Campaign Reform to Get Rid of Professional Politicians Pro or Con?
 

I had to get out when it came to me.

This will do more to fix the nations problems than debating

individual problems.

Politicians in there now do not give a darn about the

public good.

They pander to the public.Means they make sounds like they care

but they are only in it to advance themselves.

Trump for example.Recognized 'angry voter/electoral college' mechanism to get elected.

Whether he cares genuinely is a little fuzzy.

That was just an example of tricks that can be used.

There.I said it.

To finish my argument.

Bad politicians are 'adventurers'.They will play fast and loose with the public good

because at heart they don't care if their actions are disastrous or not.

They will just move on to whatever new scam.

These pros are hard to spot.They appear to fit in but are just using the voters.

Very few of the politicians I see are 'our neighbors'.Part of John Q Public.

Some of them are so 'out there' that must be some district if they are like that

there.

The best single thing one can do is severely prohibit lobbying in any form.
As I've said before, the corporations, of all sorts, banks, drugs companies, oil, what have you, and their lobbyists have perverted the system to the point the U.S. is as corrupt as any third world banana republic. They buy and sell politicians of all parties like they are bubble-gum trading cards.
These political puppets tell the voters what they want to hear, but once elected they turn around and do what their corporate sponsors have paid them to do and the public be damned.
Nothing was done to the thieves on Wall Street who nearly destroyed the economy in 2007/8, so it has nothing to do with whichever party is in control, they are both as crooked as a snake's back.

San Diego in the 90's.

Kids were talking about going 'carless'.

Point being real solutions to this disjointed 'Green' talk you hear today.

Then the World Trade Centers happened and attention shifted to Iran and Iraq for

quite a few years.

Now people are bickering about far flung issues.

The politicians (bad ones) fit into this in that the country seems to lack a

national unity and effort towards common goals.

The bad politicians are screaming 'Look at this awful threatening situation and

look at this legislation I'm sponsoring."

Legislation that will be forgotten in a year.Or less.

Bad politicians do not have the integrity and courage(character good) to talk

about hard solutions to our hard problems.So nothing gets done.

The hard solution to terrorism is a bigger military and more troops on the ground chasing terrorist.

I feel there is a tension in the nation that we are not doing enough to ENSURE OUR SECURITY AT HOME.

We have a 'paper' military.

If all the Navy's ships go to China to show force to China,Russia and North Korea then we don't have enough to sit off the Middle East.

In the Middle East the Navy can launch planes from carriers to pound terrorists on the ground.Send marines to hot spots.

We are turning into a second rate World Power.A sham.A ghost town of a military.

It's these current politicians fault.

Spending there waking hours putting on a sideshow for CNN.

You look inside the wheelhouse of the USS United States and nobody's there.Nobodies steering our ship of state.

The politicians are not taking care of United States business.

These posts look fine in Advanced Mode.

I hit Save.They come out looking like the above.

I stayed out of Advanced and fixed up above post.

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely true!!! Could not have said it better! What a bunch of snakes! Very GOOD POST cwizardone! One of the best posts I've seen here, by a mile 1000 miles!

If you want to get rid of that sort of corruption, you must change the whole system. In America, the whole House and a third of the Senate gets reelected every two years, and there is no limit on what a party can spend in election expenses. So the candidate who spends the most gets the seat. Obviously then, unless they are millionaires (Trump, Jimmy Carter), they must be in the pocket of whoever pays them.

The real problem is that we've relaxed regulations on campaign funding over the past few decades-- enabling lobbyists to take over.

Without that being legal, only so much corruption is possible. Though I will give you that some of it really started with Nixon-- a bit earlier in the timeframe than most of what I'm referring to.

You're also right that you can't rely on a corrupt congress to pass legislation that stops corruption.

There are two ways to change the whole system, and both involve Article V of the constitution. It's a quick, easy to understand, grade-school math problem.

You want to change the system to lock congress back out of this legalised bribery again, you have to pass an amendment the 2nd way, which doesn't require the cooperation of congress.

There's an even easier way, it's just less likely to happen-- Massachusetts has demonstrated it, but their version is probably weaker than what we need. You can do it on the state level, one state at a time. We ultimately need a federal version to fix the White House, though we could reform most of congress a state at a time-- at least for several other states. I wouldn't count on it for say, Illinois or California. They would each sell the entire state off to a corporation wholesale, if you just let them vote on it.

In the UK, there is a strict limit on what any parliamentary candidate can spend in one election.

The States desperately needs the same, and voting really wont mean very much (or accomplish very much-- of anything) until they have it. The problem of course, is how to get there.

The good news is that there is a much less messy of way of accomplishing this than a bunch of idiots deciding on a revolution. There's nothing wrong with Article V, except that it requires enough people to figure out that they need it. It's not like revolution is any less demanding, so Article V is there for when people to decide to organise enough to fix the problem-- whenever that is.

The right solution is much simpler, albeit radical:

A Constitutional amendment to select candidates via random selection, much like for jury service. Two or three candidates for each office. No one can volunteer to run for office; they must be drafted, so to speak, by an open-source publicly auditable program. Thus eliminating professional politicians, political parties, and expensive campaigns all in one stroke. Once selected, the citizen must report, must answer a series of simple questions, perhaps some internet and/or TV time for the higher offices. Two weeks later, the voters select, and those elected must serve. After serving one term the amateur officeholder returns to normal life, exempt from further service.

Since the process relies heavily upon the open and auditable random selection process, some kind of *nix ssytem is a natural fit. Write-in 'Tux' in 2020, as a vote for such a radical reform.

One should be free in the USA. That would mean that they can toss as much money at voters as they wish. After all don't you feel that a voter could decide?

I saw a tv show about ancient China. They would take the very best and brightest for public jobs and positions. They seemed to have failed even after such a seeming good plan.

The voter can only decide if given some real choices. The current party system means all the choices are made well before election day.

The OP asked about eliminating professional politicians. The obvious alternative to professional is - amateur. Such was also the orginal intent of jury service. Take control away from the professional lawyers and judges and give it to ordinary citizens.

So until a few decades ago, the American system wasn't that bad. All that changed (and needs to change) is they relaxed a lot of rules that kept politicians from being bought (bribed) thus making them ignore the will of most voters (90-something percent of voters) and do the will of corporations instead.

How to fix that with all the nonsense now in place-- which wasn't before-- is the question. No one is looking to make things any less "free" than they were in the 1950s, 40s, 30s-- the only people are who are more "free" now than they were then are corporations-- that should be (and was) entirely irrelevant to elections.