I'm sorry; I was in a bit of a hurry when I made that post. Here's what I mean:
Other parties should be allowed to run with far fewer restrictions than are currently placed upon them, and it should be more or less the same in every state. If a party can get, say, 2500 signatures or so within a week of the general election, they ought to be able to get their candidate on the ballot without meeting any further additions.
Also, I do not wish to silence the press. I do think, in order to break the hold of monied interests (mainly banks and corporations), we need to establish rules about debate coverage and commercial air-time which all news agencies have to stick with, and which guarantee roughly equal time to anyone on the ballot.
Here's an example of what I mean: every election year, the presidential candidate from the socialist party, the constitution party, the green party, and probably some others, challenge the Republican and Democratic party presidential candidates to a debate. They are always turned down, because debates are run by private entities funded by corporations. If you study how the elections in the Roman Republic used to work, this is pretty close to the same. People need to be able to hear other ideas, and they need to be able to see those ideas tested in honest debate.
I'm afraid I disagree. It would give those interests that have a very firm hold now an absolute death-grip. Since I used to play this game on a smaller scale, here's how I would operate if term limits were in place, and I was in charge of donating my company's money to a particular set of campaigns. First, I would make clear to the chosen candidate that they work for us. They're going to get two terms, and then who knows where fate will take them? Do they want a position in a cushy think-tank with a six-figure sallary, lecture and lobbying opportunities, etc? Or do they want to end up managing a Wendy's (or worse)? Because I (not I myself, but the fictional "I" in this scenario) can make either happen.
The only thing that affects me is that when I really need something done, I have to buy multiple elections. That's really no problem, since I have a whole industry next to me that understands cooperation with the appearance of competition is the best means of making money. We may try to undersell each other at the retail level, but the people in charge of the companies in my industry understand that the political conditions which favor all, favor each. So we buy a block of politicians, from whom we expect results. If we don't get those results, we make examples of them. They end up as ditch-diggers when they get out of office. Maybe one or two have a fatal accident. Either way, the next bunch understand we have laws we want passed, and it's their job to do it. If they do it, they get paid. If they don't, they get fired, just like the last bunch.
Being in office is far from the end-all, be-all of power, money, and influence. Politicians with term limits will be, if anything, even more frightened of what happens after their term is done.
I've known some of these uber-rich that own elections. Let me tell you: they don't always figure out how to get someone else to pay for the golden parachute, but they're far better at playing the game than most people could possibly understand. Something like this would not be seen as an obstacle, but as a reason to offload more and more costs onto the general public. I was on my way to the same fate, until I began to realize what that really means.
