AMERICA BROKEN: critiquing Capitalism, Healthcare & Politics

CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: While this article was first published before the global pandemic, it’s been updated with new lessons learned (in red). 

AMERICA BROKEN is a serious critique of our Capitalism, Healthcare, and Politics. Since these three topics are related, this article addresses each, with a closing section on How to Fix the Corrupted System. It’s inspired by Broken Capitalism, a three-part series in The Guardian that questions why public discontent is rising and asks if it can it be repaired.

1. Workers are creating massive wealth. Why are corporations hoarding it all?
2. Capitalism is failing. People want a job with a decent wage – why is that so hard?
3. The kings of capitalism are finally worried about the growing gap between rich and poor

“Wage stagflation, inequality, soaring CEO pay, market monopolies and food banks – why are the fruits of capitalism distributed so unfairly? Why does capitalism work for the few, but not the many?”

I’ll add highlights from my own writings on healthcare, public education, and criminal justice to that list and look for solutions. But first an observation about the politics of it:

Conservatives and Progressives seem to have the same complaint — “We work hard, so why should some lazy asshole get all my money?” We just disagree on who the asshole is: the family on food stamps trying to get by, or the dude paying cash for a third mega yacht.

AMERICA’S BROKEN CAPITALISM

The pitchforks are coming if we don’t reform capitalism, says Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. “If you don’t want a revolution, it’s time to use the government to more strongly regulate businesses, address climate change, and fix income inequality.”

There’s no such thing as Free Market Capitalism without rules governing Property, Monopoly, Contracts, and Bankruptcy. But who makes the rules? Who enforces them? And when was the last time the Federal Trade Commission or Justice Department filed an anti-trust or RICO suit?

Capitalism today has been distorted by wide disparities of wealth, influence and opportunity. Our laws and political systems have become rigged against all but the wealthiest among us who can buy influence.

The social distancing shutdown quickly proved former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’ assertion that, “economic prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the wealthy; it rises up from a vibrant middle class.” Our crippled economy needs a skilled, healthy, and well-paid workforce to create market demand for goods & services and then work to fulfill that demand. 

In “Saving Capitalism,“ a Netflix documentary, Robert Reich speaks of widening economic inequality, growing distrust of our political system, and the rise of Donald Trump. But, how big has this problem become? Here are a few stats from my article, Extreme Inequality in Politics, Healthcare and the Economy. I begin the article with a must-watch video infographic.

• WEALTH is a beautiful thing, but wealth concentration is more profound than ever. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. And the three richest Americans ― Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett ― have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined. That’s 160 million Americans in total.
  • SAVINGS: The Federal Reserve tells us 40% of Americans don’t have enough savings to withstand a $400 emergency without going further into debt. But so far (as of 4/10/20), over 17 million people have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance, and the real number of unemployed is likely far higher. 
• INCOME: In 1978, average CEO pay was 30 times that of median worker pay, but it increased by 937% while typical worker pay rose just 10% and minimum wage workers fell by 5.5%. Many CEOs now make almost 1,000 times more than average workers (not lowest paid, but average), and Disney CEO Bob Iger makes 1,424 times the median pay of Disney workers. Average workers must now work more than two months to make what CEOs make in just one hour.
• COSTS: Meanwhile, since 1978 housing costs increased 380%, healthcare increased 501%, and college tuition increased 1,120%, all while wages stagnated.
• EMERGENCIES: A recent Federal Reserve survey revealed that 40% of Americans wouldn’t be able to pay their bills if faced with a $400 emergency. Almost 80% of us now live paycheck to paycheck.
• TAXES: About Trump’s tax cuts: the top 1% got over 80% of the tax benefit. While most taxpayers will see a modest but temporary benefit, 60% of the nation will pay more taxes as health insurance rates spike, and 13 million will lose all health insurance.

WHAT BROKE CAPITALISM, AND WHO’S TO BLAME? – As I write about healthcare, I often say getting the goals and incentives right is key, but so is getting insurance companies out of basic health care. Their profit motive causes them to cut their own costs by denying claims, and they improve revenue by promoting higher medical costs, which leads to more subscribers willing to pay higher premiums.

While SOCIALISM can be seen as the fire department saving your home, CAPITALISM is too often the insurance company denying your claim.

