Systemic Reforms and Fair Elections System Will End Era of Pay To Play Politics in Albany
Yesterday the Moreland Commission released it's preliminary report on public corruption in New York. The commission has indicated that it has "discovered criminality", but that the real crime is that much of the corruption they have discovered is completely legal.
How Money In Politics Drives Politicians To Do Strange Things In Far Away Places
If you haven’t heard or seen the coverage, State Senator Marty Golden is involved in another corruption scandal. In exchange for generous contributions to upstate GOP campaigns, Brooklyn State Senator Marty Golden inserted some language into an affordable housing bill that gives millions of dollars in tax breaks to five Manhattan developers.
Why We Need A Fair Elections System To Get Big Money Out Of Politics
In the Federalist Papers one can find that the Founding Fathers, when creating our more perfect union, intended to create a government that was dependent upon the people alone. Yet our current system is one that has become almost entirely dependent upon special interests, lobbyists and the .01%. We even have a term for it, we call it "pay to play."
We don't need to see facts to convince us, we know, deep in our core, that our system is out of control. We know that there is too much money. We know that there are very powerful forces at work influencing decisions. We know that often the best decisions are being killed in favor of no decision or worse yet the wrong decision.
Will we choose to paddle hard back to shore or will we be carried away by the raging torrent of money that is flooding our political system?
If you hadn't heard, our Congressman, Michael Grimm had yet another scandal break this weekend. The allegations are many but can be summarized into illegally raising money for his 2010 campaign. Yes, it's what you might expect, or at the very least what you might fear.
A simple understanding of the english language would allow anyone to conclude that our founders use of words like "people" and "[wo]men" clearly indicate that citizens are, well, people. This truth is self-evident.
