GELFAND’S WORLD-This is another article about the way that politicians and the mass media grab onto inadequate, partial approaches to serious problems in the attempt to show that they are doing something. We talked about "congestion pricing" on freeways a few days ago, but that's just one example of the bigger problem, which is basically the source of all the other problems: It's the fact that politicians have to beg for campaign dollars from wealthy interests. Probably the best example of a partial, inadequate approach to this most serious of problems is the decades-long fight to demand that campaign contributions be revealed to the public, typically in more and more magical ways.
Proponents of this approach ask for instantaneous reporting of donations that goes online within a few days or even hours.
We have lots of real world experience to show that decades of campaign finance reports haven't solved anything. The best financed candidates still win most of the time, pretty much without regard to who is paying their bills. There are several explanations. First is that winning candidates are all a part of the system as it exists. That means that they are effective fundraisers. Local political clubs hardly even bother to consider the candidates who are not big-time fundraisers, because they realize how futile this is. Second, the mass media don't publicize who is getting what. Again, that's partially a realization that everybody is part of the system as a whole, but the newspapers could at least point out some of the very worst of the worst, and they don't even seem to care enough to do that.
Finally, it would appear that big money swamps out the little bit of campaign finance reporting that manages to get through, perhaps because the candidates with the most money fill your mailbox with glossy postcards. During intense campaigns, I have received as many as 3 postcards for the same candidate in one day. Meanwhile, the underfunded straight shooter is lucky to be able to do 2 mailings over the course of a whole campaign.
o what is the counter to this limited and obviously inadequate approach to entrenched and legalized corruption?
It turns out that there is an approach that works, and it has proved itself, with a few warts, in other places.
It's called full public financing. It has been proposed in California and has failed to be enacted, sometimes by enormous margins when it hits the ballot. For a system that would serve the voters well, it has not sold itself very well.
I'm not going to provide the full 30,000 word essay on why public financing is important. Instead, I'll summarize a few advantages and then link you to a report that provides the argument based on facts and history.
So how do you make such a system work, explained in as few words as possible?
In any such system, you obviously want to filter out the total flakes so you don't give public money to every crackpot who is able to file a candidate statement. The way that this is done is by requiring that in order to qualify for public financing, candidates have to obtain some minimum number of signatures and some number of small donations. For example, we might require that City Council candidates get 500 signatures and 500 separate donations of $5 or more from district residents. By the way, getting those signatures is actually harder than it sounds, as anybody who has ever run for office can attest. Getting total strangers to contribute a $5 check is even harder. The filter does work.
Candidates spend a lot less time doing fundraising (estimated at half of all campaign time in most places under the current system) and more time hearing from the voters.
When elected, publicly financed candidates are less beholden to the monied interests that currently finance campaigns.
Legislatures that have a majority of publicly funded members are more likely to pass legislation that supports the public as a whole, and less likely to do favors for the wealthy donors.
The role of lobbyists in such legislatures is reduced. Lobbyists continue to exist since they can provide information and insights, but they no longer call the shots the way they do in other legislatures.
I'm going to summarize by providing a link to a report on the Connecticut experiment in public financing. It is a moderately long read and comes from an organization that supports public financing, but it is convincing. You can download it here.
There is one wart that has emerged, which involves attempts to equalize the playing field when some election race includes a candidate who chooses to ignore public financing and raise lots and lots of money the old fashioned way. I've always felt that attempts to add on money to publicly financed campaigns to "level the playing field" is not the way to go. It's now illegal anyway. Here is the story.
We'll start with the recent US Supreme Court decision that knocked out a part of the Arizona and Maine public financing systems. I would like to suggest that the Supreme Court decision didn't do as much harm to the overall concept as some people would like to think. In fact, it would make life easier for getting a system passed in Los Angeles. First, the argument: Suppose that you or I decide to run for the City Council. We get our required signatures and small donations and qualify for public financing. Then, just as we think we are making some progress, a new candidate files for the same seat and does not agree to public financing because he has pretty good prospects of raising millions of dollars in the usual way, and therefore has the chance to snuff your campaign. You are looking at your publicly financed $175,000 which will have to compete with your opponent's two million.
It's the counterargument against simple public financing, and for some reason, the people who have tried to push public financing obsess about it and come up with the wrong solution. Basically, they add provisos that in the event that your opponent does not join the public financing group, the state (or city) will send you even more money so that you will be more competitive.
In 2011, the Supreme Court said that although public financing is itself OK, the provision for competing with private funding is not. I won't try to explain the reasoning, other than to mention their argument that campaign contributions are a form of free speech, and for the state to jump in and compete with your free speech (by supplying the money for the opposition argument alone) is to throw a hurdle in the way of free speech. Arguments coming from the losing side in this decision are at least equally persuasive in my view, but it's the law of the land right now.
