Forum Post: Publicly Funded Elections & Prohibit Government/Corporate Revolving Door
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 3, 2011, 7:33 p.m. EST by lepto
(0)
from Little Rock, AR
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
While I wholeheartedly support reining in Wall Street through reenacting Glass-Steagall, stringent regulations for investment banking and active investigation and prosecution of those who brought us our current nightmare; little of this has a chance of passing or, if passed, remaining inviolate without publicly funded elections and a block on the revolving door between government service and corporate employment. Accordingly, I suggest we add, as a plank to the Occupy platform, a well thought out plan for completely publicly funded elections. This means you can't even use your own money much less that of others. In addition all government employees, whether from the executive or legislative branches, must be prohibited from leaving government service to go to work for the same people who lobbied them or with whom they did business on behalf of the government for a minimum of five years (I could live with seven or even ten years). With the current conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court this may mean a constitutional amendment--and that is difficult, however, without something of this sort any patch put on government will, at best, be temporary and, at worst, will never get out of the starting gate.
With the death grip corporations and the rich have on our democracy the only chance we have, IMHO, is to remove money from the equation--as nearly as possible. If we do that we just might make it.
Corporate Free Speech There needs to be better corporate representation. Money is speech. Every individual, even individual stockholders, "ownership," has a right to free speech. Free speech means no one can force or prevent an individual's speech. Ownership has the right to direct the corporation's speech and political contributions. Majority control of contributions may violate an individual's free speech. Corporate management can speech for the corporation, but ownership needs to authorize that speech. No speech or money spent on political contributions may be made without ownership authorization and such contributions must be taken from the individual's dividends. No dividends means there is no allowance for contributions. Corporate management must poll the ownership to determine the amount and placement of all individual stockholder directed contributions. The assignment of all corporate contributions must be made public so that ownership can verify the correct placement of their contributions. Management can not make contributions on the behalf of nonresponsive ownership and thus can only make contributions for which they have been directly authorized.
Money is speech. Corporations are people, because people get the money. Free speech means people are not forced to pay for someone else's speech. Corporations may not force to pay or deny dividends, to a person who does not approve of money spent on speech. Corporations may only spend money on speech that is taken, by approval, from the people who get the money. Every person who gets money, from the corporation, must approve the money spent on speech, in order to protect the right to free speech. Since the money spent on speech is identifiable with a person then that money is subject to caps associated with that person and must be reported. Also, tax consequences flow, to each person, for tax exempt contributions. If the corporation feels that the cost of polling and reporting the money spent on speech is prohibitive, then the corporation is prohibited from spending on speech. Corporations spend money on product ads and any political placement in a product ad must have unanimous consent of ownership.
Check the link after the edit mark on this page for a working list of goals
http://occupywallst.org/forum/first-official-release-from-occupy-wall-street/