How much money do you need to raise to run for Congress?

If you want to be a Senator, you need to raise an average of $8,700 every day for the two years prior to the election. If you'd like to be in the House of Representatives, you only need to raise $1,700 per day, on average. These numbers are part of a stunning infographic published by RootStrikers. If you need to raise $8,700 per day, who are you more likely to meet with? People who have ideas or initiative, or people who can hand you money. And consider this too (another bit of information from the infographic): Only .26% of the people funded 68% of contributions to people running for Congress. Rootstrikers was founded by Lawrence Lessig, who has a knack for coming up with shocking irrefutable statistics relating to political corruption relating to money. The system is designed to discourage ordinary people from running for Congress. People with a distaste for asking for money are much less likely to run. People who are not functional pychopaths are less likely to run (and see this astute comment here). Or is there a huge overlap between those two types? Seems so.

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United Republic introduces The American Anti-Corruption Act.

United Republic has just announced its 9-point plan to get much of the big money and undue influence out of politics. They are looking for one million people to sign their petition right now, and eventually 100 million, because Congress is paralyzed and won't act. Change absolutely must come from the grass roots. United Republic believes that almost all of America's clashing groups can and will come together on this project. United Republic will actively require all members of Congress to declare whether they are with the program--the pro-money representatives need to get the boot. Interesting collection of folks on the board, including Josh Silver, Lawrence Lessig and reformed lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Take a close look at this effort, because this actually has a chance of getting traction. The name of the proposed act: "The American Anti-Corruption Act."

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Looking Forward?

As usual, Florida is still undecided, a mess. According to NPR, though, it is leaning heavily toward Obama, despite the shenanigans of the state GOP in suppressing the vote. I didn’t watch last night. Couldn’t. We went to bed early. But then Donna got up around midnight and woke me by a whoop of joy that I briefly mistook for anguish. To my small surprise and relief, Obama won. I will not miss the constant electioneering, the radio ads, the tv spots, the slick mailers. I will not miss keeping still in mixed groups about my politics (something I am not good at, but this election cycle it feels more like holy war than an election). I will not miss wincing every time some politician opens his or her mouth and nonsense spills out. (This is, of course, normal, but during presidential years it feels much, much worse.) I will not miss… Anyway, the election came out partially the way I expected, in those moments when I felt calm enough to think rationally. Rationality seemed in short supply this year and mine was sorely tasked. So now, I sit here sorting through my reactions, trying to come up with something cogent to say. I am disappointed the House is still Republican, but it seems a number of the Tea Party robots from 2010 lost their seats, so maybe the temperature in chambers will drop a degree or two and some business may get done. Gary Johnson, running as a Libertarian, pulled 350,000 votes as of nine last night. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got around 100,000. (Randall Terry received 8700 votes, a fact that both reassures me and gives me shivers—there are people who will actually vote for him?) Combined, the independent candidates made virtually no difference nationally. Which is a shame, really. I’ve read both Stein’s and Johnson’s platforms and both of them are willing to address the problems in the system. Johnson is the least realistic of the two and I like a lot of the Green Party platform. More . . .

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Two billion dollars per week for 11 years, but our leaders won’t level with us about Afghanistan

The War in Afghanistan. We've spent enormous blood and treasure on this adventure, yet it almost never shows up in most daily papers. The candidates for president almost never discuss it. In eleven years, no one has articulated why it is that we have invested so heavily in being there for eleven years. The official platitudes are based on horrific lies. No politician wants to discuss that our "ally" Pakistan is encouraging the Afghanistan insurgency. What should we say to the families of the soldiers who died there? Your loved ones died for what? "Freedom!" scream the politicians. No politician has discussed all of the things we could have done with that money had we truly invested in something permanent and valuable rather than something wasteful, tribal and destructive. No candidate has stated the obvious: We have been propping up a corrupt regime in Afghanistan. And the media cooperates with all of the above ignorance, making Afghanistan a bloodless, vague, distant thing that we don't know anything about, and we, as a nation, don't care that we know nothing about it. No one in power wants to admit that fighting wars is good insurance for re-election, or that it simply makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful and patriotic to fight a war, even an insane war.

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On stealing massive numbers of votes

The November 2012 issue of Harper' Magazine includes an article title, "How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. Aims to Paint the Country Red." Unfortunately, the article by Victoria Collier is not available online in its entirety. Here's a tiny excerpt of an extraordinary article that will leave you with a pit in your stomach and the phrase "faith based vote counting" resonating in your mind:

Blockbuster allegations are perhaps unsurprising given the group of Beltway insiders who helped to pass [the Help America Vote Act]. One central player was former Republican representative Bob Ney of Ohio, sentenced in 2006 to thirty months in prison for crimes connected with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff—whose firm was paid at least $275,000 by Diebold. HAVA's impact has been huge, accelerating a deterioration of our electoral system that most Americans have yet to recognize, let alone understand. We are literally losing our ballot—the key physical proof of our power as citizens.
Here's another haunting excerpt:
The statistically anomalous shifting of votes to the conservative right has become so pervasive in post-HAVA America that it now has a name of its own. Experts call it the "red shift."
This article should be required reading for all of those who want to simply assume that the will of the majority is being honored throughout the United States. Those who have investigated this issues over the past few elections have identified red flags everywhere they look when it comes to counting the vote. The Harper's article mentions a non-profit organization geared to making sure that every vote counts: Election Defense Fund. A peek at the EDF homepage provides this information:
According to the "father of exit polling," the late Warren Mitofsky, exit polls are intended solely for academic analysis of voting patterns and opinions (e.g., what did 25 to 34 year-old white males regard as the most important issue?) and not as any sort of check on the validity of the votecounts. Unless, of course, you are anywhere else on Earth (other than America), where exit polls are routinely employed, often with the sanction of the government of the United States, as just such a check mechanism, and have frequently led to official calls for electoral investigations and indeed electoral re-dos. In America, where votecounts in competitive and significant races consistently come out to the right of the exit polls (it is called the "red shift"), the media machine has waved off the exit polls, concluding, without so much as a quick peek under the hood of the vote-counting computers, that the exit polls must be "off" because they "oversample Democrats," conclusive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. We're the Beacon Of Democracy, dammit--we don't need no stinkin’ exit polls! We're "one nation under God" so our elections must be honest!

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