{"id":22028,"date":"2018-04-02T07:13:21","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T13:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=22028"},"modified":"2018-04-02T07:14:53","modified_gmt":"2018-04-02T13:14:53","slug":"montana-viewpoint-who-owns-our-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/04\/montana-viewpoint-who-owns-our-politicians\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Viewpoint: Who ‘owns’ our politicians?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Xap\"<\/a>

The seat of government \u2014 and the focus of endless influence-buying.<\/p><\/div>\n

Political wisdom: \u201cNever put in writing what you can communicate by speaking, and never speak when you can make your point with a wink and a nod.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is worse, Russian interference in American elections or secret American special- interest groups doing the same? Well, of course it\u2019s the Russians because the special interest groups are at least American, not to mention bread and butter to the politicians of one political party or another.<\/p>\n

\"Jim\"<\/a>

Jim Elliott<\/p><\/div>\n

The reason why the latter are not the subject of congressional investigation is that you don\u2019t bite the hand that feeds you. I\u2019m sure politicians feel that at least they have some control over the American outfits, but I suspect that the American outfits have more control over the politicians.<\/p>\n

Many are worried that the Trump campaign may have \u201ccolluded\u201d with the Russians, but they seem less worried about the ability of American special-interest groups to successfully collude \u2014 in an equally undocumented way \u2014 with any elected American official.<\/p>\n

If you look at the financial contributions of these groups to members of Congress, you will no doubt be shocked to see that these groups give big money to those senators and representatives who sit on committees that oversee and regulate those special-interest groups. You can find those numbers by industry and members of Congress or the Senate at opensecrets.org,\u00a0<\/a>which makes it their business to investigate these things.<\/p>\n

Basically, the way politicians have to finance their campaigns lends itself to corruption by the very fact that politicians, in general, do not want to alienate big donors. If you consider that fully one third of the waking hours of federal politicians is spent raising money, you can understand why.<\/p>\n

I categorize major political contributions into two groups: those to politicians who already reflect the contributors\u2019 beliefs, and those to politicians who can be talked into reflecting those beliefs. And that latter is the wink and the nod.<\/p>\n

Recall that one description of an \u201chonest\u201d politician is one who, once bought, stays bought.<\/p>\n

The ways that big business, political organizations and people of influence can get money to the politicians of their choice are as numerous as they can be shady. We are fortunate in Montana to have a law that requires political contributions to be reportable and reported, and which limits who can make them and for what amount.<\/p>\n

There are hypothetically enforceable safeguards in federal campaign finance which in the scope of things one might call mere window dressing, and there are plenty of ways around them.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>The irony is that the mystery contributors don\u2019t want the public to know who they are, but they damn sure want the politicians to know.<\/p>\n

The point is, do we want our elected officials to be responsible to the American people or to the titans of industry, whom Teddy Roosevelt called the \u201cmalefactors of great wealth\u201d?<\/p>\n

The Brennan Center for Justice (brennancenter.org<\/a>) is dedicated to exposing the nefarious ways that money is channeled to political campaigns and working towards the goal that such campaigns be publicly funded. Yes, that means taxpayer dollars \u2014 and I am ready for it.<\/p>\n

To date, 14 states have some sort of program for publicly financed campaigns that have been employed with varying success. One study found that in Arizona and Maine, it has increased the ability of challengers to beat incumbents. Whatever amount of success these programs have had is all to the good, but not good enough. The whole system of campaign finance and spending needs to change, but I am not optimistic.<\/p>\n

Jim Elliott served 16 years in the Montana Legislature and four years as chairman of the Montana Democratic Party. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek. Montana Viewpoint appears in weekly newspapers across Montana and online at Last Best News and Missoula Current.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Political wisdom: \u201cNever put in writing what you can communicate by speaking, and never speak when you can make your point with a wink and a nod.\u201d Which is worse, Russian interference in American elections or secret American special- interest groups doing the same? Well, of course it\u2019s the Russians because the special interest groups […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":22037,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[6034,6878,6879],"class_list":["post-22028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-elections","tag-open-secrets","tag-russians","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22028"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22038,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22028\/revisions\/22038"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}