The Economic Policy Institute’s Jeff Faux has an article in this month’s American Prospect entitled, “Who will save the middle class?”

He writes that the “American middle class is headed for a further fall in its living standards, and the probability that the country’s two-party governing class will change course is close to zero.”

There are several reasons for this, but he cites one that will be familiar to readers of this blog: our big money political system.

He finishes the piece this way:

Third, inasmuch as the central obstacle to policies that would promote a high-wage path to the future is the infestation of our political system with corporate money, it follows that getting that money out of politics should be a strategic priority.

Campaign-spending reform has rarely energized voters. But it has been primarily argued as a high-minded issue of democratic procedure rather than the central cause of citizens’ economic distress. As the noose of austerity tightens, the issue can now be cast as an indispensible step to avoiding the destruction of the American dream.

The obstacle is the Supreme Court’s bizarre interpretation of the Constitution as a document equating spending money with free speech and corporations with people. This can only be overcome with a constitutional amendment. The route to amending the Constitution will be hard. But the benefits could arrive before any final enactment—namely in mobilizing against corporate power and blunting the right-wing campaign to convince the public that government, labor unions, and other institutions of the liberal left are to blame for the coming age of austerity.

A 2011 survey reported that 79 percent of all voters—and 68 percent of Republicans—favor a constitutional amendment “to overturn the Citizens United decision and make clear that corporations do not have the same rights as people,” and this, with no visible campaign to persuade them.

Campaign financing is not the only way in which money corrupts government, of course. The hint of a future job, the chance to socialize with the rich, the hiring of a relative or a friend, are among others. But nothing matches raising large amounts of money to get you re-elected.

The odds in favor of driving corporate money out of elections may be long. But the odds of securing our future are even longer if we don’t do it. Unless we can confront the root cause of our national paralysis, future historians will look back at this generation and conclude that our failure was not that we didn’t know what was coming; it was that we didn’t act on what we knew.

And most Americans agree with him. A poll out Friday found that 76 percent of people “feel that the amount of money in elections has given rich people more influence than other Americans.” This mirrors polling from Public Campaign Action Fund and Democracy Corps out earlier this month.

A constitutional amendment is important, but we also need legislation like the Fair Elections Now Act that’ll encourage candidates to raise money from small dollar donors back in their home state. That way they'll be accountable to them--and not Wall Street bankers or Washington lobbyists.