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The best cover for the corpratists is the party-line divisions - mostly perpetuated by the culture wars. Because of the social divisions - the uber wealthy get to influence politicians on both sides of the aisle, and can count on a base of support for their handpicked sellouts no matter what. The well-financed will get the nomination, and most likely the seat. Once they're in, it's really hard to get the sellouts out of Congress or the Senate.
Safe to say that with the Congress we have now - we will not get campaign reform. The people we're expecting to pass reform are the same people benefitting from the current system (they won their last election). It's not going to happen.
Now this is where you have to do something unpleasant, so stay with me...
The only way to get campaign reform is to unseat the corporate sellouts. The most effective way to do that is to put aside D/R partisanship, and see the struggle for what it really is - a straight-up class war. Ideas aren't going to lead people to the light - there will always be partisan divisions, but there is an anticorporate element rising from both ends of the spectrum.
The tea party movement is a mixed bag of crazy - but its origins were in reaction to Paulsen's first big bank bailout: The largest act of corporate welfare we've ever seen. Then Geithner got his turn.
Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story sheds like on this. We don't talk about that movie much here anymore - and I think it's because the Teabaggers have co-opted and completely ruined the central message. But the sentiment is still there - it's just now in the fringes of the Dem power structure. Why is that? Partisanship has made us rationalize a crime that outraged us when a Republican did it, but mollified us when it was supported by our team.
I am proposing an unholy alliance between progressives and the libertarian wing of the Right - aimed at the Corporatists in Congress. The fringes of each party have the greatest stake in campaign finance reform. They both detest "corporate welfare" - albeit for entirely different reasons. But there's a shred of common ground there that will give us out best shot at bringing reform.
"No Corporate Welfare" needs to be our mantra.
Unholy Alliance: Step 2
We don't need a third party. We need a third and fourth party. This is something else we can get the Teabagging types to agree on. The only thing keeping them in the GOP is that if they broke off, they fear more Dem rule from an imbalance of power. Sound familiar? Every time we talk about our own third party, the logic is easily shot down for the same reasons, different result. The way to balance that out - and make dissastifed members of both parties break without hesitation - would be to create a third and forth party simulaneously.
We'll work on unseating the Corporate Welfare Dems, they work on unseating the Corporate Welfare Republicans. The ones in will have more incentive to pass campaign reform to keep their seats - because they will be challenged, not supported, by the DNC/RNC money, power and influence (corporate money, corporate power, corporate influence). To bring fair elections with minimal risk, we could arrange a "gentleman's agreement" not to run a third party in a race without running the fourth party as well.
With fair elections, ideas would be central. We can beat the teabaggers on ideas any day.
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