Now is the time to join Wolf PAC (Get money out of politics)

[Cantih]

Do you want to take a minute and write about what Mayone is doing? I still don't really understand it. As far as I can tell, they're raising up to $12M for 5 ridings in 2014? Didn't the Koch's already donate like $23M so far this year? How would $12M make a difference?

Also, what would happen if they mange to make the candidates that are "pro-reform" win in those 5 ridings, and then lose other pro-reform candidates in other ridings?

If you write a good explanation, I'll edit it into the OP/change the title.

First off, 2014 for what MayOne is doing is an experiment. To see how effective it can be, and thus determine the pricetag to go after most of the "ridings" in 2016. (The term you want for the US is "congressional districts", or districts for short).

Background info time

Spoiler: show

The US Congress (which creates the law, [the President executes the law, though has some discretion in how to go about doing so]) has two chambers.
First is the Senate, which has two members per state (the whole state is the district for them), who are elected in slightly staggered 6 year terms. This means each state has equal representation regardless of any other factor.
Second is the House, which has members chosen from 435 districts, and the whole membership is elected every two years. How many districts a state has is a function of it's population, so ideally each member of the House represents a small but equal amount of the population.

If you want to change the Constitution, the DNA of the US government, using the Congressional path, it requires the support of 2/3 of both the Senate and the House. So that's 67 plus 288 pro-reform candidate districts, minimum.
(In this case, the amendment would then need to go on and be ratified by 3/4 of the states. This is generally done by the state legislatures, which are often similar to but not identical to how the big federal one works. So that's more candidates needed. There's an alternate method, but it's only ever been used for the amendment used to repeal prohibition, so we shan't discuss it at this time.)

So, consider the Koch's money. They want to keep things as is, so just need to prevent 2/3 if they play defensively, and would just need to focus on aiming that at 34 plus 148 districts. (less, because of the 6 year senate term, but that means having to do leap year style math, cba atm) So they'd need to split that 23 million among 182 districts. That amounts to 126 thousand per district. MayOne would drop a 2.4 million bomb on just five.

Now, while it's something we worry about, this reform isn't even going to be a major issue for most candidates this year. But if it was, I hope you can see how just that targeted five seat disruption could wreck someone's plans. (yes, it can even be used by the other side, but that leads us to discussing a deeper game, and is a tangent until the runup to 2016.)

And as to other superPAC money, I'll re-use what I quoted back at the top of the thread.

The US Population is 316,128,839, 76.5% of which is voting age. If only one quarter of the voting age public donated $1, it would equal $60.4 million. If half gave $5 it would equal $604.6 million.

The largest Super PAC raised $20.5 million in 2014. All Super PACs combined reported $201.8 million.

And now I add
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/16/the_...ext_president/

Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80 percent of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

Most superPAC money comes from a small number of people with a high value throw weight, more than any average individual person could hope to put out. But the average individual doesn't need to, because if all the average individuals put forth the cost of a subway sandwich, once, it'd dwarf what the rich could afford to spend.

Order of magnitude, bitches. It's important. Learn it, live it, love it.

[BaneTheBrawler]

the problem with order of magnitude is that it applies to things like information distribution and the value of money, too. one dollar to someone living on a razor's edge can be enough to topple them over, and it is much more difficult to contact hundreds of millions of people than it is two hundred. convincing them all (or even just enough) that that dollar is actually going to accomplish something is infinitely more difficult than convincing 200 people that if they each tossed in a few hundred thousand they'd accomplish their goals.

The thing about being poor is that you are reminded of just how poor you are at pretty much every turn. You know what a dollar is worth, even if it's all that's keeping you afloat. How could one dollar change anything on that scale? Now ask them how 100,000 dollars could change anything. Much easier question to answer, making it more likely you'll actually get the money.


not saying it's a bad idea or anything, just pointing out that the system has always favored the elite for a reason.

