Forum Post: A unified, nonpartisan agenda against greed is your only hope

We must put forth and champion very major change: change to the corps ethics issues most all Americans would support when understood. And that means taking the big money out of politics:

1.The most critical "must have" is publicly, modestly, funded elections. One good way is to have candidates present a petition of so many names to be considered serious. This could be followed by a series of debates and web-posted questionnaires where polling after each will ultimately reduce the candidates to 3 per party. These would have free,equal tv/radio airtime for their messages. (This based on FCC returning to view that we the people own the airways)

1. Lobbying must be restricted to providing position or "fact" papers for congress. No money or in-kind contributions or freebies allowed. And budgets for congressional staff must be reasonable and adequate to perform needed research on bills instead of relying on lobbyists. Staffers should also be prevented from taking subsequents jobs with lobbying or influence peddling firms for at least ten years.

2. A committee of citizens with mixed backgrounds (race, corporate, small business/services, union, unemployed etc.) could be created to set and review salaries, healthcare, pensions and other benefits for elected officials every four years.

3. All holds that allowed the bank/housing fiasco must be plugged. (Has the major one passed at end of Clinton Administration been repealed?)

4. Corporate tax rates must be roughly in line with the average of those in major western countries except when credits are earned for producing American jobs. We should also consider re-instating the Taft-Hartley Act or similar to prevent corporations from getting "too big to fail" (or they would damage our economy too much).

5. Subsidies should be ended except when the loss would affect foreign trade in a way to significantly damage our ability to compete.

Sure there is more needed, like a review of public college costs, but these agenda proposals would go a long way toward restoring the confidence and conscience of a once noble people. This is a much-needed and welcome movement, but it will only be a footnote if it can't attack the enabling sources of greed.