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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.
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...
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.
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.
This is the only issue that the PAC will press for.
And indeed, you can direct your pledge to be used only to support members of one political party if you wish. We don't get as granular as issue-by-issue, but when you pledge, there is a targeting dropdown menu. That targeting dropdown menu allows you to choose from { Whatever Helps, Democrats Only, Republicans Only }
If you pledge your money to Republicans only, it is statistically very unlikely that they would be for gun control.
I don't agree with Prof. Lessig on all the issues either, but that's the point. No matter what side of the debate you fall upon, you have to make sure that this issue is fixed first, otherwise the decisions made will be those that are in the funders' best interests, not the peoples' best interest.
— Brian Boyko
—CTO, MayDay.US
I think you would be surprised at what we would need to do to get real reform. By no means are we *against* speech. We just want to change the *incentives* of our politicians. In short, we want politicians to have to worry about what the voters think first, and right now they have to worry about what the funders think first.
We can do this without banning anyone from speaking or spending money to speak, by creating viable alternatives to fundraising that don't involve members of Congress and candidates for Congress spending 30%-70% of their time on the phones raising money from a pool of about 150,000 Americans, who represent private interests. We're interested in reforms like the ones passed in Connecticut where no speech was restricted, but an alternative viable method of fundraising through small-dollar donations was implemented.
-- Brian Boyko
-- CTO, MayOne.US
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.
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.
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
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
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.
Do you think members of the US military will follow orders to shoot their countrymen?
Yes.
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