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Mayday PAC's Benjamin Singer Explains How You can Help Reform American Politics (Video)
Larry Lessig's Mayday PAC is a SuperPac that is working to eliminate the inherent corruption of having a government run almost entirely by people who manage to raise -- or have their "non-connected" SuperPACs raise -- most of the money they need to run their campaigns. The Mayday PAC isn't about right or left wing or partisan politics at all. It's about finding and supporting candidates who are in favor of something like last year's Government by the People Act. As we noted in our Mayday Pac interview with Larry Lessig last June, a whole panoply of tech luminaries, up to and including Steve Wozniak, are in favor of Mayday PAC.
This interview is being posted, appropriately, just before the 4th of July, but it's also just one day before the Mayday PAC Day of Action to Reform Congress. They're big on calling members of Congress rather than emailing, because our representatives get email by the (digital) bushel, while they get comparatively few issue-oriented phone calls from citizens. So Mayday PAC makes it easy for you to call your Congressional representatives and even, if you're too shy to talk to a legislative aide in person, to record a message Mayday PAC will leave for them after hours.
The five specific pieces of legislation Mayday PAC currently supports are listed at the RepsWith.US/reforms page. Two are sponsored by Republicans, two by Democrats, and one by an Independent. That's about as non-partisan as you can get, so no matter what kind of political beliefs you hold, you can support Mayday PAC with a clear conscience. (Note: the transcript has more information than the video, which is less than six minutes long.)
This interview is being posted, appropriately, just before the 4th of July, but it's also just one day before the Mayday PAC Day of Action to Reform Congress. They're big on calling members of Congress rather than emailing, because our representatives get email by the (digital) bushel, while they get comparatively few issue-oriented phone calls from citizens. So Mayday PAC makes it easy for you to call your Congressional representatives and even, if you're too shy to talk to a legislative aide in person, to record a message Mayday PAC will leave for them after hours.
The five specific pieces of legislation Mayday PAC currently supports are listed at the RepsWith.US/reforms page. Two are sponsored by Republicans, two by Democrats, and one by an Independent. That's about as non-partisan as you can get, so no matter what kind of political beliefs you hold, you can support Mayday PAC with a clear conscience. (Note: the transcript has more information than the video, which is less than six minutes long.)
Citizens United is a very popular decision here on slashdot (even though the vast overwhelming majority of slashdot readers will never be helped by it). I would expect this PAC to be only marginally more popular than Diane Feinstein with this crowd.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So the big complaint is that we can't turn on our television and be guaranteed to see fair campaign commercials? News flash: If that is how you make decisions then you will always be susceptible to being lied to or otherwise taken advantage of.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
I'd be in favor of this coupled with initiatives to decentralize power out of Washington DC (i.e., regionalize agency HQs) and thin the ranks of bureaucrats.
(If you eliminated PACs and similar organizations that act on particular citizen interests, its likely that the people actually running the government would be even more inclined to ignore the masses.)
Less videos on Slashdot. As someone explained a few days ago, Slashdot readers are not business suits, we prefer to read our information. It's just plain faster.
Videos such as these are the news equivalent of a photo diaporama of your relatives that are back from their vacation.
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no PACs, no tax checkoffs, no self-funding, no $5 checks from little old ladies... NO ELECTION MONEY PERIOD! go door to door, do a Sunday Silly Hour like BBC does and give all candidates their 5 minutes of TV, things like that. make politics personal again, get rid of the ads and postcards and call banks.
Why does the new slashdice comment count balloon obscure the headline?
Why does the slashdice icon for the post obscure the headline?
Why is my beta link to slashdice still resulting in pointless stupid gui changes?
Stupid fucking dice fucktards.
How about we just outlaw bribes in the first place?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'm not sure how this "help us get money out of politics by giving us money for politics" is ultimately expected to work.
