at the bulk of legislation passed by Congress in the past decade: an energy bill which gave oil companies huge tax breaks at the same time that Exxon Mobil just posted $36 billion in profits in 2005 and our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high; a bankruptcy “"reform”" bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe; the deregulation of the banking, securities and insurance sectors which led to rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors; the deregulation of the telecommunications sector which led to cable industry price gouging and an undermining of news coverage; protection for rampant overpricing of pharmaceutical drugs; and the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a PO Box in an off-shore tax haven like Bermuda or the Cayman islands." - excerpt from Bill Moyers speech Saving Democracy

Is that what we chose? Were those our interests being represented? Is our country better off? America, its finally time to yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Spread the word.