From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 21:02:52 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Political Cleanup program [NOISE]
Message-ID: <199512190442.UAA14637@ix3.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I was going to refrain from ranting on this one (for once:-) but 
a couple points with cypherpunks relevance have come up.
One is that PACs are, in some sense, a donation-remailer.  
The purpose is to get the money to its destination while
obfuscating the link between the donor and the candidate,
while allowing the PACs to take the political heat for it,
but giving them the out that "it's just being done on behalf 
of our fine upstanding donors."

At 11:20 AM 12/18/95 -0500, Phill Hallam wrote (order rearranged somewhat):
>The starting point for campaign reform has to be to cap the amount that can be 
>spent on a campaign. Most countries have such laws to prevent the political 
>process from being owned by the rich. Unfortunately this has happened in
the US 
>with the effect that both parties are much further to the right than in any 
>other Western democracy. 

I happen to believe in freedom of speech, especially political speech,
and if you're not allowed to spend money broadcasting your speech or
printing your messages, you don't have much freedom of press or speech.
In this case, technology is giving us the ability to not only support
freedom of speech, but give it as little or as much visible linkage as desired,
allow the money to be passed around privately, and also to coordinate
publicity efforts of different groups in ways other than simply giving
cash to a candidate's bagman to be spent on publicity.  It's also
significantly changing the costs, speed, and targetability of speech,
allowing more people to get involved, and allowing low-cost efforts
to have more impact by reaching the right people.

And as far as "prevent the political process from being owned by the rich" 
goes, there have been brief exceptions over the last 5000 years in which
the less-rich have overthrown the rich, but campaign finance laws have almost
never kept the rich or the politicians from helping each other out.

>The main problem with anonymous political donations is that it is easy
enough to 
>create linkage if the recipient and the donor conspire together. 

That's a given; not much point in giving someone a bribe if they don't know
what they're being bribed to do or who they're doing it for :-)

>There are many other things that campaign laws are intended to achieve beyond 
>avoiding bribery. For example foreign nationals cannot make donations to US 
>parties. It would be a good thing if there were similar laws in the UK
since at 
>the last election a foreign national with links to organised crime alledghedly 
>made a multi million donation to the Conservative party. 

I also don't believe freedom of speech should be limited by national boundaries.

>Of course in the absence of full disclosure of details of party records
> nobody can be sure. We are as voters entitled to consider the worst however.

You can always agree not to vote for any candidate or party that doesn't
provide full disclosure, though it's a little harder to deal with political
publicity supporting a candidate provided directly by non-candidates.

#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
# .... Heading back to The Big Phone Company