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Mr. Potter, thank you for stepping forward with your interviews and book. You are in a very unique position to help even more than you know. If you agree that campaign donations and corporate lobbying caused your industry to thrive at our expense, then please review the following articleand lend your expertise at "contact at Political Finance Reform dot org". You might be integral to putting a stop to all of this. Thank you Corporate Special Interest Influence Can Be Eliminated from Politics – Here’s How "Let us all pray for the day when we can look back on “The Era of Legalized Political Bribery” as we do slavery – and wonder in amazement how we ever allowed it to exist in the first place." JP Sayles Clearly our political system and government are broken and “Legalized Political Bribery” appears to be responsible. The following strategy proposed in Political Finance Reform will show that by redirecting 1/1000th of our revenue, it’s possible to ostracize the corporations and repair our political system. The Problem: Most politicians cannot gain office, maintain office, live like royalty while in office, retire like world class leaders, or even avoid a precipitous fall from grace upon job loss - without corporate money. Further, the need for a good policy record has been replaced by corporate sponsored political ads, made possible by 21st century media technologies our founding fathers could not have anticipated. Therefore, in the 21st century, anything short of corporate capitulation appears to be political suicide. Considering all of this, if you were an ambitious 21st century politician, who would you be loyal to? It certainly appears that whomever finances our politicians will win their loyalty. Therefore, allowing corporations to finance our politics is irrational and precisely what’s broken. What should be clear to us by now: Only 100% financial dependency upon the masses will provide the masses with the undivided loyalty of our politicians. Political Finance Reform – Dependency Equates To Loyalty Clearly the only truly substantive answer is to somehow find a way to coerce/cajole our lawmakers to legislate new law that would make it illegal for them to receive any funds and/or benefits from any source other than tax dollars. This is our proverbial catch 22. Logic mandates that it will be imperative to ensure equal, if not improved alternatives from tax dollars. Perhaps the missing piece to achieving meaningful campaign finance reform is not just replacing campaign fund contributions with tax dollars before and during office – but also the potential riches that corporations provide after office. The cost to finance political campaigns has averaged about $4 billion per election year over the past three election cycles (’04, ’06, ’08). Clearly we must finance this from public funds. Lawmakers with excess campaign funds (war chests, not to mention perks) can live like kings while in office and can make millions per year working as lobbyists for corporations upon retirement. Here’s the possible answer: It would cost approximately an additional $1.2 billion per year to offset what corporations currently provide while in office and in the political afterlife by adding a zero to their pay and improving their retirement benefits, ($25K per yr served) but their financial connections to corporations must be severed while serving and after serving. This dramatic improvement in personal financial benefits could also sufficiently incentivize them to legislate this systemic reform. The loyalty that 100% dependency will bring could possibly save trillions of dollars and quite possibly democracy itself. When combined with no longer needing to beg for campaign funds and the newfound ability to be honorable, would they say no to this offer? Would you? That’s win/win, corporations gone. The bottom line result: Corporate special interest groups will no longer own our government. The Strategic Redistribution of Already Outgoing but Completely Wasted Tax Dollars The conservative estimate to repair our broken political system by removing corporate money from our politics and replacing it with taxpayer dollars should only be about $5.2 billion per year, representing about 1/10 of 1% of our federal revenue. If we can fix precisely that which destroys our political system – and economy – by simply redirecting approximately 1/1000th of our revenue, who would say “no”? The only question remaining is: Can we get past our rage towards congress to act logically? Our desire to punish and/or remove our congressional leaders, while justifiable, nevertheless may have blinded us to the answer; designing a better system, demanding that new system, while simultaneously incentivizing Congress to legislate this systemic reform. Removal does not appear to be the answer because simply replacing politicians with new ones – or even changing parties – is not working and changes nothing, literally rendering our voting power impotent. With the money on the table, perhaps we could eliminate political bribery by “reforming the way our politics are financed” in a single, resounding, all encompassing, win/win constitutional amendment. It’s time to adapt and upgrade our political system from “1776 Democracy 1.0” to “21st Century Democracy 2.0”. Had we implemented this upgrade to our system a decade ago, would we revile Congress today? With our politicians’ undivided loyalty, what would bank, healthcare, energy and tax reform look like? end article Mr. Potter, please contact us, you might be able to help stop this from happening again.