What I proposed for healthcare years ago was a public-private hybrid model that eliminates the need for health insurance, exploits the contrasting incentives of private and public sector organizations, and potentially saves our nation over $1.5 trillion per year.

Private-sector incentives — Theoretically, companies in the private sector are most efficient in a free-market with vibrant competition on a level playing field. That causes them to improve service & product quality while driving down prices. But because they’re driven by profit and answer to shareholders, they measure success in business terms such as Revenue, ROI, Payback Period, and Quarterly Stock Price. That leads to relatively short-term decision-making and self-serving corporate behavior that the Canadian documentary, The Corporation, describes as like a psychopath.

Public-sector incentives — Public organizations measure success differently. They can thus make longer-term investments with more strategic goals, such as lowering overall healthcare costs and improving average longevity and lifestyle. Medicare is an example of a very popular and efficient public system. While critics position it as a wasteful entitlement that’s a drain on the economy, Stephen Brill describes it as probably the most efficient part of our entire healthcare system.

Without a profit motive or high executive salaries and marketing expenses, Medicare’s administration and management cost of processing over one billion claims a year is less than $3.80. In some cases, it’s as low as $0.84 per claim. Compare that to Aetna’s much higher cost of $30 to process its 229 million claims.

But even Medicare can do better. The program already negotiates prices with hospitals and doctors but, thanks to the political influence of pharmaceutical lobbyists, it can’t negotiate lower drug prices. That seems like a relatively easy thing to fix.

COVID-19 Failings – There have been many, but most obvious was the inability of private companies to react quickly enough and at sufficient scale to serve the needs of people on the front lines of this pandemic, including medical staff, first responders, and even those in retail and the supply chain. They all need personal protection equipment (PPE), testing, and more, and the federal government should have stepped in with the War Powers Act to satisfy that need. But instead, state and local governments were left to fend for themselves, even competing for the same supplies and bidding up prices against each other and federal agencies. Meanwhile, the private sector enjoyed increased profits from price gouging, with no federal oversight. 

CEO Incentives – By law, modern corporations must serve the investment interests of shareholders above all else, even the public good. And with compensation closely tied to quarterly share price, CEOs are financially encouraged to make relatively short-term decisions, such as prioritizing easy expense cuts (eg. employee wages) over the difficult task of increasing revenue with new products or markets. This is why we saw so many corporations spend windfall savings from the Trump tax cuts on buying back stock. With fewer shares in circulation, the value of each share shot up without any business improvement. And these buy-backs make our overall economy look healthier than it actually is, giving political cover to a struggling Trump administration.

Interlocking Directorates – We all know what happens when one bad apple is put into a basket with otherwise good apples. They all go bad. That happens too with interlocking directorates, such as when corporate executives sit on other boards and approve each other’s compensation without sufficient oversight from shareholders.

This practice widens the income gap between workers and executives. Potentially worse is that bad practices and behaviors of one corporation can quickly infect the others. Like schools of fish, geese and cattle that stampede in one direction following a lead cow, if one corporation increases profits through automation, offshoring, and mass layoffs; others quickly follow, often blindly. Interlocking directorates also allow corporations to gain more political influence as a group, promoting policies that often go against public interests and society. In my view, interlocking directorates should be illegal.

Monopolized Markets – Without strong competition, there is little incentive for companies to improve service & product quality, drive down prices, or pay competitive wages. And without strong regulatory oversight and deterrents, executives will keep seeking ways to eliminate competition. A “slap on the wrist” fine can be seen as an acceptable cost of doing business, so maybe the Justice Department needs to get tough and strengthen enforcement of antitrust laws.

One of Dr. Howard Green’s 50 Healthcare Predictions for 2019 include Health Insurance companies continuing to be exempt from Federal monopolization, collusion and racketeering laws via the Federal McCarran Ferguson Act. (https://www.iii.org/article/antitrust-law-and-insurance/).

Monopolized Workers – As industries get more concentrated, not only do consumers see fewer places to buy goods and services, but also workers have fewer employment options and less leverage over their compensation.

Weakened Labor Unions  – Corporations have cooperated with each other in pressing for Right to Work laws that weaken labor unions and limit collective bargaining, further weakening the wage negotiation power of workers.

Non-compete clauses – “A non-compete agreement is a contract that an employee signs with an employer that states that the employee will not compete with the employer when he or she leaves the business for a given period within a specific geographic area. Although these agreements originally were meant for high-ranking executives and managers, they have been used increasingly with low-wage, hourly employees.” Such agreements restrict workers from taking other jobs paying more.

