follow-the-money.thumbnail.jpgItem: Jane and Slinkerwink sponsor a contest to see which member of the Nervous-Nellie Caucus is the most indebted to lobbyists. That’s the caucus whose members claim to be mainstream Democrats in tune with America, and whose seats are safely Democratic, but who for some as-yet-unknown reason quail at the thought of backing something three-quarters of Americans and almost all Democrats want.

Item: Glenn Greenwald and legendary journalist and political observer Bill Moyers agree that what’s ruining the Democrats is their looking to corporations — generally the same ones that fund the GOP — for the cash needed to win elections.

Item: Paul Krugman describes the culture of corporate lobbyist control of Congress — a culture that didn’t exist as recently as thirty years ago — as the main obstacle to democracy in general and meaningful health care reform in particular:

And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.

That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are “centrist” Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money.

I think we all get the picture here. It’s about the money.

So how do we shut off the money spigot? How do we get our democracy back from the obscenely rich and obscenely greedy corporate entities that hijacked it?

Campaign finance reform legislation such as McCain-Feingold, while well-intentioned (at least on Russ Feingold’s part), has been laughably easy to thwart. Increasingly, pulling some if not all private money out of the campaign cycle is looking like the only way to go — which is where Public Campaign comes in.

Interestingly enough, a growing number of businesses are starting to back this idea, as shown by the wide support in much of the business community for the Fair Elections Now Act, which would promote public financing and rein in the amount of private cash spent during an election season. Why? Because many businesses are sick of having to spend so much dough on lobbyists — especially when their bigger competitors can afford more and better lobbyists. Putting an end to the lobbyist arms race levels the playing field and allows small businesses as well as individuals a place at the Capitol Hill table.

However, the really big money is so dug into their fur-lined platinum foxholes on the Hill that taking them out of the picture will be difficult to do with a frontal assault. That’s why the Clean Elections campaign started from the state and local levels, and is meeting with surprising success at those levels. (Of course, one of the first things that Republican politicians demand to be sacrificed to the balanced-budget gods are state-run clean elections programs. Gosh, I’m so surprised.)

This is the sort of thing that anyone, regardless of party, can and should get behind if they want their country back.