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Lessig Launches a Super PAC To End All Super PACs
An anonymous reader writes "Lawrence Lessig has announced plans to kickstart a SuperPAC big enough to make it possible to win a Congress committed to fundamental reform by 2016. From the article: 'If you can’t beat them, join them. Then take them down from the inside. That’s the basic idea behind a super PAC launching Thursday that wants to destroy super PACs for good. The Mayday PAC, as it’s called, seeks to raise enough money to sway five House elections in 2014 and elect representatives who have committed to pressing for serious reform of the campaign finance system. If that endeavor—a sort of test case—is successful, the PAC will then try to raise an enormous amount of money for the 2016 cycle—enough, PAC organizers hope, to buy Congress."
What about all of the other things they will do? Unfortunately, everyone involved will have different ideas about what else is important. Just saying the word "abortion" will split most of the people who might contribute.
What's a PAC? It sounds like it's a way of buying politicians, but surely that can't be it.
I volunteer to determine how much handing an individual unused to wealth a couple billion dollars will affect his moral and ethical judgments. I don't even need the billions.. just a couple million. And I can do this from home.
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Lessig is amazing. I signed up. The question is, will all of you? Everyone here likes to complain about politics and politicians. Everyone agrees there's a problem. Here's a guy we know isn't bought trying to fix it. Put your money where your mouth is, or never open it again.
It's really easy to complain and do nothing. It's really not that difficult to actually do something...
Elections are bought. The general public doesn't have the same cash appeal as single, large sources of money. When properly bribed with campaign contributions, politicians will do what they were paid to do.
Lessig appears to implicitly accept the idea that "money in political campaigns" = "corruption". Can it not be that the wealthy love their country enough to volunteer their own hard-earned wealth to improve it (as they see it)? The theory that every money-related act is necessarily self-interested (let alone corrupting) is naive.
And here's a man trying to BUY THEM BACK. Get off your asses and HELP HIM.
I'm not sure people realize how much money is needed.
Thatâ(TM)s the basic idea behind a super PAC launching Thursday that wants to destroy super PACs for good. The Mayday PAC, as itâ(TM)s called, seeks to raise enough money to sway five House elections in 2014 and elect representatives who have committed to pressing for serious reform of the campaign finance system.
Is that the only issue that they will press for? Or will they also be required to support Lawrence's position on gun regulation, or any of his other issues? I am all for campaign finance reform and would happily give large to the cause, but I don't support everything Mr. Lessig does, and I'm not sure I believe he has the self-discipline to keep his other issues out of his PAC. I'd love to see five campaign finance reformers elected, but despite my respect for him, I would not want five Lawrence Lessig clones.
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He's going to use the, so-called, corrupt system to change the laws to prevent himself from ever doing this again?
I dunno... why not kickstart a super-PAC that would buy candidates that does something productive? Like hire candidates who will restore our rights per the 4th amendment, stop the drug war, stop punitive taxation...yadda, yadda...
No no... gotta use the loophole to close the loophole..
Anybody who wants to ban corporate political speech needs to carefully study similar reforms in India, where about 1/3 of national political candidates are under criminal indictment (and 3% of sitting members of their congress) for campaign finance crimes. Despite what some will claim here, that is notand improvement.
The problem isn't corporate money in campaign finances, the problem is stupid, lazy voters who can't be bothered to find out what or what they're voting for, and just doing what the Magic Box in their living room tells them to. And no amount of campaign finance reform will ever fix that.
The ONLY way to have serious reform that sticks is to...
1) Make sure Clinton gets into office in 2016, ...
If you really believe this is the answer, you are deluded. She is a machine politician all the way. Note that saw was Romney and McCane, so this is not partisan...
Anytime Congress passes serious reform, it gets struck down by a conservative Supreme Court that has no interest in reform and literally equates money with speech. The ONLY way to have serious reform that sticks is to...
