A People Who Thought They Could Govern Themselves: Prescriptions for an Ailing Body Politic, by Peter Coyote

In the daily shotgun blasts of issues, gossip, talking heads, White House chaos, allegations of “fake news” and the framing of most political discourse into unresolvable he-said-she-said dichotomies, it seems clear that as a nation we framed some core problems so completely outside public discourse as to render them invisible.

It is an indisputable fact of our much advertised American Democracy brand that barely more than 50% of our citizens leave the couch or bar to exercise their franchise to vote. This silent protest of futility to affect political change, the “what’s my vote gonna do?” syndrome, has a poisonous corollary: allowing any dedicated minority to co-opt the political process with slightly over 20% of the total possible vote.

Our relentless 24-hour-a-day news cycle, which generally disinforms us about the ills, divisions, rancor, lack of involvement, and corruption of our political system, has framed four critical factors out of any serious consideration on almost every channel. What follows is a brief review of those four factors and suggestions as to how we might reverse the privatization of our election system and in so doing reinvigorate true democracy and restore the faith of voters in the American system.

There’s an old Texas expression which says, “Ya dance with them what brung ya.” It means you don’t stiff your date because you locked eyes with a cute guy or gal. Politicians adhere to this adage religiously by always remembering who made their election possible. The “who” in this case is the ¹/10 of 1% of the Nation’s wealthiest people currently paying the major share of both Democratic and Republican electoral campaigns—the anonymous super-PACs, the finance, real-estate, dot-com nexus of limitless money.

There’s one way to reduce this legalized corruption: political elections need to be paid for by taxpayers. What could be more critical to public policy than weaning candidates from the ¹/10 of 1% and of guaranteeing the principle of making a corruption-free environment in which to deliberate? Given the logic that depends on the need to raise millions (or billions) of dollars to wage successful campaigns, every political problem we face revolves around the issue of money.

Let us also prohibit them from working for any corporation or agency they supervised during their tenure, for 8 years after leaving office, insuring their post-government employment is not simply a reward for congressional largesse. If elected representatives are supposed to work for the people, the people should pay them.

Public Funding of Elections and New National StandardsThe framing of issues is always divided into two sides and there is never enough data to fully form an opinion. Furthermore, outside-the-frame thinkers like Noam Chomsky are rarely if ever invited to appear because they are scholars and “not entertaining”.

The suppressed hysteria or elevated irony of the news readers lends support to news-as-entertainment demands to elevate revenues of the corporate overlords, but the subject of why the national news is required to generate profits is never mentioned. The silence about the dual responsibility of the anchors to inform and generate profits is essentially misleading, and certainly not transparent.

It is critical to our national health to demand that people profiting from the dissemination of “information” be regulated to the degree that failure to adequately source and prove assertions should be the grounds for costing them their soapbox. Such monitoring might require further responsibilities for the FCC, or we could return to public ownership of the airwaves and enable citizens to once again attend licensing hearings and register complaints that could close down news agencies that are patently and consistently false.

If we allow our airwaves and computers to be flooded with propaganda and false information, we will be forced into subsidizing the consequences of, say, our current president and the possibility that his intemperate speech and distorted facts could produce a nuclear war.

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In the current Wild West of unregulated information, opinion, and fake news that is the Internet, the public will continue to be vulnerable to propaganda assaults, divisive fake news, rudeness, and bullying, and without criteria to determine what is a reliable or an unreliable source. We regulate or we subsidize by all paying the costs of a neurotically divided and bitter republic, and once again the crux of decision-making revolves around money.

It follows that, given the critical nature of reliable information, the people, through tax policies, should bear the cost of objective news by allowing networks (online or off) to make their news divisions non-profit, offering them tax breaks to offset the losses of revenue which would follow. This could be one way for citizens to reclaim control over their own airwaves.

