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Amazon Spends $350K On Seattle Mayor's Race (jeffreifman.com)
reifman writes: Until this summer, Amazon had never contributed more than $15,000 to a city political campaign in Seattle, but this year's different. The company is a lead funder in the Seattle Chamber of Commerce's PAC which dropped $525,000 Monday on Jenny Durkan's PAC, the centrist business candidate. Her opponent Cary Moon is an advocate for affordable housing, which complicates Amazon's growth, and city-owned community broadband. Comcast and Century Link joined Amazon contributing $25,000 and $82,500 respectively to the Chamber's PAC. Amazon's $350,000 contribution represents .00014 of its CY 2016 net profit.
Amazon's $350,000 contribution represents .00014 of its CY 2016 net profit.
Ah yes, the best government money can buy.
soon to be the AI level
You're on the wrong side.
Naughty naughty Amazon.
Title says it all.
Can we get some of that money thrown at my campaign?
In all seriousness I am running for mayor in my town and am against the use of violence on peaceful people. Realistically Amazon won't care about little old New Hampshire- particularly in the town I'm running for mayor. I am a principled libertarian and moved to NH as part of the Free State Project effort and Shire Society (it's a migration of those who believe in freedom and liberty over everything else- including "safety", "children", terrorism, naked people, breasts, etc).
I got about 1/3 of the vote shockingly in the primary here with very little effort exerted. No matter what your social or political objectives are I believe they should not come at the expense of coercion, violence, or theft (ie at the government level they call this taxes).
And before you call me heartless I just did about 20 hours of community service this past month at a homeless shelter and have put in hundreds of hours this past year outing abusive cops and police tactics. I support charitable organizations who are NOT dependant on theft and other principled libertarians have even started and run organizations to help feed and find housing for those in need.
My partner was even wrongly arrested for filming an unconscionable police checkpoint where cops were searching 'random' vehicles (we live in a police state for those who aren't aware, his case is being dismissed as I write this, but only after spending thousands of dollars on lawyers, ie the intimidation has not been effective, but it would be against most activists).
My volunteer efforts have not been publicized although I did a two second interview that hit the media in regards to volunteer work I was doing at another facility although I didn't mention I was running for mayor and the media outlet was not a local one so it would not benefit my run in any way. It also wasn't focused on me, but rather what another libertarian run organization that I support was doing. Though there was no mention by any of the participants of politics or the word libertarian in the news peace.
"The centrist", I know I wouldn't be voting for her.
If money is speech, corporations have a lot more of it than you do.
After reading your post, I'm tempted to move to New Hampshire (sounds like a state for Hobbits though) just so I can vote against you.
They gave to the chamber of commerce which gave to a pac, which runs ads for one candidate and not the other. Do you really think Amazon wouldn't want to be a part of the local chamber of commerce? Are we really sure that all of that 350k was part of what the chamber gave to the other pac?
EIther way I don't see the problem. As long as you allow political donations people will give money as they see fit. If you want to fix it cap the election cycle to say 6 weeks, ban private donations and fund the campaigns from public funds.
Have gnu, will travel.
Posting AC with no links doesn't help your campaign. Why should anyone give you money when you clearly don't know about running for office?
Instead, you should head on down to Venezuela where you and the rest of the comrades can eat rocks and trash because communism produces shortages and you canâ(TM)t get any real food.
I'm sending $40 to Jenny Durkan in the morning. Two can play at the troll game.
If you think your incumbency could be endangered by another 350K in your opponent's campaign chest, you might not want to lobby for that new Amazon HQ building in your fiefdom.
It only took the Russian's 100k
Considering people's mouths are more or less the same size, no one should be allowed to contribute more money than anyone else.
It takes more money to be a successful challenger than to be reelected as an incumbent. So limits on spending tend to mean less turnover.
There's a difference between limits on total spending, and putting limits on what any one person can donate (either in total, or per candidate).
Okay, let me try instead. I'm running for House of Representatives in Maryland's 7th District, and I'm fairly-certain I can win that seat with under $50k--not that it'll be easy, but it's viable. If I can get $25/month commitments out of 100 people, I can probably fund out of my own pocket the rest of the way there; everything else is lifting the hardship off my personal finances and raising my chances of success.
My major platforms include an end to identity theft; a restructuring of welfare around a Universal Benefit (essentially a dividend of America's productivity) to lower the tax burden, totally-eliminate poverty, and guarantee Social Security's permanent solvency; and a public healthcare option to get healthcare to every American without excessive expense of a single-payer system.
I lean heavily toward fiscal responsibility, which is why my public healthcare option aims to narrow the $200 billion gap before levying any kind of tax to close it. With the $368B spending on Medicaid covering the poor, we could instead cover 55 million Americans with the average employer healthcare package, or 41 million Americans with zero-deductible healthcare.
With 70 million Americans without private insurance and an average of 50 million total coverage (with lower-incomes getting no out-of-pocket cost care), that's $185 billion in costs for the remaining full care coverage--although shuffling the numbers in different ways raises or lowers that a bit. Plans to provide a stronger employer healthcare mandate would reduce that price tag; plans to lower healthcare costs in general--such as by reducing generic drug costs--would also lower the cost of insurance. Both approaches mean any tax levied to cover this would be smaller.
