Shared Purpose Civic Activism

Electronic Democracy

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INTERVIEW
What do you believe can or should be done to address the problems you have described?
Americans have been hearing the refrain for years now. "Our politics is broken". Do you believe this is true, and if so, in what ways is it broken?
What are you personally willing to do to help solve the problems you have described?

INTERVIEW
Very obviously, campaign reform; an end to lobbying; impeach the members of the Supreme Court who deserve it, pass laws making a betrayal of the public trust a crime with much higher penalties than crimes outside the government. Prosecute both the politicians and the bribers heavily. Obviously, Citizens United must be not only repealed but any further corruption of that kind guarded against in the Constitution. Serious investigation and prosecution of white collar crimes, not just lip service and token punishments.

The only political campaigning should be the publication by the government of each candidates history of actions while in politics and a very brief statement of what he or she intends to do about specific problems. No more paid political ads; the media must provide a certain amount of time/space for this.

Make PACs criminal.

- Presly Hollingsworth

Perhaps a solution to CU is to make candidates give a mandatory appearance to those organizations that are able to solicit a minimum number of signatures from their community. In light of the difficulty of such an arrangement, a citizen should be limited to one or two organizations for which they can sign onto for petitioning a candidate's appearance. To have mercy on the candidate, he would only be required to make no more than 10 appearances.

- Jeffrey Hatcher

One way to try to begin to advance civic virtue might be to get Fox, MSNBC, PBS and C-SPAN to pledge to develop one program each that models intelligent civil discourse that is aimed at promoting the common good.

- Al Cannistraro

1) There should be specific limits on the amount of money a campaign should be allowed to spend. 2) All donors to a campaign should be identified and published within 48 hours and listed in a manner that can be understood when an ad is placed on TV or radio. 3) All meetings with lobbyists should be identified and published within 48 hours. 4) Corporations should be required to identify all political and campaign contributions in the annual statements. 5) The 501(c)(4) code should not be used for political purposes; IRS should enforce aggressively. 6) The commercial media outlets should be required, as they were in the past, to provide members of the public with free access for the purpose of civil presentation during prime time. 7) Congress should adopt a mandatory service requirement of 2 to 3 years for all men and women upon reaching the age of 18. Individuals should have a choice of military or non-military service. No deferments should be allowed. Individuals with disabilities should be welcomed to participate in any way they can. and 8) Public funding of education should be provided through college or advanced technical schooling.

- John Duffy

I'm not sure. Election and campaign reforms are definetly needed.

- KATHY MCGROGAN

Campaign Finance Reform to include public financing of presidential and congressional elections, disclosure of all campaign donations, constitutional amendment to mitigate effects of Citizens United vs FEC)

Wall Street Reform (Re-instate modern version of Glass-Steagal, set realistic leverage limits on bank lending, prosecute senior executives for illegal acts, not just fine their companies, force all derivatives to be bought/sold via open market trading, make it illegal to write derivatives at huge multiples of the underlying value of an entity

Tax Code Reform (Close loopholes in code, revisit Simpson - Bowles, treat "carried trade" as ordinary income

Give voice to independents as competitors to our two party system by holding primaries with all candidates that have certain minimum qualifications not related to money raised.

Initiate Top 2 Open Primaries for state and federal legislators to introduce real competition into races.

Harness the power of the Internet to conduct voter polling, not the crap put out by the "paid" pollsters that know how to get the answer they want, not the message the public intends

No Labels 12 Step Program for Congress

Amend the constitution to set term limits for Congress

Amend the constitution to mitigate Citizens United

See other responses to Question #1

- Ray Hudkins