Health Insurance Lock-in – Prior to World War II, most Americans paid for their own medical care, either directly to the provider, or beginning in the 1930s, through the Blue Cross nonprofit health insurance entities. But as the federal government implemented wage controls, companies began supplementing wages with employer-paid health insurance. The unintended consequence was a reliance on tax advantages that made it easier for employers to keep workers.

Employer insurance makes it difficult for workers to seek higher wages or better opportunities elsewhere if any member of the family has a preexisting condition, because they could end up paying much more for healthcare or be unable to get insurance at all. The ACA, of course, fixed all that, but the Trump administration and Republican Congress has slowly been undoing those protections.

No other nation has as many uninsured. An estimated 27.5 million Americans were uninsured before the pandemic, and millions more had junk policies with inadequate coverage for COVID-19 treatment. Now tens of millions more are losing their jobs and employer health insurance. 

Outsourcing – When companies outsource work that was once done internally to outside contractors, they no longer have to pay competitive wages or give advancement opportunities, health insurance, retirement, or profit-sharing benefits. It’s no wonder corporate productivity has increased, along with executive salaries, while worker wages have stagnated.

Automation – Tech innovation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and high-speed Internet all contribute to increased productivity with less labor, even replacing human workers with machines or enabling work to be outsourced offshore to exploit cheaper labor.

Flattening Org structure – Technology can help managers supervise the work or more and more workers, flattening the organization structure and pushing more profits to the top. Assuming wages are always less than what workers actually contribute in profit, the more employees a manager has, the more money he earns. Capital investments in technologies that improve productivity trough outsourcing or widening a manager’s span of control offer high returns.

Income from Capital – Regular income from physical & mental labor is taxed at a higher rate than income from capital investments, encouraging business owners to invest even more but pay even less. Unfortunately, the tax code has not kept up with this shift in income. We need to fix that and place higher taxes on capital gains, taxing the robots and other tech investments at a higher rate than taxing the humans.

Privilege – Privilege can be described as an advantage, liberty or benefit that’s bestowed upon some people, such as those born white and affluent, but not others. My article on Health Care as a Right or Privilege includes an excellent video example where race participants gained a head start if …

• They never wondered where their next meal would come from
• They grew up with a father figure in the home and both parents are still married
• They had access to a private education or a tutor
• College was provided without an athletic scholarship
• They never had to worry about a cellphone being shut off
• Mom and dad helped with the bills

Blacks and Latinos are dying at a higher rate from COVID-19 than privileged whites in big cities like New York. While some argue that it’s because the current administration doesn’t care as much about them, it’s largely because of how they’re affected by the pillars of health (nutrition, exercise, stress management, and sleep).

Besides being less likely to have insurance and affordable healthcare, living in poverty with food deserts leads to obesity & diabetes. Their inner-city neighborhoods may lack safe places to play or exercise, and the stress from constant fear of a being racially targeted can impact sleep quality and weaken their immune systems. Living in high-density neighborhoods is compounded when more people per household, because there’s not as much separation. And since so many black and brown people work in “essential” jobs, they’re less able to adhere to social networking guidelines or have the needed protection.

Incarceration – The private prison business is booming as President Trump delivers on his campaign promise to crack down on immigrants here illegally. Already, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world, and the highest per-capita incarceration rate, with minorities overrepresented. African-Americans, for example, make up 33% of the federal and state prison population even though they’re just 12% of the total US population. We no longer have debtor’s prisons, but inmates who can’t make bail can sit in jail for months or years awaiting trial, making it more difficult for them to prepare their defense. They’re also more likely to plead guilty and tend to get tougher sentences than those awaiting trial outside.

Much of the inequality in our criminal justice system is based on privilege. Dennis Hastert, former Republican House Speaker, got just 15 months in jail after raping 5 little boys, one of whom committed suicide. But Shona Banda had her son take away from her and is facing 28 years in prison for using medical marijuana to treat his chronic, life-threatening disease. How is that for American Justice?

Covid-19 poses a heightened threat in the dense living conditions of jails and prisons.

School Vouchers  – According to Tom Luce, Chairman of Texas 2036, “Average Texas family income is set to ‘decline’ by 2036 without significantly improved education.” As education goes, so go our economy, quality of life, and future, because Public education effects everything.

