tim | Lest we forget.

Entry tags:

Lest we forget.

Seven years ago, about 3000 people died in a terrorist attack in the United States. Ever since, at least 87,000 civilians have died in Iraq in a war that the US started as a misguided attempt at retaliation or a cleverly calculated use of pretext. The war has met with little domestic protest, and in 2004, those who thought it was at least a little bit important to stop it failed to gather enough of a majority to elect a president who cared at least a little about ending the killing.

But let us put aside our past failures. This year, we have a chance to redeem ourselves. It would be wrong to say that anyone has absolute confidence that Barack Obama can or will end the war, but he is at least unbeholden to the corporate interests that keep the war going. And thus, we have no reason to believe he won't make a good-faith effort to stop the killing.

This is an area of moral certainty. If you're American, are you going to do everything you can to elect a leader who will shift our resources away from killing foreigners and back to healing our sick, employing our unemployed, cleaning our environment? Or are you going to assume that history is something that other people make and politics is other people's problem?

This is not the year for namby-pamby platitudes about how you should support whichever candidate makes you feel the warmest and fuzziest inside. If you're American, and you're not giving your time to talk to your fellow Americans about why they should support Barack Obama, then -- in a far inferior tack, but one suitable for those with crippling social anxiety or without physical energy -- you can at least write a check. If you can't write a check, and can't talk to people, then [nondenominational-deity] bless you. I'm guessing that's not so for most people reading this.

If you were going to tell me I should leave my politics out of this day, then don't. Leaving my politics out of it means leaving my politics out of it so that there's more room for your politics to fit into it.

To those of you who are eligible to vote in the United States: Nonvoters, McCain voters, I'm not asking you to defend yourselves and so I don't need to hear your defenses. Please, just go sit in the corner for a while and think about why you hate your country so much.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, I guess if it's not obvious that they are corruptive, then I don't know how to explain it. I would not call our current system "freely financed", either, because not everyone is free to donate large quantities of money to the candidates of their choice. (The system for personal donations to presidential candidates works, IMO, because although not everyone can afford the max of $2000, it's at least a lot closer to zero than is the max for corporate donations.)

(deleted comment)

Money is not speech. If J. Random Millionaire wants to influence an election, shouldn't they go knock on doors to tell people who to vote for, which they are probably equally capable of doing as I am?

Fuck, I didn't mean to delete my earlier comment. I'll repeat here:

Well, yes, people who have less money have less power to influence events through donating money. What exactly is your solution to that? I don't see how anything short of a total shutdown of political speech will have any practical effect.

I was saying that drastically limiting campaign donations would not be a "total shutdown of political speech", because donating money is not a speech act.

They have been drastically limited, and the situation already causes problems, because suddenly it's much harder for non-millionaires to challenge incumbents.

I'm serious, you simply cannot legislate away the power gap between the rich and the poor.

We could also limit how much personal income you're allowed to spend on campaigns; maybe that would force candidates to go back to, omg, convincing people they wanted to volunteer their time to do grassroots campaigning. *shrug*

We might not be able to legislate away that power gap, but that isn't an excuse for not taking every measure possible to level the playing field.

Okay, so now you're significantly worsening the power gap that incumbents have over their challengers, because the challengers can't make themselves heard over the other challengers, and they certainly can't make themselves heard over the status quo.

I suppose you're also going to limit expenses made "on behalf of" other people, i.e. stop people from engaging their personal resources in favor of candidates they like?

I don't know what you mean by "personal resources" other than time or money, but yes, I thought I said I would limit donations by people or businesses (and there are already limits on donations by people). We don't have to legislate limits on time since everyone only has 24 hours a day.

Well, there's a true "donation", meaning "here, have some of my time/money to do with as you please", and then there's a "use", meaning "I'm going to spend my time/money independently of your control but in ways that help you." The latter case is really, really difficult to regulate without basically repressing all political speech — oh right, for you that's okay as long as the speech somehow involves an expenditure, because door-to-door volunteer campaigning is the true ideal of politics.

What do you think is the true ideal of politics?

I don't presume that there is one, which is why I prefer to leave it unregulated.

Well, politics has to be regulated in some ways, unless you think dead people should be allowed to vote. So the question is not whether to regulate, but how much to regulate. To paraphrase Larry Lessig, if we stop regulating and let private interests do the regulatin' instead, it's not as if there are no biases involved or as if magical fluffy-bunny interests prevail; perhaps it's better if the regulating gets done in a way that has some measure of public accountability built in. (Except he wasn't talking about campaign reform in particular and didn't say anything about fluffy bunnies.)