In what way is this different from Republicans who will insist it's one's obligation to fund defeating Democrats, versus Democrats' insistence they must be helped to outfund Republicans?
Seems like another providing of the illusion of influence in exchange for real dollars, which generally just leads to more of that, at ever-increasing scales. Where am I wrong?
Most of the money contributed goes to pay for television time.
What happens when a network contributes its own time to a candidate? Isn't that also a contribution of sorts?
If someone buys a television station or a newspaper before an election to run favorable stories about a candidate rather than buying advertising space or 30-second commercials, isn't that a contribution?
Maybe it's time to regulate television and newspapers to insure fair coverage of all candidates.
The masses are uninformed ignorant buffoons who are incapable if learning about an issue with some semblance of basic understanding.
They should be ignored because if government were to act on their or my shallow understanding of most issues, we'd be truly fucked.
Their understanding of anything is as only as deep as the soundbites they see on TV or some bullshit opinion piece written by a hack on some website.
I think there's a basic error in this approach. It assumes that government can and will run better with "big money" taken out of campaigning. But there's a lot of money given to campaigns for several reasons. The first is that, as Citizens United confirmed, money is speech, and spending money to support a cause or a candidate is at the heart of political expression.
The second reason is perhaps even more basic. When government is huge and has their fingers in every pie, it creates a great deal of motivation to influence those fingers. Campaign contributions are merely a form of lobbying, and lobbying has a standard message: subsidize me and cut my taxes and regulations, but burden my competitors and enemies with taxes and regulations, if not ban them outright.
If you really want to "get money out of politics," you need to (as much as possible) get politics out of the economy. (Ideologues will always lobby, and that's fine, because it's the crony capitalism and pay-to-play aspects that are most objectionable.) Which, of course, is not what many reformers want to do. Until they do, they are basically advocating spreading sugar around their picnic blanket, and then complaining about all the ants.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Money seeks out Power, not the other way around. The reason there is a lot of money in politics is due to the obscene amount of Power our government now wields. When the #1 return on your investment is no longer R&D, training your employees, hiring better employees, but is instead lobbyists (to either reward your company or punish your competitors) there is a sickness. Taking money out of politics will not change this. In fact, it will just mean the money will ooze in around the cracks and crevices of whatever laws we throw up and corrupt the system even further. Take the power out of the government and the money will disappear on it's own.
If we put Senators back under the control of state legislatures, they'll be less influenced by outside money because the state legislatures can yank the leash when these "law makers" stop representing their constituents appropriately. This would make the Citizens United decision less relevant, at least on the Senate side.
The House reps are another story, because they're still under direct elections by the same public that keeps voting these "luminaries" back into power every time. Like senators, as soon as they finish lying to their constituents to their faces, they turn around and land in DC where they get hypnotized by lobbyists, committee chairmanships, etc. Then they're smooth sailing with their own agenda until it's time to come back home and lie to our faces again.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Schemes like those proposed by the author may have great intentions but ultimately fail because they are silly and contrived means to solve a simple problem. The problem isn't money, its how the money is raised and funneled to this group or that candidate with no accountability.
The start of the solution in the US is 3 parts;
1. Term limits for Congress, judges and the top two tiers of the bureaucracy.
2. In races for political office; full disclosure of all personal, professional, business, charity, fellowship, board membership etc. financial affairs. Donations/contributions to campaigns, individual, business and/or bundled, or affiliated charities/organizations must have full granular disclosure within 48 hours of receipt all the way down to a living person.
3. Remove the limits on personal donations/contributions to campaigns, eliminate campaign donations from corporations, businesses, PACs, charities or any other organization, eliminate foreign contributions regardless of how far removed they are.
4. Organizations may be formed to collect and spend money promoting or defeating a particular issue. The org is tied to that issue, may only produce material about that issue, may not mention other groups, people or issues and have a 1 year life span after which they are disbanded and all unused funds are forfeited to the state in which the PAC was formed and all members/founders/managers/workers of the org may not participate in another org, including political campaigns for a candidate, for 5 years.