1) Make sure Clinton gets into office in 2016, so she can appoint liberal judges once luddites and philistines like Scalia and Thomas are gone / die off.
2) Focus on an amendment to the Constitution that SPECIFICALLY says money is not speech for purposes of law.
That is it. Nothing else will do, because it will be OVERTURNED. Why is this so hard to understand, Lessig?
Sorry, you're wrong on many points but for the moment I'm only going to answer the cash != speech point. Money is speech when it is used to promote a political view. There simply is no other rational way to say it. The only reason the Left, of which you would appear to be one, are butt hurt about Citizens United is that the case has the effect of putting the Right on more equal footing with the Left's propaganda machine in the form of the majority of the media.
It was all good when Unions and various Left wing groups and causes could scream in the echo chamber but once CU broke the echo chamber and everyone could play now it is a bad thing. I'd think true Liberals, in theory those in favor of liberty one would imagine, would have cheered the ability for anyone to band together and form a PAC to promote their interests.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
If you think Hillary Clinton is going to do anything beyond furthering the status quo, you're dreaming. Even if you wanted liberal judges, there are lots of people who would do a far better job than Hillary Clinton.
She is a dishonest person willing to lie, and mislead for personal gain. Remember when she circulated pictures of Obama in a "muslim outfit" to get racist democrats to vote for her in the primary? Remember when she claimed that she was under sniper fire in bosnia to try to inflate her foreign policy credentials?
I am not religious, but I will be praying that she does not win the democratic nomination for 2016.
If we want real change, we'll stop voting for the lesser of 2 evils, and break out of this democrat vs. republican false dichotomy. Surely this is easier than a constitutional amendment to stop people from spending their own money how they see fit.
She's gonna be president. Deal with it. She's going to slaughter any Democrat stupid enough to enter the primaries against her, and the teatard party is preparing to send out idiots like Rick "Hipster-Glasses" Perry and Rand Paul against her. Or maybe they might do something even sillier like have Jeb Bush run. That will be amusing.
No, our next president is almost certainly going to be Clinton.
Clinton spent 12 years in the White House and this is where we ended up. No thanks. I hear that another Bush may be running - I think I'll pass on the too.
As to CU, so your proposal is that citizens can speak orally, as long as they don't use amicrophone, but cannot make Xerox copies of anything or make a web site, signs, etc. without prior government approval, correct? If you had a blog and paid $35 / for hosting, that would be money, not speech, right? CU was making videos. The government claimed that because they bought supplies to make the videos (which cost money), it's not free speech.
Understand, your proposal (no spending money on free speech), Martin Luther King's speech "I have a dream" would be illegal - the stage he stood on and the sound system costs money.
it's long past time to give the Alternative Parties the same chance we've give the R&Ds for decades.
End Corporate Personhood while you're there Mr Lessig, It's about time that more power was allocated back to the Voters of the United States. Where the USA leads, other countries will follow. Don't bother trying to amend things like gun laws, or drug laws etc in the constitution. Just focus on smashing corporate personhood. Hell a Constitutiional amendment to end it needs to happen.
Once you buy them out, then what? How will you change the law? They will balk at not being able to receive such funding in the future, esp if your success hinged on the biggest buyout in history. The moment your funding is spent and they're back to business as usual, congress will undo those laws just enough to let funding trickle through again.
The fundamental problem with washington politics (and really, world politics) is that it is more interested in compromise than it is in making correct decisions. Not rocking the boat and risking their 'careers' is of higher concern than treating their positions as duties like they're supposed to. As a result, few politicians nowadays have the testicular fortitude and backbone to LEAD; to make unilateral decisions when the situation calls for it. It's the only way to break the vicious cycle of passive aggressive fallacious attacks that make up the bulk of the 'political process.'
Good luck. You'll need it. The mention of TED however makes me wonder this is just another left wing power grab, same as it might be a neocon power grab if this came from the heritage foundation.
http://www.colbertsuperpac.com...
At least the commercials were funny.
