Explain to me exactly why our country should be available for sale again, anyone? I don't care what side or what party when it comes to this issue: buying attention and therefore votes and influence with seemingly-unlimited millions of dollars is nothing but cancerous to the democratic process, a perversion. I'd prefer that each candidate get a set amount from a general fund, is allowed to publish his or her views/agenda/promises in a predetermined non-biased forum a set number of times, and would be required to participate in public debates/town hall meetings. NO ADS. NO PERSONAL OR CORPORATE FUNDING. Run on merit, experience, vision, and intelligence, not sound bytes and creepy international power grabs.What Would Abe Lincoln Do?
Via @barackobama and DemocraticVideo, plain talk from a smart guy about the reality behind just who is funding the conservative grass-roots movement, and why.
God, it's so nice to have someone who can speak and think well in the White House.
In Connecticut, President Obama Warns of "Corporate Takeover of our Democracy"
TRANSCRIPT:
This is a tough election season. People are hurting and they are understandably frustrated. And a lot of them are scared. And a lot of them are anxious. And that means that even when people don't have ideas, if they've got enough money behind them, they may be able to convince some folks that, you know what, just cast a protest vote, throw the bums out. That's a mentality that has an appeal. And you can't blame folks for feeling that way sometime. But that's not a future for our country, a country that's more divided, that's more unequal, that's less dynamic, where we're falling behind in everything from investment in infrastructure to investment in R&D. That's not a vision for the future.
And if that's not a future you accept for this nation, if that's not the future you want for your kids and for your grandkids, then we are asking you for help in this election.
Because if you don't think the stakes are large -- and I want you to consider this -- right now, all across the country, special interests are planning and running millions of dollars of attack ads against Democratic candidates. Because last year, there was a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United. They're allowed to spend as much as they want without ever revealing who's paying for the ads. That's exactly what they're doing. Millions of dollars. And the groups are benign-sounding: Americans for Prosperity. Who's against that?
Or Committee for Truth in Politics. Or Americans for Apple Pie. Moms for Motherhood. I made those last two up.
None of them will disclose who's paying for these ads. You don't know if it's a Wall Street bank. You don't know if it's a big oil company. You don't know if it's an insurance company. You don't even know if it's a foreign-controlled entity.
In some races, they are spending more money than the candidates. Not here because here the candidate is spending a lot of money.
They're spending more money than the parties. They want to take Congress back and return to the days where lobbyists wrote the laws. It is the most insidious power grab since the monopolies of the Gilded Age. That's happening right now. So there's a lot of talk about populist anger and grassroots. But that's not what's driving a lot of these elections.
We tried to fix this, but the leaders of the other party wouldn't even allow it to come up for a vote. They want to keep the public in the dark. They want to serve the special interests that served them so well over the last 19 months.
We will not let them. We are not about to allow a corporate takeover of our democracy. We're not about to go back to the days when special interests took advantage of Main Street families. We're not going to go back to the days when insurance companies wrote the rules that let you languish without health care because you had a preexisting condition. We're not going to go back to the exact same agenda we had before I took office.
© Copyright 2008- Marianne Spellman