Cleaning up election system won’t be easy

Iwould like to respond to the piece by James Harnar (“Next time, no more attack ads,” Nov. 6). I agree there should be no more attack ads during election campaigns and hope he is right in being able to get all parties to sign nonattack agreements prior to the next election cycle, but I doubt that will happen.

The reason I doubt that is because of the “dark” money thrown into the campaigns. We had a prime example of how damaging that is right here in New Mexico during this past election cycle. The losing party ran several smear ads against our sitting governor. In spite of the facts coming out about one of those ads in particular, including it being shown by an investigative reporter for KOB-TV to be outright lies, that station, along with all the other local TV stations, continued to run the ads. Why?

One word — profits. Corporate media own our local broadcast stations and have no interest in honesty, fairness or even local issues. It’s all decided elsewhere, where the credo of the 1980s still reigns supreme: “Greed is good.” Even the national networks on cable, satellite or streaming work on the basis that in order to run up ratings and revenues, their news outlets must keep the public in turmoil, chasing one crisis after another with no clear resolutions for any of it.

The day after this last election, they immediately began the next crisis with constant reports of gloom and doom, reporting on a daily and nightly rotation of the price of gas and inflation being at 40-year highs. This kind of reporting is designed to keep people stirred up, and when people are stirred up, their adverting revenues go up. This, when the truth was inflation was coming under control and the price of gas was coming down. Also, none of them reported on the real reason for inflation — corporate profits.

The two largest grocery chains in America want to merge, and one of them immediately announced they planned to pay out $40 billion to shareholders. Gee, what do you suppose that will do to the price of a gallon of milk? Must be Joe Biden’s fault. Who thinks that a monopoly in the grocery store world will help the consumer?

You can bet your bottom dollar it won’t. It will mean higher prices across the board with the stores having few employees. Customer service does not help profits. Want to help defeat them? Don’t use the self-service checkout units; use only those stations with humans running them. Whatever happened to the Department of Justice breaking up monopolies?

Solutions? I’ve brought these up before and I’ll repeat them here.

Billions, no, hundreds of billions of dollars, spent on political causes are a waste of money. Shouldn’t that be used to improve our lives? No, because there are no profits in that.

I suggest that political donations of any size, source or purpose be taxed. In the past, I’ve suggested it be taxed at 100 percent, but that was more sarcasm than reality, so let’s start at 50 percent taxation on all political money. Plus, let’s tax the income the broadcast media make on all political ads at the same rate — including the advertising companies that produce those ads.

Next, term limits. Anyone serving as the president of the United States already has a limit to the time they may serve. No one needs to be in the Senate for 40 years. One six-year term for the United States Senate and one four-year term for the House of Representatives. With no crossover from one chamber to the other without a four-year waiting period. When the politicians leave office, the furniture stays; that’s ours, we paid for it, and they can go home and get a job like everyone else. The Supreme Court also needs a major overhaul. Lifetime appointments are nonsense. One 10-year term, with an age limit of 70 years. They turn 70, they retire. Period. Oh, and the benefits for all of them end after they leave office.

For any of this to happen, we the voters need to be proactive. We need to start pushing for these changes or they will never happen. There is way too much money changing hands. Let’s start at the state level, and and as changes spread, it will suck in the federal level whether they like it or not.

George Watson is a concerned citizen and resident of Santa Fe.