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If the RIAA, for example, spent $10 million last year on lobbyists, it wasn't because they only had $10 million to spend -- it's because they only needed to spend $10 million to get the results they wanted. If they have to spend more, they will.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
We already lived in that system, we're simply no longer pretending that we don't. I am certainly in favor of transparency. Now it is transparent that our system is corrupt. This is a vast improvement over when it was possible to argue that corruption wasn't a big problem because it was illegal.
This has nothing to do with the tea party. If you are a rich person who wants to spend his money on advocating for a particular political cause by buying tv spots, printing signs, etc, I don't see how a free society can make this illegal.
Money is not speech. Money is money. But forbidding someone from spending their own money on bringing their message to more people is a limiting their freedom of speech.
If, for example, someone tried to destroy baseball by making it illegal to purchase all baseball equipment. They might say, I'm not limiting people's freedom to play baseball, I am only regulating how people spend their money. Money isn't baseball. It's trivially true that money isn't baseball. Preventing people from spending their own money on baseball equipment is nonetheless a limitation on people's freedom to play baseball.
"Money is speech" is a trivially false statement if taken literally and is different than "Freedom of speech entails the freedom to spend your money own money on spreading your message". I think it's unfortunate that this is how the debate is framed (or rather misframed), because it discourages people from examining the real issue, and encourages them to simply take a straw man position without realizing it.
I am not in the tea party. I have problems with the citizens united ruling as it pertains to the personhood of corporations, but this oversimplification of "Money != speech" I find very disturbing.
sorta. Go read "A people's History of the United States". Education in America was meant to get Farm hands used to working in factories. That's why they have bells and drills. The Farm Hands kept wandering off the factory floor. They needed to be trained.
That said, a well educated populace can and will learn to think for itself. It's a by product of the education process. You can't really have one without the other, and China's starting to have problems with their middle class as a result...
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Primaries are virtually ignored. A few dollars in the right primary at the right time could screw everything up for the Koch's of the world. They're not Gods you know? The wealthy have screwed up before, and been turned on by their own before. That's how Roosevelt got his reforms through. It happened before, and It can happen again.
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Yes Hillary Clinton is a liar.... But Benghazi? seriously? If ever there was an example of republicans trying to make a controversy out of essentially nothing, this is it.
One of the most corrupt administrations in US history? You must have a very short attention span.
I'm sure by the time we have another democrat president, that administration will be the most corrupt in US history. Have you ever heard of "The boy who cried wolf". These claims that the current administration is the most X in US history start to get pretty old especially when they are obviously false to anyone who has any sense of history.
And I will state for the record that I am not a democrat.
Professor Lessig started in copyright. After his defeat in Eldred v. Ashcroft, he traced the blame for the copyright expansions of the 105th Congress (No Electronic Theft Act, Copyright Term Extension Act, and Digital Millennium Copyright Act) back to the source, and the source ended up being politicians who listen to Hollywood and other special interests over their individual constituents. This lead to Change Congress, which became Fix Congress First, which became Rootstrikers. The $100+ that I'd give to Lessig's organization is $100+ that I would have otherwise spent on something that's illegal to produce solely because of these expansions of copyright.
What would be cool is if this super PAC returned everyone's money if they don't raise the critical mass of dollars to make a difference. Ultimately that's my main worry. I'd rather donate $1000 to a cause that would give me my money back if it failed to raise enough money to make a real difference, than donate $10 that was gone forever regardless of whether it is used effectively.
Wasting my already-spent mod points by posting, but I think it's worth it:
That's exactly what they're doing. If you look at their FAQ, the second section explains that they will set certain funding targets, people will "pledge" their contributions, and only if they meet their total pledge target will any money actually change hands. Just like Kickstarter.
I've already pledged $20, and I wish I could give more, but our financial situation isn't super-stable at present :-/ I think what Lessig is doing is probably about the most important political action of our time.
