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By Root 586 0

The U.S. government pioneered such thinking with the establishment of national parks in the Yellowstone National Park Act of 1872, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant; the American Antiquities Act of 1906, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt; and the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916, signed by President Woodrow Wilson. The new National Park Service was directed “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”6 In a world rife with environmental degradation, such future-oriented stewardship has become a matter of survival.

The president should devote part of every State of the Union speech to describing the implications of our actions today—in science and technology, environmental threats, demography and aging, saving and investment—for an average American in the year 2050. This alone would open the eyes of the citizenry to our stewardship for the future. After all, today’s newborns will be a mere forty years old at midcentury. We need not presume to shape the distant future; we need only respect the prospects of those newly born today.

End the Corporatocracy

As long as practical politics revolves around raising large sums for media campaigns, America’s corporatocracy will remain in place and the downward economic slide will continue. During the past decade, the curtain has been pulled away from the Wizards of Washington who manipulate campaign financing, lobbying outlays, and revolving doors, and the public now understands the flow of corporate money much better than in the past. Politicians would be foolhardy to believe otherwise. Rather than despair, I therefore ask instead what might be done. How can the broken system be fixed? For that, we need to identify practical steps that could extricate the federal government from the clutches of the lobbies.

Provide public campaign financing. No longer should we let Obama or any other supposedly reform-minded presidential candidate walk away from public campaign finance, as Obama did in 2008. The Democrats and Republicans are equally tarnished by private campaign finance, and neither party should be trusted. Federal campaign financing should be extended to congressional elections.

Provide free media time. Broadcast TV should be required to set aside a fixed amount of time for free media according to explicit allocation rules.

Ban campaign contributions from lobbying firms. Lobbying firms are a cancer on the political process. Employees of registered lobbying firms should be banned from making campaign contributions to candidates or political parties.

Stop the revolving door. Senior federal employees should be barred from employment in registered lobbying firms for a minimum of at least three years from their departure from federal service. They should also be prohibited from accepting employment in any company that lobbied their agency during their tenure in public office.

Take away the trough. Corporations currently view campaign financing as a corporate investment, to obtain tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, no-bid government contracts, earmarks, and other perquisites of power. By directly opposing such abuses of the federal budget, corporations will have less reason to try to buy politicians through campaign financing.

When Obama became president, many of us hoped he would chase the moneylenders out of the Capitol. The financial crisis had exposed the tawdry side of Wall Street and politics and the intertwined tentacles connecting the two. Yet before the first stock market bell of his presidency had rung, Obama had installed a pro-banking team at the White House, led by Larry Summers. For the first two years of his administration, he sided mostly with the bankers, providing bailouts but asking for and getting too little in return regarding restraints on salaries, bonuses, and other abusive behaviors of the past. The bankers, not surprisingly, continued to