My two cents.
~The grand unifying truth is that the State's power to change us now exceeds our power to change the State.
Mayday PAC should support Bernie Sanders. He is very specifically for reform and even said if he wins the presidency he would require any potential supreme court nominee to be someone who openly wants to overturn Citizen's United.
Pretty sure they don't believe Corporations are People, thus: *not* Right Wing.
The solution to speech you don't like is not censorship, it's more speech. I have no problem with newspapers editorializing on political subjects and recommending candidates for office. I further have no problem with people banding together to make their joined voice louder by creating documentaries, websites, etc. The slippery slope of trying to chop people down to all be the same sizes is ultimately misguided and works against free speech.
When some person or group has too much power, work to become more powerful than they and dispose of them. Whereupon you become the next person or group that is too powerful.
Posting AC because the morons that maintain this site don't understand how to test and have fucked up the login function.
Most of the moral panic surrounding campaign finance is based on correlation, not causation. In reality, large donations don't cause politicians to win, but politicians that are likely to win receive large donations. Furthermore, the fact that lobbyists, corporations, unions, and other special interests get to write legislation has little to do with campaign donations, and more with regulatory capture and the complexity of regulation.
And that brings us to these legislative proposals. The intent is to somehow make political speech more fair and egalitarian. The net result will, however, be that political power will be traded in even less transparent ways. In the worst case of fully publicly financed campaigns, you end up with government effectively deciding who can run against them.
I don't think these proposals have a snowball's chance in hell. But if they were to pass, the US would be screwed. So, I'll be donating to, and supporting, candidates who oppose them.
Disallow tax deductions for political 'donations'.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
and I'm not talking about the Breitbart site.
When government gets big, politicians have more power. And they WILL sell that power to the highest bidder.
But only those eeeeeeeeeeeeeevil big corporations are to blame. SMH.
If politicians didn't have as much power, they would not be able to sell as much power - lower corruption.
The conclusion is simple: smaller government with fewer powers.
Given that it's Lessig, and named 'Mayday' isn't doing very much to dissuade any perception of a leftist/marxist PAC.
Let's get to the route of the problem that CAUSES so much money in elections: The US Tax System.
Because politicians write laws that create winners and losers, exceptions and punishments via the tax code or burdenous regulation, they can lure or extort entire industries for their support to either stay in office or replace the person unfriendly to their industry. When one has competitors and ideologues trying to use the power of law to get advantage or reduce/eliminate competition/entire industries, one fights back with the only option they have, more money at those that mirror their viewpoint.
Removing tax law jockeying via a flat or Fair Tax with no corporate tax component (bc corps don't pay taxes, it gets passed along to the consumer as an embedded tax) will reduce a large amount of the problem. That will still leave corporate interests versus the ideologues trying to shut them down such as envirotards versus just about every industry in existence that doesn't conform to the 18th century: land development, farming, energy production, energy transmission, lumber, plastics; or corporations trying to protect themselves from marxist unionization efforts and the 'Feelz' laws that do more harm than good such as constant minimum wage hikes (that only benefit union employees that get automatic raises based on contracts keyed to min wage, or exceptions for union shops that don't have to abide by arbitrarily high min wage laws).
Those needs for corporations to have a voice via financial influence will likely never disappear.
Yes, nothing like an attempt to limit speech to win the votes for a Socialist politicians...
Money is speech. Any attempts to limit donations — or to ban anonymous ones — is tantamount to limiting speech or mandating, the speaker always identifies himself.
Whether donation is by a corporation, a labor union, or a person, it is still speech — if I can not donate $5000 to a candidate, then I shall not be allowed to talk on his behalf for more than 500 hours. And vice versa: if you can spend three months (roughly 500 work-hours) canvassing and otherwise promoting your candidate, then I must be allowed to donate the equivalent sum to mine. All existing limits are unconstitutional and must be abolished the soonest.
