[Chapter-delegates] Pacific Islands Regional Advisor bannedfrom major World IT Meeting

[Jeffrey Sherman]

Perhaps we're getting a little off-track here (talking about political
systems), but...

The problem with a politician paying for a campaign from his or her own
pocket is that the very wealthy can afford to pay for a campaign where
the poor (or at least less wealthy) cannot.  Even if the government is
paying a fixed amount per campaign for basic costs, if the individual
politician can put up his or her own money, then that gives an advantage
to those with more money.

Although you didn't mention it, allowing outside groups to campaign on
behalf of a politician is pretty similar to something we have here in
California.  Some years ago, people got tired of politicians spending
lots of money to push their own agendas.  So there were limits on
spending.  However, outside parties can spend as much money as they want
- and we have something here called "initiatives."  Basically, some
concerned group raises money (or puts up their own money), writes a
potential law, and then gets signatures of people who want that
initiative as law.  If enough people sign, it goes on the next
election's ballot as a proposition and then everyone votes on it.  The
groups with an interest for and against that proposition can spend as
much money as they want trying to get voters to vote their way.

What that ends up doing is that rich groups - including various industry
organizations - can push their own agendas.  The end effect is that
elected politicians no longer really decide what's going to happen; rich
business groups now dictate what's going to become law.  And
unfortunately, quite often, the campaigns are misleading - and the
propositions often have hidden language that offers great benefits to
one group or another.

Jeffrey Sherman
Warever Computing, Inc.
Los Angeles, CA

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Vande Walle [mailto:patrick at isoc.lu] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2005 11:37 PM
To: Jeffrey Sherman
Cc: chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org
Subject: Re: [Chapter-delegates] Pacific Islands Regional Advisor
bannedfrom major World IT Meeting

Jeffrey,

I know this is common in Northern America and most probably other
countries but it is not an universal behaviour.

On the European continent,  private funding of electoral campaigns is
generally seen as a form of corruption. As an example, in France and in
Belgium, there have been major cases where influent politicians have
been sentenced to jail. Usually, political parties get allocated a
certain amount of money by the state to cover the cost of their election
campaign. If a politician wants to pay for a part of his/her campaign,
he/she has to prove it comes from his/her own pocket.

In such a system, organized groups of concerned citizens can be heard by
politicians. Add to that it is usually more helpful to brief the
politician's staff with objective information rather than crying slogans
at demonstrations. A good example of this is that ISOC was able to
educate some governements at WSIS, to the point that many do not claim
anymore they want a DNS root server in their own country, now that they
know how DNS works.

Best regards,

Patrick Vande Walle