Dan Aris
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and I wish people would stop deluding themselves that it does. A bunch of untrained or moderately guys with AR-15s don't stand a chance against a modern military. That's sorta why we didn't lose in Iraq.
Do you think members of the US military will follow orders to shoot their countrymen?
The US government doesn't. That's why they made a treaty with Canada, that if Canada has a revolution, American solders will be sent to quell it, and if America has a revolution, Canadian solders will be sent to quell it.
With the right indoctrination, you can teach a man that his enemy is not human. But most people don't like shooting their neighbours, and will go AWOL if you try to make them.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I might vote for Hillary over some person typical dumb hypocrite republican if I lived in a swing state, but let me pose this suggestion:
If you don't live in a swing state, a vote for the lesser of 2 evils doesn't really come with a benefit. I live in california. We haven't been a swing state in a long time. I very much preferred Obama to McCain, but I felt quite free in voting for a someone that was not going to continue the wars in iraq and afghanistan without any guilt that I was adversely affecting the outcome of the election.
I think it's important to vote for something other than the status quo, especially when your vote doesn't really matter in terms of deciding the winner. None of my votes have ever really mattered in this way, and therefore every vote I have every cast has not been for the winner. Luckily it's not a horse race.
In the San Diego mayoral race, my vote probably did have a pretty good chance of counting, but I was so disgusted with both candidates that I wrote in "None of the above", even though there was no spot to write someone in. I made my own "write in spot" filled in my "none of the above" and checked it.
I don't know how productive this was, but it sure made me feel better than voting for either candidate or simply not voting.
Yes Hillary Clinton is a liar.... But Benghazi? seriously? If ever there was an example of republicans trying to make a controversy out of essentially nothing, this is it.
I visited foxnews.com for the first time in quite a while. Benghazi was the #1 headline. Frankly, I'd forgotten about it. Things like a couple of hundred drowning Koreans, a hundred or so Malaysian airline passengers, an oil fire, floods, tornadoes wiping out people by the dozen, couple of dozen kidnapped girl students, Russia's hijunks in the Crimea and so forth, and the burning question of whether or not Hilary screwed up a year or so back and got a couple of people killed just didn't seem to be able to keep enough urgency for me.
Corporations aren't people, they're machines owned and steered by people: vehicles. My car doesn't have citizenship and neither should my corporation.
If you control a corporation and it's a "person" and has the rights of a person and you also act as yourself as a person, that's inherently unfair, because those of us who don't control corporations are only one "person" but the CEO (or whoever) is two "persons".
In reality, of course, it's worse, since a corporation is generally actually comprised of a lot of persons, but the corporate voice and actions aren't equally controlled by the persons in the corporation, only the ones in control. Which is, for example, how a mining corporation can successfully beat back legislative attempts to promote safety for the miners.
This is part of why everyone, not just the really rich, pays taxes because it adds up to a large amount.
So for political spending as a simple example: Suppose Bill Gates put every bit of his wealth, about $76 billion, towards a PAC. Unbeatable right? Not hardly. If each person over 18 gave $320 dollars, they'd outspend him handily.
Now of course it is ridiculous to think that every eligible voter would give that much but it is equally ridiculous to talk about someone spending that amount of money. The point is that even for ridiculous sums, numbers still favour the population.
A more realistic example would be that Romney's campaign cost about $850 million dollars (the most expensive ever). Crunch the numbers and you'd need half of voters to give $7 average to match that. So literally if you could get half of people to give $10, you'd crush the amount spent on the most expensive campaign ever.
People also seem to forget that the rich didn't become, or stay, rich by spending all their money. Ya, they may be willing to kick in a lot, by a normal person's standard, to an election, but it is still only a small fraction of their wealth. Blowing a significant portion of their wealth on an election would be monumentally stupid.
It really IS doable. What's more, politicians really DO care more about a large number of people voting one way than all the contributions in the world because if they get voted out, well the gravy train stops. So doesn't matter how much money they are offered, if their constituents say "Do this or you are out," and mean it, they are extremely likely to do it.