As for identity theft, I plan on passing laws charging regulators to mandate the latest consumer-ready technology for credit issuance. That means low-cost, high-effectiveness. Today, that would be a FIDO U2F authentication with the CRAs: you go to a bank, show a hard ID (driver's license, passport, etc.), and plug your USB U2F device into a computer to establish a Trust relationship with each of the three CRAs.
That device holds a private encryption key (non-disclosed) used to sign challenges, so it becomes impossible to validate your identity with the CRAs unless you have the device itself--even if you hack the CRA and copy all the information they have about you. If you lose your key, voice-verification with the bank is sufficient to cancel the Trust: you can use your accounts, but can't open new ones until you physically enter a bank once. Otherwise, plug it into your computer or phone when you open a new credit account online so the bank can run a hard credit check with the CRAs.
Note that the details would be regulatory. Not only is this a good technical solution built in consideration of all identifiable risks, but it also minimizes the mandate by legislation: at most, I want to tell the regulators they must mandate feasible, inexpensive technology following any current standards on security as published by NIST. Note that NIST currently standardizes AES and Triple-DES for encryption, RSA and ECC for digital signatures, and so forth. The point is to ensure the regulation must deprecate an insecure technology when or before NIST says it's insecure, rather than exercising their own judgment.
Yes, I'm both a technologist (what a word) and a bureaucrat (I actually like project management more than technical work).
The Universal Benefit (which I might rename to Universal Dividend) is a foundation tying our entire anti-poverty system into one coherent effort. Essentially, I restructured the taxes to involve a 15% tax on all income (business and personal), which is paid out equally among all adults as if one adult represents one share
Support my political activism on Patreon.
But when you're raising money for an election, the real question is why do you think you can win? If you can't win, none of your policy matters. If you can't win, your donors are throwing away their money.
You are running against an incumbent who has been in politics longer than you've been alive. He won his last election with 74% of the vote and won his last primary with 92% of the vote. If I had to choose between giving $100 to your campaign or spending $100 on Powerball tickets, Powerball seems like better odds. What is your plan to win?
Plans can't win an unwinnable battle, so let's talk about the battlefield first.
Elijah Cummings won his last primary against a guy whose campaign was a vertical cell phone video where he rants about Elijah Cummings "has not fixed the issue" and that he's going to "go to Congress and get the money". He got 8.9% of the vote.
It's 25,000 votes to win. That's not a whole hell of a lot of bulk effort. It does mean getting most of the reliable voters (there are only 33,000 registered Democrats who voted in all of the last three primaries, out of around 50,000).
Elijah has only a few fanatics--and very few in the district. Most of his Facebook followers are all around the country; he has NINE THOUSAND people in District 7 actually interacting with his page (follow, comment, etc.) or posts about Elijah at all, out of 550,000 Moderate to Liberal democratic voters. He hardly communicates with anyone.
This uphill battle is turning more anti-climactic by the day. Nobody I encounter who isn't a raving Conservative fanatic really dislikes Elijah; he's a great community leader and he really does have the people's best interests at heart--he's just ineffective as all hell, and everybody knows it. The most I get in his favor is a consoling look and the counsel that I have a tough battle ahead of me; usually folks tell me that Elijah just isn't doing anything useful and needs to go, even though they don't think he's a bad guy--just a bad Congressman.
I actually encountered a political discussion group meeting in an elementary school that had replacing Elijah Cummings as a repeatedly-surfacing concern.
Do you know what the strategy is for that kind of playing field?
Name recognition and don't make people hate you.
I've been knocking on doors. I'm having actual campaign materials printed up. I have a Web site (which is getting some traffic at least). I've got a Facebook page that's getting followers, and I engage my followers; Elijah doesn't engage his, and I respond to his (sparse) posts and get people actually following me--I'm actually canvassing his own territory. I do the same on some radio show social media pages, and on some forums for the Democratic party. I have digital marketing campaigns that are giving me returns now at under 50 cents per click, follower, or whatnot.
Elijah loses more than 10% of the primary vote to no-names and unkempt fools--not to disparage anyone in particular, but the folks who have against him in recent elections haven't exactly been hard-hitting candidates. You can't even find out anything about these people, about their plans, their positions, anything. Do you really think he has standing power against a competent campaign?
Sure, he can fight back; the question is: is it too late? Everybody knows who Elijah is. What's he going to do? He can't open his mouth, shout loudly, and hope to get more name recognition; he has to convince people that the Elijah Cummings they know isn't the real Elijah Cummings. He doesn't have anything with which to fight back.
Will I win? I don't know. Can I win? I can crush this guy; but I can't do it without funding.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Yup, they want Durkan, who has been endorsed by former governors Christine Gregoire and Gary Locke. Why is that important?
Because Durkan, as a former US Attorney, led a three-year investigation of Washington Mutual in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown, and couldn't find a single action worthy of prosecution, while a 2010 congressional investigation found plenty!
And the latest FBI stats indicate Seattle leads the nation in property crime (has for quite some time, if we are talking reality here) and that is a result of former governors, Christine Gregoire and Gary Locke, who signed the Interstate Compact on Adult Offenders, bringing in 3 out of every 4 ex-convicts to this region.
Actions have predictable consequences . . .
http://www.seattleweekly.com/n... Foreign buyers market of US real estate last year: $92.2 billion.