At least 65% of new jobs will need 14+ years of education, not 12, but even as Texas added 850,000 new students in the past decade, funding of public education was cut by $2.5 billion. It has been done in other conservative states too. Meanwhile, Austin lawmakers cut taxes for businesses and padded the State’s reserve funds and have pushed for tax-funded vouchers for home schooling, charter schools, and parochial schools under the guise of School Choice. This is all designed to help white evangelical Christians and disadvantage minorities.

Delayed Retirement – For the first time in almost 60 years, 20% of America’s elderly are participating in the labor force. They don’t have enough money saved to retire. The surge in seniors going to back work or working longer has been driven by declining benefits and savings in recent decades. Meanwhile, Trump and Congressional Republicans have proposed deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, likely making it even harder to retire. In a nation as wealthy as ours, workers should be able to retire with dignity and not be forced to spend their entire lives trying to make ends meet.

A Billionaire Perspective – Extreme inequality and growing political instability are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory, says billionaire entrepreneur Nick Hanauer. In his 17 minute visionary TED talk, Hanauer dismantles the mantra that “greed is good.” He describes that idea as not only morally corrosive, but also scientifically wrong, and he lays out a new theory of economics powered by reciprocity and cooperation.

AMERICA’S BROKEN HEALTHCARE

Even though the U.S. has the most expensive health care system in the world, we rank dead last in terms of efficiency, equity, outcomes, and longevity. The primary cause of our broken healthcare system is our broken political system, and the extreme inequality that fuels it. How do we unrig this system? Watch the video below.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – The ACA (or Obamacare) was designed to address these problems, extending healthcare to millions more people and flattening the rising cost curve. To help more people afford insurance coverage, the ACA included subsidies for the poor and adopted insurance-mandate proposals from the conservative Heritage Foundation to expand the insurance risk pool.

The overall goal was to expand insurance coverage and help cut costs by minimizing the need for medical care in the first place, through an emphasis on wellness, prevention, and positive outcomes. All of this would support a healthy and productive workforce.

Yes, the ACA had its problems, but it was a good start and has become too popular to easily repeal and replace. Improvements are still needed, but they won’t likely come from private industry, because natural incentives prevent that. And instead of trying to fix what’s wrong with the ACA, Republicans and the current administration have worked to sabotage its progress.

Public Health – Historically, the biggest health improvements have come from public investments in clean water, sewage systems, immunization programs, and smoking cessation. Universal health care could be another investment in public health. It’s the key difference between the U.S. and the other industrial nations that view healthcare as a human right.

President Trump closed the Global Health Security office that was established by Bush, strengthened by Obama, and for 15 years monitory any future potential pandemic under the National Security Council. 

Is Health Care a Right of Citizenship or Individual Responsibility? Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and public health researcher, asks the question that’s been dividing Americans. He offers important insights missing from the Republican push to repeal and replace the ACA. Besides understanding what other nations do, we need to understand the different perspectives of our own citizens. This amazing must-read article is a good companion to my article on Single-Payer.

Wrong Objectives – Health should be the goal, not profit from treatment. As Benjamin Franklin said centuries ago, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” But we seem not to have listened that lesson. Our “sick care” system is focused on disease management, not health, and it encourages medical practitioners to view patients as customers, diagnosing and treating their symptoms to keep them coming back, paying for each new test, drug, treatment or procedure. We stay in the grip of a very big industry that doesn’t want to stop making money and instead wants to expand.

Industry Incentives – With 2018 revenues of $3.65 trillion, the profit motive has infected the healthcare industry like a cancer that threatens our very lives and livelihood. We spend almost 18% of GDP on healthcare, which is twice as much as what other advanced nations spend per capita, yet we still live sicker and die younger. But the medical industrial complex fights fiercely against any reforms that could cut overall costs in half. Such reforms would result in a $1.5 trillion loss of revenue and affect profits and jobs.

Political Influence – The perversely profitable medical cartel has stolen trillions of dollars per year from the middle class, risking our health while protecting ill-gained profits with huge political influence “investments.” Insurers, hospitals, drug companies, testing companies, and medical equipment providers spend three times more on political lobbying than the military industrial complex, according to Steven Brill’s 2013 TIME magazine special report, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us. They do that to protect the status quo and their profits, and they’ve seen huge returns on that investment. The ROI of such investments, and lessons from Trump’s tax cuts, cause me to believe 2020 will be the more expensive Presidential election of all time and by a long shot.