Yes, this means, that people with more money will have an advantage. No, I don't see, how this is automatically a bad thing.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The proposals boil down to supporting politicians with tax money.
A wet dream of Statists, this would a) force people disapproving of a candidate to support him anyway via the kind and gentle power of the IRS; b) open up wonderful opportunities for corruption and fraud among people deciding, whether a candidate has fulfilled the necessary requirements for receiving tax-money.
Can we, please, stop pushing this crap on Slashdot? Seriously...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm not convinced that state legislatures would be any better. Industries already control/influence state legislatures the same way they influence senators. E.g., here in WI "The serving of colored oleomargarine or margarine at a public eating place as a substitute for table butter is prohibited unless it is ordered by the customer." (source) State representitives didn't do that out of any moral convition; it happened because the dairly lobby is powerful. See also state legislatures being bought off by ISPs to put the kibosh on municipal broadband. Combine that with the fact that many state legislatures have lots of problems), and I don't see why repealing the 17th amendment would be in improvement.
(That said, I think there are a few too many elected offices. E.g. we shouldn't be electing judges. However, I think that electing senators is fine.)
Disclamer: I will not research how well they keep their promises, or acts they voted for and against or sponsored. I do not endorse or oppose any of these candidates.
I looked at their website, mayday.us It referred me to a different site, repswith.us describing five proposals they support. The plan of Democrat Mr. Sarbanes was first. His site seems to directly address various issues, with little double-speak. The Government By the People Act is its own section of his site, listed under "issues", but in its own section. The plan hinges on a tax credit for political donations to encourage small donors. Also this:
"Allow candidates to earn additional public matching funds within 60 days of the election so that citizen-funded candidates can combat Super PAC"
which doesn't explain how superpac donations won't apply to the matching funds. To be fair I didn't look into it.
Next is Democrat David Price. His site isn't as straight-forward, but does present mostly solid stances on the issues. I couldn't find the Empowering Citizens Act(pdf warning) without using the search function, which tells me he's not staking his reputation on it. This one is more complicated but the main theme seems to be limiting per-donor donations. Obviously loopholes that allow present donors to give more than they need to declare (such as giving bonuses to employees who promise to donate most of the bonus) remain. It also limits total public funds available to candidates, which my intuition tells me will have the opposite effect. This plan looks pretty slimy to me. Your opinion may vary.
Republican Jim Rubens plan, Political Money Reform Proposal" isn't on his site at all, so the link is back to repswith.us. It involves a larger tax rebate for donations and "Require searchable, realtime online reporting of contributions above $200" and removes all political spending and contribution limits.
Republican Richard Painter literally wrote the bookon ethics reform. His site is his university's site, so wouldn't naturally have details on supported initiatives. According to repswith.us the Taxation Only With Representation Act involves a $200 tax rebait for private donations and nothing else.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
If as some say money equals speech, then I will vote for the candidate that makes the most compelling argument to me using ONLY that form of speech.
Any and all flyers, emails, and/or commercials will be relegated to the waste bin.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
of trolls post in favor of citizens united. Didn't know the Koch Brothers bot army was running so well.
I don't think the problem is people letting themselves be manipulated by advertising. I think the real problem is news networks letting themselves be pressured into bias in the 'news" by the threat of removing advertising. So you have news networks pushing whatever agenda anyway, but with even more pressure to maximize shareholder value by essentially lying to the masses. THAT'S the problem with advertising dollars in elections.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I recommend looking into Wolf-PAC -- wolf-pac.com
This effort is focused on states driving a constitutional convention to amend the constitution to ending corporate personhood and publicly financing all elections.