Some legally-based regulatory system of fact-checking needs to attend every news-oriented website. It cannot be true that the First Amendment protects the right to lie over the public’s airwaves. In the same way that, in the interests of public health, restaurants are obligated to display their “grades” from the Health Department, media sources should be publicly graded for reliability and truthfulness and compelled to keep that grade for veracity prominent in their chyrons. They must be able to “source” information, and if they cannot or will not, they should no longer have access to public airwaves, or if they do, they should clearly be labeled “Fiction”.

It is so easy to hide behind a fake name. One remains unaccountable, and, masked by invisibility, can murder civility without consequences. Why should people be allowed to bully, cite unsourced information, and offer opinions without a name? Our courts have found that even the Fifth Amendment has necessary limits. Unless one is a whistleblower or a leaker facing retribution from the powerful, there seems to be no good reason why the Internet offers anonymity as a default position.

Huge corporations like Facebook, Yahoo, Instagram, and Google should be held responsible for the ads they take and the information that they “forward” on their websites. They should be held responsible for using their corporate fortunes to secretly create and enable legislation via groups being used to inject the propaganda of political interest groups and foreign adversaries into the midst of our election machinery. Their scale alone should make them subject to regulation. If we don’t regulate, we will have to subsidize, as we are currently subsidizing “the costs” of the Russian intrusion into our last presidential election.

Both Democrats and Republicans have colluded to rig election districts to favor their own party members from the same center-right part of the spectrum. This protects reelection for over 90% of incumbents—a rate rivaled by the Soviet Union and tin-pot African countries. We need to insure that voting districts resemble as closely as possible the makeup and diversity of the American public, so that candidates are forced to craft compromises, rather than preach division to the choir, which results in making all voices more radical and obdurate and has produced the vitriolic atmosphere presently corroding our political process.

How to combat this is difficult, but if we would move towards more plurality in our election system, committees to review gerrymandering should at least be able to insure that representatives of the entire political spectrum be present to supervise and/or participate in reviewing voter rolls to determine legislative parity. As of this moment, only Republicans and Democrats appear to have a voice. What about Independents? The Green Party? Socialist Labor Party? Libertarians, minorities? One might argue that they are too small to matter, but in aggregate they may also be a significant part of the 50% of Americans currently boycotting the vote.

All voters have a stake in insuring equitable distribution of population within districts. Unless the sunshine is let in to this process and it is publicly witnessed, the results will continue to be deals between the two major parties to deep-six independent candidates. Ask Bernie Sanders.

Furthermore, as a nation, it is urgent to make elections simpler and cheaper so that less-wealthy and more-diverse candidates might qualify for public office—perhaps a $2500 filing fee and 500 supporters on a petition could qualify a person for the first round of primaries. That would probably flood the parched political landscape with new ideas, fresh faces, and more economically diverse souls. Of course many would shake out, and there would be the usual assortment of wingnuts and dim-bulbs who might receive first-level funding, but we have them now; they’re just better dressed and more highly compensated by their employers. Besides, that’s what primaries are for sorting out.

Alternative voting systems exist that minimize unfair advantages, and the news could be explaining and analyzing Single Transferable Vote, the Borda Count, Cumulative Voting, and others that offer voters either a number of votes to cast for different candidates or to rank their preferences, so that if a first choice fails, their second choice might win. These systems are inherently more democratic than our current winner-take-all systems, which prevent minority populations from ever electing representatives to reflect their interests. Consequently, they remain permanently out of power.

It is obvious that some totally transparent national voting system should be employed. If the software is transparent and easily available, it will be easy to determine if any hacking has taken place. The “security concerns” of private, for-profit voting systems make us vulnerable precisely because of the secrecy of the voting software. Alternatives already exist and are in use—today. A direct corollary is (states’ rights or not) that there need to be national standards for voting machines, ballots, polling hours, etc.

