Next Revolution: The Second American Revolution

As this article in capitol weekly points out, the real money for dem candidates does not come from the voters, but is composed of big buck bribes channeled through state and local party committees to get around campaign finance law.

This is exactly why we must pass the political reform initiative

Alex Wierbinski, Berkeley, Ca., March 25, 2008

Our initiative closes the county and state committee campaign finance loophole, while maintaining the ability of political parties to support their candidates.

Rather than trying to completely prohibit outside contributions, which would virtually eliminate the national political parties, our initiative prohibits any non-voter from contributing to an election they cannot vote in, but puts no limits on what they can contribute to county and state parties.

Our inititiative goes at it from the spending side. Our initiative imposes a sliding scale contribution limit on the parties. Under our initiative, the total of all party contributions to any candidate cannot exceed 30% of the total contributions from voters qualified to vote in the election.

Our initiative maintains the right of anyone in the country to give to state and county party committees in california, and allows the committees to distribute this outside money to their candidates. But most importantly, our initiative requires that the contributions of the locals have the predominant weight in determining the viability of local candidates, rather than the bribes of outsiders as is now the case.