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A Modest Proposal™ by Skip Mendler

Actually, I don't mind. Really. I mean, if someone wants to give money to a candidate, they should be able to do that. If people want to get together en masse and give large sums of money to candidates, they should be able to do that. Even if huge corporations want to give great steaming gobs of money to candidates, and expect special treatment as a result, they should be able to do that. I mean, even a corporate robber baron is still a citizen, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities -- Wait a second. Maybe that's the problem -- responsibilities, or perhaps the better word would be accountability. Maybe the brouhaha over campaign finance reform is due at least in part to this fact, that corporations, unions, lobbyists, and other wealthy contributors get no feedback from the public about the people and legislation that they foist, by their financial support, upon the rest of us.

So here's my idea. Let's just scrap the campaign finance controls; they never have worked, and they never will work; money will always find a way to circumvent whatever obstacles well-meaning citizen activists place in its way -- but instead, we'll require that candidates and their contributors must adhere to the following disclosure rules:

All candidates and office-holders must, at all public appearances, wear a coat, vest, or other garment festooned with the easily-visible names or corporate logos of their twenty leading contributors. (Yeah, just like race car drivers.)
All legislation shall carry the name of the corporation or other organization that contributed the most to the sponsors of the legislation -- hence, "The Archer-Daniels-Midland Agricultural Subsidy Act," for instance. The names of the sponsoring legislators shall be followed by the names of all other lobbying organizations involved in the crafting of the legislation.
All candidates and office-holders must preface any speech they give with a sponsorship announcement: "My comments today regarding telecommunications policy have been made possible by IBM..." Optionally, contributors may pay extra to have commercials inserted into the text of the speech: "And before I outline my plan for streamlining international trade, how about those Chevy trucks, huh? Talk about streamlined..."

In fact, why don't we just cut to the chase, and institute a system of direct corporate sponsorship of politicians and their candidacies? Graduates of law and government schools could be scouted and recruited by corporate headhunters to run for strategic legislative seats. Pols could appear in commercials ("Elizabeth, that committee meeting will be awfully stressful, wouldn't you like some delicious Eggos before you go?" "Why yes, Bob, that'd be lovely..."), and citizens could shape their consumer choices based in part on the popularity or unpopularity of the politicians and laws sponsored by a given corporation.

A system like this, I believe, might begin to either reintroduce some real democracy to the political system, or once and for all remove the democratic facade from the plutocracy that we actually inhabit.

What do you think?