Any American employee of a corporation is free to vote and contribute politically as they will. Why, however, do we allow corporations (fictional humans) to dedicate their vast resources to alter public policy for their shareholders’ benefit, often at the expense of sound public policy? It may be consistent with corporate understanding of fiduciary responsibilities, but such policies distort and pose very real dangers to public life. The people are not served when a corporation can legally evade fiscal and social responsibilities by off-loading toxic discharges in public waters, destroying public watersheds and aquifers by fracking, adding potentially dangerous substances to food, and filling valleys with mountaintops that once blocked corporate access to coal seams. One might also add the blocking of investment in public water systems so that people have no option but to buy plastic-wrapped corporate water (currently more expensive than gasoline) while the corporations remain insulated from responsibility for the consequential by-product of plastic bottles clotting landfills and oceans. Once again, in a system whose logic revolves around money, these are the folks who consistently win.

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These ills—including organized corporate campaigns to cast doubt on the science of global warming (consider Exxon’s recent hiring of four scientists who once orchestrated the campaign by the Big Tobacco industry to throw doubt on the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer)—have come to pass, sheltered beneath the umbrella of privatized elections whose minions in Congress declare them legal. It is not an exaggeration to assert that the entire Congress has been conscripted as a concierge for corporate interests. Federal funding of elections as a way to end this disenfranchisement of the majority should address many such problems.

Obviously, there is no system so clever that humans cannot foil it. Nothing will ever assure us perfection cranked out with the reliability of an automobile engine, but that does not mean that we cannot analyze the weak joints and design flaws of our current system and struggle to correct them and make them more responsive to current conditions than to those of the 18th century. I doubt that framers of the Constitution could have envisioned a future which included fully automatic machine guns in the hands of the hoi polloi they struggled so hard to exclude from power. Why not make some serious attempts to refine and clarify our systems for today’s realities? Only those currently benefitting from its flaws and loopholes will be opposed. That’s the easy way to recognize them. Regulate or subsidize.

Everything has a shadow, and there will be unintended consequences of these proposed changes. They are inevitable. However, in assessing them, let’s take some stock of the benefits they might afford us, so that we can weigh the two in some accurate balance.

Non-profit news supported by the general public should broaden the scope and depth of critical information and policies that may not be easily marketable. The general public may not be too interested in the extent of Chinese investment in Africa and India, but if they were fully informed of the consequences, they might better understand the reasoning behind our foreign aid and support American efforts to balance Chinese spending with our own.

Public funding of elections could shift the focus of elected officials from their richest donors to actual service of their constituents. It would free them of the onerous burden of everyday fundraising and enforced obsequiousness to the demands of America’s wealthiest citizens. Lowering the eligibility limits for elections would broaden the field from which minds and voices might be drafted, offering voters a larger spectrum than the currently stultifying Democratic-Republican cultural split between two pro-corporate parties.

The end of Gerrymandering might begin the process of consolidation and healing of extreme vitriol in political dialogue. When candidates are forced to compromise to attract the widest spectrum of voters in open districts, the results will be less partisan and ideological. It is only within a field with very narrow differences, that candidates must be excessively dramatic and judgmental to distinguish themselves.

Finally, prohibiting corporations from spending their tax-advantaged treasure to alter public policy for the benefit of their shareholders would level the playing field between massed corporate power and the voters. If the corporations are not securing Congressmen and Senators as their personal vassals, candidates will remain freer to determine and support policies which actually help the majority of their constituents.

Failing core changes like these, I perceive little chance of any consequential change for the better in our public life. Such changes will have to be fueled by public demand, since I cannot imagine a scenario where the political class will voluntarily remove its snout from the feeding troughs. Harsh yes, but true. It would not be difficult to print online petitions and make them widely available to citizens to distribute at supermarkets, high-school sports events, rotary clubs, etc., vowing support for candidates who would agree to such changes as those suggested above and pledging opposition (and higher campaign costs) to those who refuse. It is difficult to ignore a petition with 100,000 names on it when you are considering your next run for office. Such a campaign could be organized locally by local people addressing their elected officials. It does not require huge centralized fundraising efforts or national campaigns.

I offer this piece as a starter kit for dialogue. Greater minds than my own will have to handle the nuances and the unforeseen consequences, but even an ordinary mind can perceive the core overlooked and unmentioned problems currently assailing us. If you don’t like my ideas and solutions, what are your own?