May One - Lawrence Lessig's Anti-Corruption SuperPAC
For those not paying attention, Lawrence Lessig launched, with a
fairly prestigious board, a superpac aimed at forcing political/electoral reform using the same aggressive tactics that have been so effected elsewhere in US politics.
https://mayone.us/So far, they're going to push a small number of specific reforms at the candidate level.
http://reform.to/#/reformsThe veiled threat is that they'll basically tank anyone who opposes basic reform, using intelligence, research, technology, and aggressive advertising, intervening in individual elections.
I pledged money to this.
Comments
EDIT: Or rather, in the races they're committing to.
https://mayone.us/more-ways-to-help/
http://oneway.lessig.org/
More on the match in a moment. First, we need your help. To launch the second stage of Mayday on June 4, we're planning a Thunderclap -- a way for all of us to join together and commit to broadcasting the same message, at the same time, on our social media networks. If enough of us do it, we can make a huge statement for our launch.
Click here to join next week's Mayday Thunderclap -- your participation is crucial for making it a success.
Thunderclap doesn't keep any of your personal information, and certainly doesn't keep the list of your friends. Think of it like a free Super Bowl ad. The potential network effect can be enormous, but it depends on your joining the effort.
Now for the match. Before we go public with this, I wanted to share with you the names of the people who made the match. We’ll make our public announcement next week, but because they’re matching you, you should know first. I am incredibly proud of the mix and diversity in this match.
Here’s who they are:
Chris Anderson, curator of TED, where the story of this SuperPAC began
Brad Burnham, partner at Union Square Ventures (which gave us Twitter, Tumblr, Kickstarter and tons more)
Reid Hoffman, president of Linkedin, and on the original PayPal team
Vin Ryan, founder of Iron Mountain
Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and cofounder of PayPal
Fred & Joanne Wilson, Fred is also a partner at Union Square Ventures.
And to top it off, I’m grateful to my friend of almost 20 years, David Milner, president of NuGen Capital Management, a private equity renewable energy fund, who has committed to match the stretch we raised over our original $1M goal.
This is an amazing mix who have joined the amazing 13,000 of you. This means stage one is finished. Now on to stage two. Help us celebrate in the best way you can:
Join next week's Mayday Thunderclap right now.
Thank you for getting us this far. I'll be back in touch very soon about our plans for stage two of Mayday.
Now, it’s on.
- Lessig
Paid for by:
Mayday PAC
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee
www.MayOne.us
Our mailing address is:
Mayday PAC
PO Box 380444
Cambridge, MA 02238
$4,677,061 pledged of $5,000,000 goal and 14 hours to go. If this was a work day, it would probably make it. Ending on a holiday means it's probably going to be close.
Looks like it's quite unlikely *not* to make it to me.
So until some massive upswell happens outside the normal bounds of discourse, whether a peaceful protest of millions or an armed uprising or a foreign incursion or a massive failure of the top... it seems we're beyond the political event horizon.
And that's not any sort of 'new' thought just not there's more evidence to support the actuality of it and not just the seemingness of it.
It's like in some games: You can sense that you're probably behind, but then you can count up the points and know if you're too far behind to possibly pull ahead.
Tying this back to Lessig's topic of corruption, these were well intentioned men with a flaw that soured the system. Lessig's goal of removing money from politics gives lower and middle class citizens a better shot at influencing the national policy scene but doesn't address the institutional structures that ensure this exclusion.
What blows me away is that the one place citizens with a mailing address have substantial power is county and city elections, yet very few people vote for these positions / many are uncontested.