The narrative of “bringing jobs back” is aimed straight at the booomers who lost their jobs to the utterly misnamed “neoliberalism” of the eighties. Listen to Billy Joel’s Allentown if you are too young to remember. Or Springsteen’s My Hometown.
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Those jobs were union jobs, including the textile mill jobs, and were solidly middle class till Reagan. But in the middle of the seventies the Supreme Court decided that money equaled speech and the insidious song of corruption grew louder.
Once politicians became responsive to their donors and not their constituents the rot set in. “You scratch my back, I scratch yours” is a social instinct. It is at the root of the cooperation that lets us survive.
We stopped measuring the success of campaigns by how many voters they got but by how much money they raised. No matter how honest a politician was going in they became obligated to spend more time fundraising than legislating.
If we really want to save our democracy we have to limit who campaigns can get money from to constituents. And we need to report the number of donors, to get a real sense of the breadth of support.
We need to restrict loss of the franchise to individuals convicted of election crimes, or treason. No groups, not even felons. It is too easy to railroad someone into jail.
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