The Independent View: Reclaim the American Dream

Reclaim the American Dream is a non-partisan informational gateway aimed at helping people who are upset about America today to get engaged in fixing our democracy and making our economy fairer at the local level, where people power still has clout.

Their target audience is the mass of frustrated civic-minded Americans and local groups, from seniors to millennials, from nonprofit volunteers to the politically disenchanted, people who want change but don’t know where to start.

Their process is:

• It’s impossible to start right off fixing Washington. Our leverage is local and, fortunately, almost every national problem has local roots. So we can have an impact on national problems by action at the state and local level.

• So look around your home community, find local allies and figure out what action you can take together.

• Check out the strategy of other groups that are working for reforms at the state and community level and making real headway. These local initiatives, working together, are building pressure for change at the national level.

I always believed the road back to the "Peoples House", started at your home state.

You could start with these:

Empower Small Donors, Public Campaign Funding
The recent explosion of Mega-Money in American campaigns, presidential races costing in the billions, individual Senate races topping $100 million, have reignited public concern about the excessive influence of fat-cat Mega Donors.

In Congress, there has been a rebirth of interest in public funding of campaigns to offset the impact of wealthy or corporate interests flush with cash and to give more clout to small donors. Several proposed bills incorporate reform strategies already working at the state or city level.

The reform measure with the broadest support is the Government by the People Act, first sponsored by Rep. John Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat. This bill provides matching funds for donations up to $200 on a 6-to-1 ratio, as well as a $25 refundable tax credit for donations up to $200. It has attracted 155 co-sponsors, 154 Democrats plus Republican Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina. But so far, the House Republican majority has blocked it from coming to a vote on the House floor.

Public matching funds for small donors, Congressman Sarbanes argues, are a way to give some leverage back to average voters “Americans want to see Congress putting their priorities first, but the problem is that Big Money gets in the way,” he says, pointing to the campaign funding and influence of oil companies, Wall Street banks, and U.S. multinationals.

In the U.S. Senate, Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin has proposed the Fair Elections Now Act that creates a small donor matching system of public funding for both Senate and House candidates. Durbin’s bill, co-sponsored by 17 Democrats, provides a 6-1 match for small contributions up to $200 but no refundable tax credit. “This bill,” says Durbin, “will give candidates the opportunity to focus on dealing with our nation’s problems, not on chasing after campaign cash.”

While Republican leaders in Congress have generally opposed using taxpayer money to fund election campaigns, some Congressional Republicans have recently come out for tax credits for small donors. In what he calls the CIVIC Act -Citizens Involvement in Campaigns, Wisconsin Republican Representative Tom Petri has authored a bill that offers tax credits for donations up to $200.

Disclose Campaign Money
The foundation stone of campaign reform, then as now, was disclosure, transparent openness about the sources of political money. Full disclosure was the disinfectant prescribed in the Nixon era to kill the epidemic of tainted money and to cleanse the nation’s political system. In the decades since then, disclosure has been the one campaign reform that has won general endorsement from conservatives as well as liberals and moderates. George Will, the conservative columnist, once condensed their concept into “Seven words – No cash, full disclosure, no foreign money.”

The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, has fostered the explosion of dark money by reversing the century-old legal ban against corporations and labor unions using general revenues in election campaigns; by turning a blind eye to obvious close ties between political candidates and their Siamese-Twin supposedly “independent” backer groups; and by sanctioning ad campaigns once forbidden by law, for and against candidates by corporations and so-called “independent” groups.

For all the media scrutiny of powerful Super PACs, they are not the cause of the dark money geyser. By law, Super PACs must disclose their donors. It is tax-exempt “501 C” non-profit groups, which get their nickname from the sub-paragraphs of the U.S. tax code applying to them, that are the main conduits for the modern flood of dark money. Business trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and certain labor organizations have long enjoyed 501 C status but only in recent years have they spent aggressively on campaigns, while shielding the identity of their donors. By far the largest and most potent channels of dark money are so-called 501(c) (4) “social welfare” organizations, a category that began with Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and other general purpose non-profits with little interest in politics. But since 2009, the “social welfare” category has exploded, adding 14,000 new groups, including political advocacy nonprofits with shadowy, secret donor lists.

Campaign experts expect 2016 to bring a volcano of “dark money,” casting a long shadow over the next election, leaving American voters literally in the dark, unable to find out who funded whom to get what.

Unless average voters get mobilized and contact their representatives, insisting on strong disclosure rules in a hurry.

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