So many political scientists on slashdot!
but you cannot take the money out of politics because washington is beyond our control... you have to use the state legislatures to take back power from DC...do that with an article 5 convention of the state legislatures where 38 state legislatures could pass amendments to put the power back into state hands
Hi all, the Slashdot community is a smart one. As Lawrence Lessig has said, for 40 years campaign finance reformers tried to limit speech, instead of empower it. And they failed. This really isn't about Citizens United. The system was corrupt before that, and separate from it.
The commenters on this story hit the nail on the head. Campaigns cost money. And special interests—those seeking favorable treatment at taxpayer expense—will find every possible loophole to provide that money to give themselves influence and access. They have a constitutional right to do so. Whether or not you agree with that, it's what our nation's court has ruled, that that's the law of the land, at least for now. And I’m sure we all agree, regular citizens should also have the opportunity to have genuine influence over and access to their public officials. We need to replace our broken system with a voluntary, citizen-funded one.
Feel free to skip to TL;DR.
Otherwise, here’s a full explanation of our approach.
You might be surprised if you looked at our endorsed reforms. One allows for all limits to be removed. It also allows candidates to participate in a system where voters receive a $50 tax rebate voucher to give to eligible candidates. Check out this Republican proposal: http://www.repswith.us/reforms/political-money-reform-proposal
For candidates who want to run on big money from themselves, their friends, or special interests, that’s protected by the First Amendment. For candidates who are not wealthy, and who run to represent working-class interests by getting lots of smaller donations from regular citizens, that should be encouraged, too. If we have as many good candidates running as possible, voters will decide who is the best candidate. But right now the system is winnowing the field to those who are beholden to those writing big checks in primary elections and expecting something in return if their candidate wins. That something usually comes at taxpayer expense.
New York City’s new, optional campaign finance system offers a helpful case study of another approach favored by Democrats. Under this system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent $108 million in one election. As sometimes happens, it was mostly his own money, and he was his own man. His opponent used the optional public financing system and spent $9 million, some of which was public money used to match the first $175 of all donations at a 6:1 ratio, and he was able to get out a competitive message. The race was very close but voters preferred Bloomberg. The system worked, even though the publicly funded candidate did not win. Voters had more information to choose from more good candidates.
In the meantime, City Council leadership had become quite corrupt. Thousands of children in New York were suffering from lead poisoning in housing all over the city, severely impairing cognitive development and other disastrous problems. This was clearly a public health emergency, but certain special interests did not want new regulations that would require the lead removal. For a long time, they had their way, and City Council leadership, who took a lot of donations from these interests, did not pass reform.
However, as the New York City campaign finance system ramped up its public matching power, councilmembers were no longer going to be beholden to special interests. They would be independent, answering to people like the families with kids who’d been poisoned by lead, or families who did not know if their buildings had lead, and feared it could happen to them. Soon, every member of city council was someone who ran on the public matching system, and won. Kids in New York City are now greatly protected from the same public health issue that was protected by the big money from special interests.
The system worked again.
If you look at a map of political donations in New York City, working-class citizens are donating to candidates in city-level races at a much higher rate than in state-level e
How can anybody with any mathematical literacy believe this? Especially the crap about it being bipartisan?
In the 2007-2008 election cycle, there was around $8 billion spent on ALL campaigns (local to federal). About what Americans spend annually on potato chips.
The federal budget now is over $3.5 trillion, with discretionary spending at nearly $1.2 trillion.
With the amount of money under the control of the congress every year being so many orders of magnitude larger than campaign spending, what sane person can actually believe that campaign finance reform is actually going to do anything substantial to "remove money from politics"?
So let's throw away the 1st Amendment, and maybe improve the alleged problem by .002%. Great plan.
My Mother-in-Law told me after a trip to the US that she liked Americans, she said they're kind and good natured and very friendly, but she could never get over how everything in the US is for sale. She was a practicing Catholic, but would go to any Christian church if she felt the need. She told me she always felt a little dirty after attending church in some of the evangelical churches she came across, as if she had just done business with the mafia. I think that is how your political system works, sold to the highest bidder. There's no way the corrupt politicians and their financial backers are going to allow ordinary people to muscle in on the action. Mayday PAC is a nice idea, but has no chance of changing anything. There's too much money at stake.
