Wednesday, November 30, 2011

How Occupy Wall Street Can Restore Clout of the 99%: Scott Turow - Bloomberg

How Occupy Wall Street Can Restore Clout of the 99%: Scott Turow - Bloomberg

This comes from a friend of the blog Sue.

Now that the Occupy Wall Streetprotesters have been driven from many of their encampments, I have an unusual suggestion for how they should next deploy their considerable energies: work across the nation for a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to regulate the expenditure of private money on elections. Let me connect the dots. The heart of the protests is a lament about widening income inequality in the U.S., brought about, in part, by a government that seems to favor disproportionately wealthy interests. The Occupiers have focused their outrage on the bailout of banks that reaped huge profits on mortgage-backed securities and are now profitable again, while millions of homeowners have been foreclosed upon or lost their jobs. The best antidote to this imbalance of income and influence would be to greatly reduce the role of private funding in our elections. Nothing is more empowering to the well-heeled -- corporations, unions, lobbyists, political-action committees, trade associations and bundlers -- than our political leaders’need to come to them hat in hand for the money to get elected.

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