Forum Post: Ideas for Demands

Improvement ideas brainstormed in 2007 on two topics important to this movement:

Corporate Corruption

1. No other country can compare to America’s corporations and competiveness. But our Founding Fathers and best Presidents such as Lincoln and Eisenhower were very concerned about the power of corporations getting out of hand. In fact it was an unnerving concern: unlimited corporate power will always lead to unlimited corporate corruption.
2. When our country was founded corporations were chartered for a limited time to serve for the good of the public. For example a corporation would be chartered for the task of building a road, then after a set amount of years it would turn ownership of the road over to the city or state in which it was built.
3. In the 1880s the Supreme Court gave the rights of an individual to corporations. Since then corporate lawyers have successfully claimed more and more rights for corporations. The Fourth Amendment right against search and seizure keeps corporations from revealing too much about their accounting practices which has lead to scandals such as Enron. This keeps corporations and transparency separate. Federal agencies must also produce a warrant before they can inspect for environmental or safety issues, giving companies time to cover their tracks. So to even begin to pull the plug on this cesspool of corruption, the first step would be to reverse the decision of allowing corporations the same rights as a human being.
4. The government should make it a point to document people’s hardship which resulted from any corporate corruption, put a face to that wrongdoing. This newfound corporate corruption would be exposed by greatly increasing the funding to the Justice Department corporate crime center and to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
5. Whistleblower protection much be strengthened.
6. Then a company must prove itself worthy of keeping a charter, rather than allowing it to have an unlimited lifespan.
7. The countless ways to maneuver around the legal system such as companies picking and paying someone auditing them as a "consultant" on that same company’s payroll, which is a jaw-dropping conflict of interest, must be addressed.

Political Corruption

1. Increase limits on any concrete (money, gifts) or abstract (favors, votes) rewards given to politicians while in office.
2. Prohibit elected officials from lobbying for 2 years before and 7 years after holding office.
3. Require all bills to address one issue at a time.
4. 75% of all funds raised for an election candidate must be collected from people who can vote for said candidate.
5. All political entities must disclose the source of contributions within two weeks in a manner easily accessible to the public.
6. All forums receiving government funding which host candidates from both the Republican and Democratic parties must also host any candidate(s) whose party received 5% or more of the popular votes in the last election year.
7. Any candidate may only use $50,000 of their own money on political advertising.
8. Ban leadership PACs (Political Action Committees); because they create a loophole around the maximum contribution by a single person. They also create distance between the elected official and constituents while in office.
9. Hold state-by-state votes allowing people decide if term limits should be imposed on all elected offices.
10. Increase the members in the House of Representatives.