People in the US do have the ultimate power, they just doesn't exercise it effectively.
She is what every she needs to be to get elected. Like far too many politicians.
Do you think members of the US military will follow orders to shoot their countrymen?
Yes.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Yes, you're missing something. Right now, the only way to influence policy is by writing big checks, and they are accepting this as a given. The idea is to write a big check to influence policy in such a way that will prohibit writing big checks to influence policy in the future.
That's not what happens. Obviously you weren't in the military. Would soldiers be brought in to "quell rioting"? Sure, look at Katrina.
Do you think many civilians would shoot at their own soldiers? I don't.
What do you think would happen if american civilians fired on US soldiers?
Here's a hint. Go look at ogrish. Anyone who was over there (Iraq, Afghanistan) knows we didn't fuck with anyone unless they shot at us first. (I was Army, not Blackwater.)
Sure we'd probably extract to avoid a massacre. But you'd best believe if a squad member got hit the entire area will be "secured/suppressed" while we did CASEVAC.
Wolf PAC is working to get the states to call for a convention to pass an amendment saying that corporations do not have the rights of people and limiting the amount of money that a politician can raise from any person or entity.
Wolf PAC
The wealthy will remain perfectly Free to shout from the street corner like everyone else. Giving huge sums of money to OTHER people for political speech is poisoning the political process.
The public does not owe the wealthy large chunks of spectrum, airtime or even billboard space just because they have a lot of money on offer.
I'm glad to hear someone else pointing this out too. :-)
A secondary benefit to this strategy is that if enough people follow it, if everyone in swing states started voting their true choices instead of buying into the two-party horse-race, because their votes didn't matter anyway, then their votes would start to matter. E.g. if we assume there's a lot of Californians who prefer Democrats over Republicans but would really prefer Greens, and they all start voting that way because their votes don't make a difference since the Democrat is a shoe-in anyway, then the Democrats would be weakened and the Greens would become a viable party and now suddenly it really matters who you vote for. You might (as a left-leaning voter) say that would actually be a bad outcome because then the Republicans might win California, but if the right side of the spectrum was doing the same thing meanwhile (e.g. if a lot of Californians who prefer Republicans over Democrats would really prefer Libertarians over either, and started voting Libertarian cause it's not like the Republican was going to win anyway), you could get an actual contested election with multiple viable options and a third party could possibly win the state.
I really wish the various third parties would get together and run a series of ad campaigns in election season targeting would-be third-party voters in swings states telling them "[Liberals/conservatives] of [state], [shoe-in candidate] is in all probably going to win [state] no matter who you vote for. So why waste your vote on [them/their major-party opponent] if that's not who you'd really prefer? Why not vote for [short list of prominent third-party candidates aligned with target audience] instead? They're even more [liberal/conservative] than [shoe-in candidate / their major-party opponent], and a vote for them will bring attention to the issues you really care about like [issues the major parties are neglecting]. Vote third party this election and make your vote count!"
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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So, why did they make the treaty then, do you suppose?
Oh, go on, what treaty is this anyway?
Another way to look at it would be if about 10% of voters gave $50 each, which is a fair bit more but still not at all out of the realm of possibility for most people. Also if you are talking house/senate elections, which is what is begin talked about here, then the actual budget isn't nearly as high.
The point is you really DON'T need rich people to fight these big budgets, regular people can do it in large numbers, and really the numbers are in their favour.
The eternal pessimists on places like Slashdot seem to have this view that there is just unimaginable amounts of money being poured in to this that can never be equaled. That is in fact not the case. A number like $800 million sounds just terrifyingly high but then if you spread it across, say, 20 million people you are now talking $40 per person.
That's his point with this. If this is something you care about, you can toss in some money. Not an onerous amount, two figures is fine. However you get millions of people doing that and hey, that's serious dollars you are talking, the kind of thing that is hard to outspend.