Claire
Stephen
It is becoming painfully clear: our government is becoming more and more dysfunctional and politicians aren’t very interested in creating jobs and strengthening the middle class. Here are 3 main reasons why making political donations anonymous makes sense:
1. If politicians don’t know where their money comes from – it will be more difficult to promote the donator’s interests. In other words, it reduces conflict of interest.
2. Let the Supreme Court make all the rulings it wants!! A company wants to donate all of it’s profits anonymously to a politician or political party? Great! Donate away!
3. Unlike politics, other professional fields actually care a whole lot about conflicts of interest. In scientific research, for example, doctors are required to write out all financial relationships and how they might impact their current research. Thus, focusing on conflict of interest in government makes sense!
Let’s make it the norm that companies and individuals cannot disclose their identity to donation recipients. It may take a little brain power at first, but shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out – others have instated relatively successful systems to reduce conflicts of interest. Here are a few suggestions on how we could get this done:
1. Instate an ethical regulation or law that requires that politicians do not have knowledge of their funders, and if they do, they will be removed from office.
2. Politicians would need to work with a middle-man that manages their contributions, which would keep all identifying information private and only release dollar information.
3. We the people would need to demand that freshman representatives (remember, we do have our votes) will instate ethical regulations, and vote them out of office if they don’t fulfill these promises.
4. In order to keep tabs of who is making political contributions, aggregate data should be released on how much each corporation/person donated above a certain amount without releasing which party or politician in particular benefited from the donation.
We can fight back and demand an equal political voice.
The Fault Line 