Right, which is why I think campaign financing restrictions are bad, but strict disclosure laws are good. You seem to be strongly in favor of both disclosure laws and strict campaign-financing restrictions, and I'm trying to figure out why you believe that the campaign-finance laws don't cause more harm than good.

(no subject)

catamorphism.livejournal.com - 2008-09-11 23:58 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

rjmccall.livejournal.com - 2008-09-12 00:01 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

catamorphism.livejournal.com - 2008-09-12 00:05 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

rjmccall.livejournal.com - 2008-09-12 01:04 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

catamorphism.livejournal.com - 2008-09-12 01:14 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

rjmccall.livejournal.com - 2008-09-12 01:24 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

catamorphism.livejournal.com - 2008-09-12 01:51 (UTC) - Expand

J. Random Millionare can also pay people to go knock on doors, and he can buy a lot of flyers to post on all the electrical poles in town, and he can rent billboards to carry his political speech, and he can run his own newspaper, and he can buy political commercials, and oh hey guess what everything has costs.

Right, that's why flyers and billboards are required to say who paid for them. With campaign donations, of course someone can go look up FEC records, but politicians aren't required to wear stickers with the names of their major campaign contributors. (Though it would be kind of cool if they were. Like pro cyclists!)

I'm all in favor of disclosure laws around political speech, but that's a totally different point. The speech is still out there, and there's more of it because the speaker is rich.

I don't know if I explained myself unclearly or misunderstood your point. I thought you said that limits on campaign contributions by businesses were useless because businesses could still pay to put up advertising for candidates. I said that that's why we have disclosure laws. If a business circumvents contribution limits by paying for advertisements directly, it's possible to follow the money and nail them for it. Did I miss the point or...?

J. Random Millionare is a person, not a business.

Well, substitute "people" for "businesses" there, then.

Okay. My point is not that the laws can be easily broken, although of course that's true and irrevocable (what are you going to do, give the candidate a 15-yard, er, 20,000-vote penalty because a supporter broke campaign finance laws?). My point is (1) that these laws can simply be bypassed through independent speech, and therefore are largely ineffective absent comprehensive speech controls, and (2) that these laws have negative side-effects which you are ignoring.

(1) Independent speech is cool, independent money-spending isn't. I don't see how a law that says (a) political advertisements must disclose who paid for them (which IIUC is what we already have), and (b) any individual or corporation can only spend X amount of money on political advertisements is a "comprehensive speech control". Free speech is one thing, expensive speech is another.

(2) I'm still not seeing the side-effects. You brought up the point about challengers to incumbents, but I think I answered that.

(1) So what you're saying is that you believe NARAL should have an effective advertising budget of $2500 a year? Or are you distinguishing political lobbying groups from corporations in some way that doesn't leave a giant hole?

(2) Where did you respond to the general point about incumbents? You said that we should eliminate the advantages of wealthy challengers by preventing them from limiting their personal campaigning expenditures, and I responded that that simply makes the incumbent problem that much worse.

(1) Not for advertising that doesn't mention a particular candidate, no.

(2) We can't level off everything. I would much rather see incumbents ride on their reputations (and if it's a bad reputation, then presumably that makes it easier for a challenger, not harder), then see people buy elections.

(1) So NARAL isn't allowed to create voter guides? What about its membership newsletter? Is this a ban on all candidate-specific information, or just positive — e.g., can NARAL say that McCain and Palin have terrible views on abortion? What if it's purely factual information — can NARAL send something out detailing specific occasions when McCain publicly opposed blah? Who decides all this— will every NARAL mailing suddenly end up in court to decide whether it's sufficiently non-political?

My point is that any organization that wants to distribute information is invariably going to spend money doing it, and that you are basically proposing to destroy the freedom to create large organizations that express any sort of real political opinion. Worse, you are doing this purely out of a misguided belief that the only people cutting large checks to political candidates are evil defense contractors.

(2) Incumbents have a huge name-recognition advantage, and the only way to even try to overcome that is with exposure, which you are massively limiting a challenger's ability to gain — I mean, even a candidate's gas money when canvassing neighborhoods is a campaign expenditure that must be carefully accounted for.