Re: Political Cleanup program [NOISE]
The starting point for campaign reform has to be to cap the amount that can be spent on a campaign. Most countries have such laws to prevent the political process from being owned by the rich. Unfortunately this has happened in
I was going to refrain from ranting on this one (for once:-) but a couple points with cypherpunks relevance have come up. One is that PACs are, in some sense, a donation-remailer. The purpose is to get the money to its destination while obfuscating the link between the donor and the candidate, while allowing the PACs to take the political heat for it, but giving them the out that "it's just being done on behalf of our fine upstanding donors." At 11:20 AM 12/18/95 -0500, Phill Hallam wrote (order rearranged somewhat): the US
with the effect that both parties are much further to the right than in any other Western democracy.
I happen to believe in freedom of speech, especially political speech, and if you're not allowed to spend money broadcasting your speech or printing your messages, you don't have much freedom of press or speech. In this case, technology is giving us the ability to not only support freedom of speech, but give it as little or as much visible linkage as desired, allow the money to be passed around privately, and also to coordinate publicity efforts of different groups in ways other than simply giving cash to a candidate's bagman to be spent on publicity. It's also significantly changing the costs, speed, and targetability of speech, allowing more people to get involved, and allowing low-cost efforts to have more impact by reaching the right people. And as far as "prevent the political process from being owned by the rich" goes, there have been brief exceptions over the last 5000 years in which the less-rich have overthrown the rich, but campaign finance laws have almost never kept the rich or the politicians from helping each other out.
The main problem with anonymous political donations is that it is easy enough to create linkage if the recipient and the donor conspire together.
That's a given; not much point in giving someone a bribe if they don't know what they're being bribed to do or who they're doing it for :-)
There are many other things that campaign laws are intended to achieve beyond avoiding bribery. For example foreign nationals cannot make donations to US parties. It would be a good thing if there were similar laws in the UK since at the last election a foreign national with links to organised crime alledghedly made a multi million donation to the Conservative party.
I also don't believe freedom of speech should be limited by national boundaries.
Of course in the absence of full disclosure of details of party records nobody can be sure. We are as voters entitled to consider the worst however.
You can always agree not to vote for any candidate or party that doesn't provide full disclosure, though it's a little harder to deal with political publicity supporting a candidate provided directly by non-candidates. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # .... Heading back to The Big Phone Company
On Mon, 18 Dec 1995, Bill Stewart wrote:
I happen to believe in freedom of speech, especially political speech, and if you're not allowed to spend money broadcasting your speech or printing your messages, you don't have much freedom of press or speech.
This has somewhat undemocratic aspects when applied to political free speech. A person has ONE vote regardless of his wealth and as far as access to the political process this same principle must be maintained otherwise democracy is lost. At times freedoms for corporate entities and freedoms for individuals are at cross purposes, freedom for individuals must always be held in the higher position. Jay Holovacs <holovacs@ios.com> PGP Key fingerprint = AC 29 C8 7A E4 2D 07 27 AE CA 99 4A F6 59 87 90 (KEY id 1024/80E4AA05) email me for key
I happen to believe in freedom of speech, especially political speech, and if you're not allowed to spend money broadcasting your speech or printing your messages, you don't have much freedom of press or speech.
It is very strange the way that "Libertarians" are so able to turn all rights into property rights. Thus freedom of speech become freedom to have influence on the politicial process in direct proportion to wealth. I began work on the web in '92 because I saw its potential as a political tool which did not have the bias of wealth. It has the potential to create a new kind of political dialogue. When the Web becomes as ubiquitous as the telephone we will still see inequalities of power, the homeless and the poor will still be underrepresented. But that situation must be judged against our own where the political process can be bought and traded as if it were any other form of comodity. It is not simply an issue of money, it is an issue of national security. If a foreigner were to control the majority of the media there would be a significant threat to the national interest. This threat has been realised in the UK with the comming to power of Rupert Murdoch. Fortunately his influence on the US political scene has thus far been minor. In his own country he has brought down the government more than once.
And as far as "prevent the political process from being owned by the rich" goes, there have been brief exceptions over the last 5000 years in which the less-rich have overthrown the rich, but campaign finance laws have almost never kept the rich or the politicians from helping each other out.
In UK politicis the influence of an individual's money is limited to influencing one party. Even that is done behind closed doors. The other major parties both limit the size of individual contributions to a constituency party to a relatively nominal sum. $5000 is a huge sum in UK politics.
I also don't believe freedom of speech should be limited by national boundaries.
Nor do I. But I only vote in one country. If we take the question outside the US it would not on the whole be a good thing if the Prime Minister of Tobago (say) were provided with a campaign contribution of $1M by a foreign company with an interest in strip mining the entire island. similarly it would be a bad thing if Columbian drug lords were to make massive contributions to politicians committed to continuing the prohibition on drugs. Phill
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart -
hallam＠w3.org -
Jay Holovacs