Doctor Incentives – Doctors in medical school primarily learn how to diagnose ailments and treat symptoms so they can fit into the healthcare ecosystem. They spend relatively little time on the pillars of health (nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress management). That’s because the big bucks are in treatment, not prevention. And as they graduate, their goal is paying off student loan debt, so they succumb to financial incentives to test more, prescribe more, and do more. That’s how the fee-for-service model works.

Here’s an extreme example of misaligned incentives from the documentary, Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare. A doctor who installs a stent in a clogged artery can earn $1,500 for 5 minutes of work, but if she spends 45 minutes talking with the patient about how to avoid such conditions, she’d only earn about $15. Ah yes, fee-for-service.

Pharmaceutical Incentives – In 1923, two Canadian scientists won the Nobel Prize for discovering insulin. They decided to give away the patent for free because they wanted insulin to be available to diabetics at no charge. For turning over their patent to production, they agreed to receive just $1 each in compensation. Since then, however, drug companies monopolized the insulin market and now charge diabetics $500 per month to survive. The more important a drug is to saving life or relieving extreme pain, the larger the profit potential. This isn’t healthcare; it’s extortion.

Even worse is the side effects that some drugs cause, creating opportunities for new drugs to treat those side effects. Unfortunately, curing patients is not a sustainable business model, but treating side effects, and even causing them, is.

Patient Incentives – Convenience and cost drive consumer behavior, as we tend to make short-term decisions and eat whatever is cheap, tasty, and available. But the big healthcare cost comes from treating the result of eating cheap and unhealthy food. As portrayed in HBO’s The Weight of the Nation, if trends continue through 2020, 20% of healthcare spending, or up to $1 trillion/year, will be spent on obesity related conditions. Talk about market opportunity!

Marketers in the food chain prey on these natural tendencies and profit from the sale of unhealthy processed foods. So does agribusiness.

AMERICA’S BROKEN POLITICS

Political Corruption – The biggest problem with American Capitalism is corruption from wealthy special interests that creates an uneven playing field and discourages competition. But politicians deserve blame too, for accepting their bribe money and doing their bidding. So does the US Supreme Court for allowing it with the Citizens United decision that largely legalized corruption as we see it today.

Citizens United gave corporations the same free speech rights as citizen people and defined campaign contributions as a form of speech, unwittingly allowing politicians to accept unlimited sums of dark money, and leaving nothing to prevent billion dollar “investments” in political influence. But why stop at a billion?

For perspective, watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expose the problem of dark money in politics in this 5-min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_gxiMTIudA. As a result of political corruption, just 4% of the US population has confidence in Congress, according to the video at the end of this article. No wonder voter turnout is so low. This was intentional.

American Democracy May Be Dying. As New York Times economist Paul Krugman wrote, “If you aren’t terrified both by COVID-19 and by its economic consequences, you haven’t been paying attention.” He was responding to a partisan 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision this week that allowed Wisconsin to hold its Primary election during the peak of the deadly pandemic. The ruling ignored distancing rules and put the lives of citizens at risk. It was also consistent with other Republican voter suppression efforts.

The Wisconsin legislature has previously used extreme gerrymandering, and in the 2018 midterms, Democrats won 53% of the state-wide vote but only 36% of the seats. This time they used the pandemic as an excuse to close polling locations across the state, closing 175 locations in Milwaukee and leaving just 5 for a city with the largest black population. To make matters worse, voting officials were unable to process vote-by-mail requests in time, meaning there were long lines to vote in person, and people had to stand there for hours.

The Real Lawmakers are not those elected to represent us, but the attorneys for corporations, special interests, and wealthy individuals. Lobbyists shop their completed bills to friendly politicians, along with campaign contributions and other legalized bribes. The politicians welcome both the money and the expertise that industry representatives bring, and they then introduce and promote their bills through the process of becoming law. So in most cases, lawmakers don’t write laws.

Campaign Finance – Politicians today have to spend some 70% of their time fundraising, and in many districts they have to bring in $45,000 every day to stay in office. Now consider that less than 1% of Americans give more than $10,000 to political campaigns, and you can see why politicians rely on the top 0.05%. People for decades have called for campaign finance reforms and term limits to help level the playing field in the political process, but those in power resist. To demonstrate how much corporate money flows into our corrupted political system, Ben Cohen drops BBs into a metal can in this short (2:24) video.