The knee-jerk assumption that most Americans make when they hear talk about reforming the ridiculously out-sized influence of big money in Congress is "Ok, make a law that restricts donations".
But that's quite possibly the most crude way to address the problem. There are a lot of more elegant reform ideas that I think avid Free Speech advocates can get behind.
For example:
Small donation matching -- match and multiply only the first $100 or $200 of a donation. This amplifies the power of individual donors (actual people) and dilutes the influence of big money
Tax rebate or federal voucher -- every voter gets to allocate say $100 toward whatever Representatives or Senators they want to support. Again, this idea dilutes the influence of big money because it makes it plausible for a popular Congressman to run a campaign without relying on big money at all. It encourages Congressmen to please their constituents instead of completely ignoring them, which is pretty much how they behave right now.
Campaign funding allowance -- Congressmen may opt in for federal campaign funding if they agree not to take money from other sources. This frees up their time to do their actual job as Congressmen and frees them from enslavement to big money concerns.
Transparency measures -- any real reform law needs to require complete disclosure of funding sources, so the SuperPAC loophole should be closed up in that regard. Boehner says "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
Conflict of Interest measures -- implement regulations that prevent Congressmen from taking jobs connected to anyone that was a donor after they leave Congress. Also, perhaps some regulation could be crafted that recuses a Congressman from oversight or certain activities around bills directly related to their donor's concerns.
Anyone who is very concerned about any policy making that could threaten Free Speech rights in the future does not have to automatically avoid anything to do with campaign reform.
Corruption is becoming a huge problem in our government. Big money is beginning to completely drown out the voices and concerns of individual voters (for example, check out this awesome video by Represent.US ). At this point, money is pretty much the only determinant of policy-making in the legislature any more. This is literal. I am not exaggerating.
The result is, instead of a government that legislates based on rational planning around the concerns of Americans, we have a system of irrational legislation. Money is now the dominant driver of policy, not the concerns of voters.
Check out this scholarly paper from the journal Perspectives on Politics, it is a study of some 2000 bills since 1980. The researchers (Gilens / Page) from Princeton and Northwestern essentially show that the opinions of the bottom 90% of Americans have literally zero influence on Congress. -- Their ultimate conclusion is that America, by function, can no longer be considered a Republic. America is now, effectively, an Oligarchy. We are a nation run by a few rich people and the rest of us are just serfs with little or no practical impact whatsoever on our nation's governance.
If speech is free, why can't I afford it?
However, what is really happening on the ground is that past campaign finance reforms are CAUSING political corruption.
Campaign finance reform laws are being used to criminalize and complicate political participation. Right now in Texas, Wisconsin, Montana, Nevada and Arizona there are cases of minor politicians and citizens being criminally charged with campaign finance violations that are civil violations of complex rules.
The nub of the problem is that "corruption" is defined too broadly. There is a widespread assumption that campaign donations corrupt our politicians. First, this notion is largely unproven. Second, it dilutes the notion of real corruption, which is bribery, vote-buying and misuse of public power for private gain. Real corruption is highly illegal and we have good laws for that.
"Fake corruption" is really just free speech, and certain people don't like what other people are using their free speech for. They are afraid to let Americans listen and decide for themselves. "Campaign finance reform" should be called "muzzle the political process reform". There's no bogeyman of rich plutocrats who can buy American elections. There are rich people, left and right, who are politically, legally, active and who pay to get their message out. GOOD! We should have an active, raucous, loud, free political process.
So what if they influence politics! Politicians are there because voters put them there. Voters. Not anyone else.
If you are afraid that "corrupt plutocrats are buying elections", then that just means you don't trust your fellow voters, or worse, you want to control them, what they can listen to, what they can say.