Campaign Finance Reform With our national election cycle reaching its quadrennial fervor, filled with frenzied campaigning and feverish advertising blitzes, American citizens are once again charged with the enormous task of deciding upon their next leadership class. What began with our forefather's modest experiment in democratic governance, built upon a foundation of informed citizenry selecting candidates who best represented shared values on the relevant issues of the day, has since become slowly distorted by the pernicious influence of corporatized campaign funding. The American political apparatus has traditionally been the arena of the affluent, because "like almost every pursuit in this free-enterprise country, political campaigning is a business & #8230; and, as in many businesses, success often goes not to the entrepreneur who brings a product to market first but to the one who exploits it best" (McManus, 2010). While candidates on the local, state and federal level have always been beholden to major donors, modern elections were forever transformed from contests of relative merit to proverbial spending sprees after the notorious decision delivered by the Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This landmark 5-4 ruling, made along strictly partisan lines in 2008, reversed more than a century of law regarding electioneering communication and essentially declared that the First Amendment's explicit guarantee of free speech necessarily protected the unlimited political expenditures made by corporations, § 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations, and labor unions. The resulting injection of corporate and private capital into the presidential election, exemplified by the creation of so-called Super PACs, or political action committees, and the emergence of billionaire benefactors like William Adelson and the Koch brothers, has altered...
With the presidential campaign now controlled from afar by a cabal of wealthy financiers, the priority for voters in individual states like California should remain the preservation of their own political power through the passage of legislation which restricts rulings like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission from being repeated.
voters in the United States feel campaign finance reform is a necessity. They see candidates for elected offices being curried by special interest groups. Voters fear, with some justification, that money may corrupt a candidate who is elected using special interest money to finance the campaign, and not keep the voters' needs foremost. Politicians have acknowledged that they have until recently spent an inordinate amount of time phoning businesses,
American Anti-Corruption Act: The Tipping Point for American Citizens The American Anti-Corruption Act: A tipping point for American citizens In the wake of increasing concerns about the undue influence of money and special interest groups in American politics, the anti-corruption advocacy group Represent.Us created a grassroots campaign in support of a law called the American Anti-Corruption Act. The Act is "a nine-point plan to crack down on lobbyists, strengthen the flimsy law intended
' Ultimately, while this makes a compelling argument, it seems almost aggressively to skirt the issue of campaign finance reform as a basic inspiration for the restrictions struck down here within. This is a resolution that should be seen as somewhat troubling apart from questions of free speech, at least from the perspective that there is some genuine value to limiting the impact which corporations can have on an election. Such
Campaign Finance Ongoing Issues in Campaign Finance Reform: Political Freedom and Recent Supreme Court Rulings The issue of campaign finance reform comes and goes as a focal point of national attention, and though recent economic events have eclipsed attention to this issue in the past two years, recent changes ought to be carefully noted by the voting public. Over the latter half of the twentieth century, various pieces of legislation have been
Campaign Finance Spending You decide Campaign finance spending reform For many years, campaign finance reform was an important 'talking point' amongst populist Democratic and Republican senators alike, cumulating in the McCain-Feingold Act. The Act placed spending limits upon 'soft money' (money not directly given to a candidate or party) as well as banned corporations from financing advertisements designed to influence voting about particular issues before an election (Gitell 2003). The Act was intended
While this does not seem ethically questionable on the surface, it is certainly questionable when one considers that the only way for a capitalist to keep being a capitalist is to keep acquiring capital, and the only way to acquire capital is to exploit labor for profit. This means that the bourgeoisie must oppress the proletariat in order to continue to exist, and that the proletariat must struggle to
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