Limited Voting Rights – In 2013, the US Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that was meant to combat racial discrimination in voting. Since then, several states previously covered under preclearance have returned to their old practices of restricting voting rights. Here are a few examples:

Gerrymandering – Rigged is a new documentary that spotlights gerrymandering as a cornerstone of voter suppression in Texas, where voting districts are drawn to win more seats than otherwise suggested by population demographics.

Voter ID – Laws requiring a government-issued photo ID can disenfranchise voters who don’t own a car or have a driver’s license, including college students, the poor, and the elderly.

Other Techniques are covered in Politics, Voter Suppression, and Modern Killing Fields. They include: voter registration purges, poll taxes and literacy tests, intentional confusion, inconvenient polling locations and times, voter fatigue, onerous candidate qualifications, poverty, incarceration (inmates can’t vote), and healthcare (dead people don’t vote either).

BIG Money has corrupted both our politics and our healthcare. $3.15 Billion was spent on lobbying in 2016, which amounts to $5.9 Million per member of Congress. With healthcare as the top issue, the 2020 Presidential election promises to be the most expensive in history, by far.

The powerful US Chamber of Commerce has pledged to fight any efforts by Congress to move toward single-payer healthcare. So has

• The Federation of American Hospitals,
• America’s Health Insurance Plans,
• The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America,
• Partnership for America’s Health Care Future,
• American Medical Association,
• The American Hospital Association,
• The nation’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans,
• The National Retail Federation, and
• the pharmaceuticals lobby.

The question is WHY? For the answer, just follow the money – the BIG Money.

The ROI of Influence Investments – The 2018 Trump tax cuts proved to the Koch brothers and other billionaires that Political Investments Have Huge Returns. The Koch’s strategic investments in conservative think tanks, conservative media, conservative judges (through the Federalist Society), and conservative politicians (campaign finance) paid off handsomely.

Voters Have Near Zero Influence – Watch the video below to see how little influence the public has on lawmaking. A Princeton University study showed that a policy issue has the same 30% chance of passing if there is no public support, or if there is 100% public support. It still has the same 30% chance, showing how little influence the public has. Now that’s discouraging.

Plutocracy – America was founded on self-governance, but we now live in a corporatocracy run by dynastic plutocratic families, corporate oligarchs, and international banksters, many of whom are members of secret societies, rooted in self-interest, greed, and power … not Love and Wisdom. Even though they’re less than 1% of the population, they own at least 40% of the wealth. And with that wealth, they dominate the politicians, the mainstream media, the financial system, the legal system, and the corporations.

Unequal Senate Representation – According to ProPublica, the upper chamber of Congress “has become a firewall for a shrinking minority of mostly white, conservative voters across the country to block policies they don’t agree with and safeguard the voter suppression tactics that shore up Republican power.” Even though the Senate is split 50-50, Democratic senators currently represent some 40 million more voters than Republican senators. It will get much worse by 2040, when 70% of the population – in the 15 largest states – will have just 30 senators compared to the 70 senators representing the 35 smaller states, giving Republicans out-sized influence.

HOW TO FIX THE CORRUPTED SYSTEM

Last year Elizabeth Warren introduced her Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act in the Senate, and this year House Democrats passed HR-1, a bundle of sweeping anti-corruption measures for stamping out the influence of money in politics and expanding voting rights. Both bills cover three main planks: (1) campaign finance reform, (2) strengthening the government’s ethics laws, and (3) expanding voting rights — issues that 87% of voters from both parties support. These ideas from the Anti-Corruption Act have strong public support (91% among Democrats and 83% among Republicans):

• End Gerrymandering
• Overhaul Lobbying & Ethics Laws
• Transparent Political Spending
• Give Every Voter a $50 Tax Voucher
• Automatic Voter Registration and Vote From Home Ballots
• Ranked Choice Voting to allow independents and 3rd parties to run without spoiling elections

Because Congressional politicians have no incentive to pass laws that go against their own best interest, maybe it’s time to go around them, with city and state laws where we can have more influence. To do that requires getting organized, politically active, and building coalitions that include everyone – liberals, conservatives, and moderates – with a unifying focus on fighting Corruption.

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