It seems nowadays money rules everything. Any powerful special interest group that has a ton of money funding it seems to get their agenda passed through on Capital Hill and occasionally when they create a serious problem, like oh let's say the current economic crisis, nobody gets into trouble. Too may powerful people who protect the people that make things happen on Capital hill. Trillions lost on sub prime mortgages and derivative whatever those were? No problem. We will bail out the economy so everyone can continue the American dream and still think the two car garage and white picket fence means prosperity.
So my thought is. If those powerful special interests are what really runs the show, the only way to compete is to provide more money to the power brokers and politicians to enact a better agenda. One such area is when it comes to military intervention. People complain they cannot understand how we could spend billions every year fighting wars we cannot win and how we should spend that money elsewhere, stop putting young men and women in harms way and interfering with the internal conflicts of far away nations like Afghanistan where the majority of people still think and act as if we were in the 12th century..
Well clearly nothing has worked. There must be powerful vested interests in keeping these conflicts going. Obama appears to be taking steps to end those wars but he may not even be around when the troops start coming home and who knows what the next President may decide to do.
SO what is the answer? More protests? Nobody really cares anymore anyway. NOW don't get me wrong. I am not a pacifist or isolationist. We still need bases and a presence in many hot spots of the world which costs money. My concern are about active conflicts where we have so far not prevailed and it does not appear we will do so yet our industrial military complex continues to thrive while our debt goes up and our economy not to mention our brave troops suffer hardship.
So my idea is this : Give every politician two million dollars worth of perks: advances on books they will write after they retire, free jets and luxury resort vouchers for vacations, speaking engagements and any other way to provide them the funds to get the troops home and not ever vote for future military engagement except int he case of clear self-defense (Like Iran having a nuclear weapon they could use to start WWIII).
I almost guarantee they will find a way to end those conflicts sooner and bring peace to America. It might seem expensive or a bit absurd but it makes more sense than just having another protest, burning incense and dancing around another drum circle. People listen to those who have power and to have power in Washington, you better have a lot of green.
Mark
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And if you do the math it kind of works out. There are 100 senators and 435 Congressmen, right? A million for each is about 535 million. There are at least 50 million people who work and can afford to make some small donation to the cause. That works out to $11 per person.
ReplyDeleteOf course there needs to be overhead so let's call it $13 per person which gives approx $100 million additional, plenty for letter writing, ads and all that stuff. :-)
We could also request that they:
- enact strict campaign finance reform so there is an even playing field and less special interests and corporate influence
- enact reforms to encourage third party participation and to give third parties real power if they win even a small percentage of the votes so that we move away from a duopoly.
- eliminate or at least severely reduce lobbying so that legislation that needs to be passed for the common good gets through as opposed to special interests running our country
YES many of the elected officials would end up losing their seat if they agreed to this. That's why they need a million each and a good investment firm (should not be hard for them to get one) to handle it for their early retirements.
OOPS. I made a mistake. Since I originally said 2 million per elected official it would actually require $22 per working American to raise the funds necessary to pull this off. Then with the additional money needed for the funding of the movement itself, let's call it an even $25 for each person.
ReplyDeleteLOL. see these guys require large sums of money to do anything. Even an income of 400K is not that much to a congressman:
ReplyDeletehttp://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/rep-john-fleming-field-criticism-over-600k-income-153305241.html