Is this my second of the day? If so, I apologize and will refrain from one tomorrow! I think proving the corruption is the point, of course. I value...no, I revere the work of the press in providing information so that the public knows what is going and is able to make better informed decisions. I think it is more important for the electorate to evaluate the decision to protect cab owners from more competition than to know who made contributions to the decision makers. If regulation of competition makes sense to the voters, then so be it. If it doesn't make sense, the voters have the opportunity to elect others to office or, horror of horrors, litigation is always an option. I do not believe that campaign donations cannot influence policy. I do believe that policy decisions need to be evaluated for their appropriateness rather than by the source of the funds used to elect candidates. The press should report the fundraisers and the bundling of contributions by all parties. I favor the publication of campaign finances to the extent required by the statutes and to the extent recipients and donors agree. I personally do not chose to have my contributions made public. (Mine are really no secret since I decorate my lawn liberally with lawn signs!) I don't know myself how much it takes to be bought. And I agree that money seems to pervade most aspects of American public life. Is money pervasive in election campaigns? Can it be denied? Of course not. Is that pervasiveness necessarily bad? I don't think so. I think that the press has been very efficient in bringing to light those engaged in both illegal and ethically questionable behavior. Law enforcement punish those who break the laws and the public punish the ethically questionable. See the Clintons vis-a-vis gifts, Rostenkowski vis-a-vis stamps, Dave Durenberger vis-a-vis housing subsidies, and Spiro Agnew vis-a-vis outright bribes. Follow the money seems to be the refrain. I prefer to follow the policy decisions. If I don't like a policy decision, I go after the legislative history and the rationale for the policy. I let people know if I am opposed to a policy and I certainly work for other candidates. Knowing where the money comes from should, in my opinion, be a small piece of the evaluation of a candidate or incumbent. It is possible that someone without the resources to make a campaign donation has some of the same interests as downtown retailers: jobs, good public transportation, clean and safe streets. Or, real estate developers urging subsidies for building housing: affordable housing, jobs, etc. I agree that technology should be used to report contribution data to the extent required by law. I trust the public to vote their self-interest. I urge everyone to get as many facts as they possibly can assimilate. The facts I am lobbying for are those surrounding the public policies actuated everyday at City Hall or in the County Building or the State Capitol. Read the legislation, the histories, the rules adopted for legislative implementation. Use your computers, telephones, etc., to question and question and question. It's my view that this will serve you better than knowing how much I gave to a particular campaign. It's not so much "don't confuse me with the facts" as give me all the meaningful information from a credible source. I see nothing wrong with the Pohlads contributing to a candidate who will further their interests and I feel the same way about the MEA. I vote for the candidates most likely to further my interests. It's not that I think that the Pohlad and MEA contribution means nothing. They mean that the candidate's positions are consonant with their own. It strikes me that we do, in fact, pretty much know who supports a Pohlad-friendly professional sports scheme and who supports education financing friendly to the teachers' union. I hope I didn't give the impression that campaign finance was the only thing I thought R. T. Ryback's campaign was about. There's much more. I just wanted to talk about the campaign finance piece for a while. Let me see here: We know that millions are being poured into campaigns by wealthy individuals and corporations. It would appear that we have sufficient disclosure. I simply do not believe that wrongdoing is a necessary conclusion to that situation. Andy Driscoll apparently believes that wrongdoing is the necessary conclusion of these contributions. Andy, then, should work for the elimination of those contributions. That is to say, he should address himself to that policy issue rather than campaign finance disclosure, since, in his view, knowledge about these donations is virtually universal. It takes millions of dollars to be elected President of the United States but there is very little evidence of wrongdoing that has not been discovered and made public. I can tell you that this kind of money in other arenas of public life has had a checkered history. Some years ago the national United Way was almost destroyed by corruption but not many people would deny that overall it is a valuable social institution and now free of the taint of corruption. It is precisely the point that "proving wrongdoing is difficult." Proving wrongdoing is not in the eye of the beholder. It is subject to public adjudication. You are correct. Proving influence is much easier because it is subject to unsubstantiated innuendo. I remember newsclips of that sheaf of papers being waved by Senator McCarthy. He was able to destroy dozens of lives simply by asserting the influence of a foreign government on people's lives. I don't know what undue influence is until its policy results are public. Undue influence is a lot like pornography, I'm afraid, in that we can't define it but we know what it is when we see it. And that's my point, you can't reliably point to public policy being moved in directions "...that too often have little to do with the public interest elected officials have sworn to protect" until after the policy is made and evaluated and until after there is general agreement on what the public interest is. Andy Driscoll sounds like a juror who would welcome an opportunity to engage in jury nullification when adherence to the court's instructions would be more appropriate. Thanks for the stimulating conversation, Ken Stewart Nokomis Village 12-9 _______________________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
