Candidates Who Shun Corporate Cash Are Winning

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/stories/48405/

Candidates Who Shun Corporate Cash Are Winning

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted February 26, 2007.

Electoral reform isn't just starry-eyed theory: Clean elections are taking place in states from Arizona to North Carolina, reversing the big-money corruption that rampages throughout our political system.

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The advantages of clean elections are enormous -- not only for the candidates, but also for the public good:

• A GREATER DIVERSITY of candidates can come forward to give voters real choices, for public funding means that a school teacher, cab driver, small farmer, factory worker, artist, bookstore owner, veteran, waitress, student or other regular person can run ... and be competitive.
  
  
• ELECTIONS ARE RUN on a more-level playing field, giving "outsider" candidates a better chance to buck the party bosses, funders, media "selectors," and other power brokers.
  
  
• BECAUSE CLEAN CANDIDATES spend zero time in corporate suites and lobbying haunts collecting money, giving IOUs, and continually reaching for handouts from special interests to fill the next campaign's war chest, they are even free to toss pushy lobbyists right out of the door.
  
  
• RATHER THAN ADVANCING the selfish legislative agendas of big funders, CE officeholders can stay focused on the common good, dealing with the big challenges that face our society.
  
  
• THERE'S NO NEED for publicly funded lawmakers to sit in a cubicle three hours a day making money calls; instead, they might make random calls to constituents back home and ask, "How ya' doin'?"

Trying it out

The clean-elections approach is not just starry-eyed theory. CE got its first toehold in Maine in the mid-1990s, when people there became aware that corporate lobbyists were effectively running (and ruining) their legislature. A tipping point was when lobbyists for greedheaded trucking corporations squirreled a popular public-safety bill that contained new rest requirements intended to prevent tired, overworked truck drivers from causing crashes. Mainers were outraged that legislators would kow-tow to avaricious industry lobbyists at such deadly public expense.

MUCH MORE AT LINK

[blm]

1. Clean Money, Clean Elections was submitted by Kerry and Wellstone in 1997. Only 5 senators supported

that bill. I'd say it is past time it be resubmitted.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/ProSense/4

[Hissyspit]

2. .