[Mazmaz]

Lessig on the States Convention

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...mocracy/371898

[Mazmaz]

Congressional hearings begin on constitutional amendment to get money out of politics, thanks to Vermont. Head of the committee is a senator from Vermont.
#BypassCongress
wolf-pac.com

[Acevalefor]

Congressional hearings begin on constitutional amendment to get money out of politics, thanks to Vermont. Head of the committee is a senator from Vermont.
#BypassCongress
wolf-pac.com

This showed up on my facebook. The redneck tea party republicans that I grew up with flipped their shit and commenced calling Obama a false president saying his liberal cult followers would ruin our government forever if that muslim terrorist was not removed from office....

The amount of ignorance was astounding. I even tried to tell them that Obama outspent all of his opponents during campaigns but they would have none of my liberal propaganda. I would remove them all if they weren't so entertaining in a /picardfacepalm sort of way.

[Cantih]

Mayone has also started the second stage of it's fundraising, the final for this year. 29 days to get 5 million, and they're carrying over a quarter million that exceed the first stage. (so 4.75 left to go)

Also, Lessig got the matching contribution for the first stage, and the donors were announced, and Huffpo did an article outlining them.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_5442230.html

[Sqwunk]

If anyone is interested in a 3hour convo between Cenk Uyger (founder of the WolferPAC) and Joe Rogan, this is only a couple weeks old.

I just became a member of WolfPAC though, made my first donation to it. I'm all for all of this stuff, and pretty cool to hear my twin state is leading the committee on what Maz posted

[Mazmaz]

So this is really really cool. A whole hour dedicated on how the fundraising and money in politics works. It's 2 years old. Some snippets of what I found interesting.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radi...run-for-office

Andrea Seabrook

The leadership of both parties actually ranks each committee according to its fundraising potential. There are lists of the A, B, and C committees with fundraising targets for each one. Those numbers aren't public-- many lawmakers say these lists exist, but no one would give one to us.
Alex Blumberg

So we did our own list, based on publicly-disclosed fundraising numbers. Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, crunched data for us, going back to the early '90s. And the math shows the best committee is indeed Ways and Means. Just getting on that committee earns you an estimated quarter million dollars more in donations than the average member of Congress.
Andrea Seabrook

Number two-- no big surprise here-- the Financial Services Committee. It covers banks and Wall Street. It brings in $182,000 more per member than the average. Third best-- Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over the oil and natural gas industries. If you're there, you get a $142,000 boost in fundraising.
Alex Blumberg

And as for the worst-- it's true, Government Reform is bad. As are Education and Natural Resources. They all hurt your fundraising. Members on those committees bring in less than the average. But the very bottom spot belongs to the Judiciary Committee, which covers the federal courts and judicial nominations. Just being on Judiciary costs you $182,000 in donations.
Andrea Seabrook

And then there's leadership. According to the Sunlight data, having a leadership position on any committee-- even a dud committee-- will bump up your fundraising. So, for example, even the chairman of the Government Reform committee does very well, bringing in about a half a million dollars more than the average House member.
Alex Blumberg

And if you become a chairman of a powerhouse committee, an A committee, like Ways and Means or Energy, you pull in over $1 million more. Like Congressman Barney Frank. He became a leader on the Financial Services Committee in 2003 and saw his fundraising skyrocket.

Alex Blumberg

Jeff Flake, the Republican from Arizona, says once you get on a good committee or become a chairman, your party's leadership expects you to raise even more money and turn it over to them, so that they can spread it around to members who are less fortunate. Ones in tight races who don't have such an easy time fundraising for themselves. Remember that list of the A, B, and C committees? Flake says leadership makes those targets pretty explicit.
Jeff Flake

We were given dues and assessments. And if you're a senior member on committees that lend themselves to fundraising, and you're either a ranking member or you're the chairman, then you're expected to raise a lot of money.
Andrea Seabrook

Or?
Jeff Flake

Or when you come up every two years to either retain your position or move to another committee, those things are certainly taken into account.
Andrea Seabrook

Do they tell you this?
Jeff Flake

I think that's implied. I think it's pretty well understood.