My argument is twofold. First, there are states still operating under the more limited form of public financing, and some of them look like they are doing well under it. Here's a report that includes both 2010 (pre-verdict) and 2012 (post-verdict) results. [http://www.publicampaign.org/CleanElectionsWinners] In several states -- mostly the ones with the more comprehensive programs and the most time in service of these programs -- the state legislatures continue to be predominantly filled by publicly financed candidates. This may be a function of being lower population states, or it might just be a function of voters enjoying the benefits of having less corrupt systems to live under. Anecdotal accounts from both voters and elected officials tend to support, at least in part, the growth of public sentiment supporting a clean money system.
The other side of my argument is, I think, the more important. When we try to create a system that provides some help, no matter how modest, to the cleanly funded candidate, we are trying to improve the system as a whole. The way I look at it, if there are 15 members on the Los Angeles City Council and only 11 are there through public funding, then we will have an enormously improved system. Not only a majority, but a controlling majority would be publicly funded. That would mean that in 4 districts, the candidates who ran under public funding and lost would feel that they have a gripe, but to the city as a whole, there would be a huge benefit.
Not only that, but we can expect that there will be a learning curve for the voters. As one district after another elects a cleanly funded candidate, the rest of the city will begin to see the benefits. I would expect that in the first few years of such a system, the winning publicly funded candidates would get to do a little soap-boxing whenever the City Council dutifully supports the wealthy interests against the interests of the majority. We would finally have some useful public debate, and out of that, some voters would learn. We don't need 100% of the votes in each district. We only need enough, and that's 50% plus one vote.
One major improvement we could add to a system of public financing would be to allow candidates the chance to add the words "a publicly financed candidate" alongside their names on the ballot. This would give the voters a chance to sort out the clean candidates from the bought candidates. If the voters are given this kind of information and still go with the guy who sent them 40 glossy postcards full of attacks, then that's what democracy decrees. The evidence from other states is that the voters themselves have joined the reform movement by electing a strong majority of clean candidates. And by the way, the publicly funded elected legislators have a chance to undercut the bought candidates when it comes to legislation, and therefore teach the voters a lesson about the limits of falling for big money campaigns.
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MISC: In a previous article, I reported on a federal lawsuit against the parking ticket system. I received an email from Jeff Galfer, who points out that there are actually two different federal lawsuits, of which his was the first to be filed. You can read his arguments and additional comments by people who have signed his petition at Support the Class Action Lawsuit Against the Los Angeles Parking Violations Bureau (Xerox) here.
If I may be allowed to offer my own editorial remark to Jeff's contribution, let me just say that there seems to be a large number of people who are seriously angry about the way the appeals process jerks them around. I got an email from a woman whose car was parked in Palo Alto at the time her alleged parking violation happened in Los Angeles. Not only that, but she was, at the time, recovering from joint replacement surgery and wouldn't have been traveling anywhere.
I would predict that a ballot initiative that took an aggressive approach to obliterating the current profit-based appeal system would get the requisite number of signatures in a few days. The required number is less than 62,000, plus perhaps half again as many just to be sure.
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My recent article on the Fastrak (aka "The Lexus Lanes") got a few comments. Jeff Jacobberger makes the reasonable point that with proportional pricing, the number of dollars on the freeway signboard wouldn't necessarily be what your car is charged. I don't see this as insurmountable from the technological perspective.
The transponder can be built to include an LED screen which tells you the real charge. Nothing technically difficult, as the transponder just has to take a signal from the Fastrak system and multiply the base number by your car's multiplier. Presto, you've got the final price displayed. They could even add on an audio announcement.
Another commenter argues that the Fastrak revenues are going to good works, in particular providing services for those who use public transportation.
Aside from reasonable skepticism that this will continue and is not, in itself a smokescreen (remember that the city got two hundred million dollars from the federal government in advance, which supposedly went for such improvements), there are at least three responses.
The first is to congratulate the MTA for making some lemonade out of this lemon, if in fact the improvements continue.
The second is that we probably can't trust the MTA to continue to make such improvements, considering its overall track record.
The third argument, and in my mind the most directly pertinent, is that tens of thousands of people are being punished by daily traffic jams in order to accommodate the wealthy and, given the above argument, some people who use mass transit.
The argument is easily rebutted, by pointing out that supplying better and more frequent bus service on lanes that are no longer toll lanes would simply equalize things for the rest of us drivers.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 36
Pub: May 2, 2014