Ideas For Democracy:  Goal #6

By law legislators may receive requests, suggestions, comments, or advice only from individual citizens and not from any business entity. 

 

Citizens who want real democracy will actively support this policy and vote for trustworthy candidates who actively support this policy.

 

IFD - policy:  The practice of "lobbying" by business entities, including the hiring of professional lobbyists who may not even be constituents of the elected official whose behavior they try to control, has developed to the point where it is obstructive to democracy and really the antithesis of the democratic process.  Lobbying is nothing other than euphemistic language used to describe behavior that is the same as bribery, plutocracy and corruption.  THERE IS NO SOUND REASON WITHIN THE DISCIPLINES OF GOVERNMENT OR SOCIOLOGY THAT PROVIDES FOR BUSINESS ENTITIES TO CONTROL THE ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL POLICIES OF A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT THAT IS EXPECTED TO BE DRIVEN BY THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS.  Lobbying gives business entities what the citizens pay for: the time and attention of the elected legislators.   The legislator is supposed to serve the best interests of an entire body of constituents that includes citizens from "all walks of life," and develop policy positions that meet the best interests of both their districts or states and the nation.

 

What has really happened in the United States of America is actually similar, even the same case, as the entanglement of church and state in Medieval Europe.  The investors and bankers, or if you will the capitalists of America are an institution, and that institution is so closely entangled with the government that we cannot honestly sustain the claim that our government is democratic in process.  Just as the outcome of theocracy in Europe became hopelessly destructive of both church and state functions, and the best solution has been what we call "the separation of church and state" (financing), the best solution to the entanglement of capitalism and state is the separation of capitalism and state. 

 

The most suitable set of policies to accomplish an effective separation of capitalism and state would include making what we call "lobbying" an illegal activity.  It would include the use of quasi-governmental publications of the opinions of business people, bankers, investors, professional economists and self-identified "economists" (everyone is a parent, a school teacher, and an economist) and our elected legislators can evaluate those opinions applying the same standards of credibility and merit as the opinions of chamber maids, house cleaners, biologists and physicists.  There is no positive function for everyone to be required to form an organization and "lobby" legislators in an effort to get them the laws they want or the money they want.  All information, from all sources, needs to be passed through the same filter of a legislator's mind.  The worst practice of all is where business entities make monetary contributions to a candidate's campaign funds.  This is so obviously the process of a "special interest" literally buying a legislator.  It is a profound commentary on the power of human denial that this practice has evolved in the country that narcissistically claims to implement liberty and justice "for all." Americans are blatantly self-deceived in their claim that their country is "exceptional" --  as though the most cruel and violent form of slavery and genocidal treatment of native people's, in particular by President Andrew Jackson, need not be remembered.  America is exceptional in its capacity as the most armed nation in the world; the only country ever to have actually used nuclear bombs as a weapon of war; the nation that uses its military forces to conduct foreign policy; the nation that applies the theory that putting people in prison is the solution for a dysfunctional and racist economy; the modern industrial society that implements anti-labor policies by importing millions of "illegal aliens" to work without any rights or protections; the nation that, so eloquently stated by President Dwight Eisenhower, is controlled by a "military-industrial complex."  We are also the nation that has designed and implements an exquisitely successful tyranny known as "the two-party system," a system that deliberately obstructs real competition in the arena of public debate and government policies.

 

Many practical and realistic solutions to the two-party problem may be considered, but we must follow soon with dramatic changes in the way we discuss public policy and elect candidates for legislative office.  We must accomplish a political process transformation before the "two-party system" and the "legislative lobbyist" systems completely destroy our democracy.  The process of political collapse is like global warming in that it is not to be feared as something that might start in the distant future;  it has begun already, and people are being killed by police officers, lives are being destroyed, and public policy relentlessly moves toward the economic and social stratification of 18th century Europe, because our two-party system sustains an anti-democratic medieval plutocracy and calls it "lobbying."