Andrea Seabrook

With the American Jobs Creation Act, Alexander and her colleagues finally got something that could help them add up the lobbying costs and benefits.
Alex Blumberg

They simply compared the amount that companies spent lobbying with the amount they saved on their taxes. They came up with a figure. A figure they called "the return on investment for lobbying." Now, for some perspective, money in a regular old savings account, you be lucky to get a 1% return on your investment. On the other end of the spectrum, Bernie Madoff advertised annual returns of just over 10%. If you want to come up with a big, impressive-sounding lie, a 10% return on investment is what you say. The return on investment to lobbying, in the case of Alexander's study--
Raquel Alexander

22,000%. So, for every dollar, on average, that these firms spend on tax lobbying, they receive $220 in tax benefits from this repatriation provision.

Ben Calhoun

Day by day, as these ads continued to run, the Bera campaign struggled to respond. Bera sent out emails, sent out press releases, talked to reporters, but what Bera really needed was money. According to him, the campaign had budgeted money for a late rainy day, but it wasn't enough to match $682,000. Eventually, the situation got so dire that Bera tried to bail out the campaign with a $400,000 loan.
Ben Calhoun

And what were your most recent polls showing before those ads hit?
Ami Bera

We were probably down by 8%.
Ben Calhoun

But you actually saw-- you saw the numbers move after those commercials.
Josh Wolf

Oh, absolutely.
Ami Bera

Yeah. I mean, it clearly had impact and drove us backwards. We went from a single-digit race to 14 points down. Now, that's a lot to make up in a single week.
Ben Calhoun

Of course, it's impossible to know if, without the Crossroads ads, Bera could've closed that eight point gap and won the race. Eight points is a lot of ground to make up in two weeks. What is possible to know, though, is that Bera could not compete with $682,000 in TV commercials. I mean, just to put that number in context, during the entire campaign, the Republican incumbent, Dan Lungren, raised and spent about $1.9 million. That means American Crossroads, when it spent about $700,000, it single-handedly increased spending on Lungren's side by more than 30% in a single day.

This year, we've seen a lot of headlines about this person and that person putting millions of dollars into the presidential race. But Super PACs can throw their weight around more in smaller races, like House races. There, every dollar is more influential. Put $5 million into a presidential campaign-- no matter how flashy that is, you're still ultimately just a drop in the bucket. Put half a million dollars into the right House race, you can change the fate of an entire campaign.
Norm Ornstein

Every potentially vulnerable member of Congress is worried about a late-breaking, enormously-expensive attack campaign used against them.

Norm Ornstein

Imagine if you've got enough money to take on an opponent, even raise some money for your party, and two weeks before the election, somebody-- and you may not even know who it is, and certainly the voters aren't going to know who it is-- spends $10 million in a blanket television campaign defining you as a scoundrel, an alien, a felon, and a louse. You can't raise the money at that date to do anything about it. You don't have time. So what's happening now is more and more members of Congress are raising a protective war chest, just in case.
Ben Calhoun

Like a rainy day fund.
Norm Ornstein

You could call it a rainy day fund. You could call it an arsenal. A stockpile of nuclear weapons, just in case there's a sneak attack.

Norm Ornstein

I've had this tale told to me by a number of lawmakers. You're sitting in your office and a lobbyist comes in and says, "I'm working with Americans for a Better America. And I can't tell you who's funding them, but I can tell you they really, really want this amendment in the bill." And who knows what they'll do? They've got more money than God.

If somebody disappoints them, the implication becomes clear-- cross them and you're going to get the $20 million alien/predator attack on you and your campaign. And when they leave the office, the lawmaker is sitting there thinking, it's just one amendment, one little thing. And so what's going to happen here is, even without spending the money, in a lot of instances, there are going to be changes in laws that will benefit special interests because of the threat of millions of dollars in undisclosed contributions to bludgeon somebody who thwarts them.
Ben Calhoun

You said that these are conversations that you've already heard of happening at this point?
Norm Ornstein

Yeah. I've had more than one member of Congress-- House and Senate-- tell me about having conversations like this.

