The most important thing to do is to get big money out of politics. That will make everything else easier (Medicare for all…you know the list).
We also need to find a way to “throw the bums out;” and by “bums” I mean those professional politicians, regardless of whether they have an (R) or a (D) after their names, who are beholden to the oligarchs. Marginalizing Jeffries and Schumer will be a start, although replacing the latter will probably be more difficult.
Yes, but how? I have been thinking about this for a while, and I can’t really think of anything that would be effective and hard to circumvent.
For example, if all campaign contributions were banned outright, only people with lots of money could run for office. That is obviously what we want.
As for ‘get the money out of elections’… Canada has done that to some extent. Not only are there limits on political contributions, but the Canada Elections Act provides both subsidies for candidates and partial (50-60%) reimbursements of expenses in order to reduce the ‘only somebody already rich can afford to run’ problem. So the biggest source of election funding is generally the government itself, and Elections Canada is rather militantly non-partisan.
Lots of limitations, of course, still: the subsidies are at a party level and based on the number of votes the party got in the last election, and the reimbursements have eligibility criteria regarding what percentage of the vote either you or the party have to achieve in order to get them, so combined they tend to reward existing parties and discourage people from running big campaigns if they don’t think they’re going to get more than a few percent of the vote.
So there are ways to do it without making it so that only the rich can run; it just tends to be difficult to get there past the wishes of the existing big donors first. This is especially true given the current U.S. Supreme Court precedent that political contributions count as ‘speech’ for First Amendment protections. Not to mention the entire concept of a ‘SuperPAC’ pretty much exists to bypass any limits on political contributions. So changing those would need to be a first step.
(It’s also worth noting that the change in Canada to have the government do most campaign financing was also a bit of a ‘screw you’ from Chretien at the end of his time as Prime Minister, because the party had chosen his old rival Paul Martin as its next leader.)
I was wondering if absolute financial transparancy would be useful? What if every transaction on every bank account owned by a candidate / politician and their campaigns would have to be published within 24 hours. With strict limits on contributions.