Ira Glass

What Senator McCain is referring to is the fact that the candidate's own staffers are often the ones who leave to run these Super PACs. A pro-Obama Super PAC called Priorities USA is run by President Obama's former deputy press secretary. Carl Forti who is political director of American Crossroads and senior strategist for a pro-Mitt Romney Super PAC called Restore Our Future, used to be Mitt Romney's political director. We'll pick up our interview here where the two senators are talking about what it was like the day they went over to observe the Supreme Court hearing arguments during the Citizens United case.
John Mccain

At first, I was outraged. The day that Russ and I went over and observed the arguments, the questions that were asked, the naivety of the questions that were asked and the arrogance of some of the questioners, it was just stunning. Particularly Scalia with his sarcasm. Why shouldn't these people be able to engage in this process? Why do you want to restrict them from their rights of free speech? And the questions they asked showed they had not the slightest clue as to what a political campaign is all about and the role of money that it plays in political campaigns. And I remember when Russ and I walked out of there, I said, Russ, we're going to lose and it's because they are clueless. Remember that day we were over there, Russ?
Russ Feingold

Absolutely, John. I couldn't agree with you more. It clearly was one of the worst decisions ever of the Supreme Court. The trouble with this issue-- and I think John would agree with this-- is people have gotten so down about it, they think it's always been this way. Well, it's never been this way, since 1907. It's never been the case that when you buy toothpaste or detergent or a gallon of gas, that the next day that money can be used on a candidate that you don't believe in. That's brand new. That's never happened since the Tillman act and the Taft Hartley Act. And so, people have to realize this is a whole new deal. It's not business as usual.

[Mazmaz]

This is BIG. California has passed the House and the Senate Judiciary Committee. If you're in California, we need your help. Volunteer, call your state senate representative, get others to call them, tell them to support AJR1. Just IMAGINE how all the other states will fall when one of the biggest states manage to pass this. The vote is SOON. Get on this!

wolf-pac.com

[Mazmaz]

http://www.marchfordemocracy.org/

[Mazmaz]

California has become the 2nd state to call for a states convention for a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics!

[Sqwunk]

Very cool, I hope more states start falling in line. At the moment I'm still making my monthly donation to WolfPAC, best I can do right now but I'm really glad to see another state has passed

[Mazmaz]

George Takei supports wolf pac.

[Acevalefor]

When is Oregon going to get on this? All I hear around here are arguments about tax breaks for Intel and Nike and the money involved for the state or appropriations bills for ODOT to funnel more money to Portland for MORE bike lanes...

[Mazmaz]

When is Oregon going to get on this? All I hear around here are arguments about tax breaks for Intel and Nike and the money involved for the state or appropriations bills for ODOT to funnel more money to Portland for MORE bike lanes...

Here's the Oregon spreadsheet. Looks like a lot of representatives need to be contacted/convinced still. Senate side looks a bit better.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...vRmR1MHc#gid=0

[Mazmaz]

PS. I emailed George Takei asking him to give the issue a Takei bump lol

[Acevalefor]

Here's the Oregon spreadsheet. Looks like a lot of representatives need to be contacted/convinced still. Senate side looks a bit better.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...vRmR1MHc#gid=0

Cool. I'll take a look and see who I need to contact. After a cursory glance, this seems to be a partisan issue here in Oregon with the majority of Dems supporting and the majority of Reps opposing...imagine that. "Let the market decide" right?

[Mazmaz]

Cool. I'll take a look and see who I need to contact. After a cursory glance, this seems to be a partisan issue here in Oregon with the majority of Dems supporting and the majority of Reps opposing...imagine that. "Let the market decide" right?

Not particularly. If you look at column C, it's colour coded by their responses. It seems that mostly Dems have been contacted so far, with most "waiting to call back". On the republican side, I see one in house and one in senate have been contacted, and both have "needed convincing". For those that are blank, it means that they've simply not been contacted yet, so it might be worth it to start there.

First step though, I would think would be best to start with your own district, since a face-to-face will be much more convenient if you're close.

[Mazmaz]

I should probably put these here. Will also edit into OP.

How to talk to legislators script: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...ASwMGomtE/edit

How to call legislators:

[tyven]

Fyi house goes on recess for most of August and most reps are home a few times a month. Don't be a pussy, if you want to talk to your legislator go do that shit face to face like the hero America needs.