2/9/2020 Voting is our superpower
I hope this message finds you well. It's been quite a week, with rain and flooding in many areas around our state, and, as usual, a lot happening on the national and world stages. I send love to all who are struggling, and wishes for a rapid return to peace and comfort.
With all that's happening, and the temptation to feel powerless in the face of it all, I want to send a message about our superpower: the power of the vote.
As many of you know, for the last year or so I've focused my active and financial support on organizations that prioritize anti-corruption initiatives. I encourage you to check out your local League of Women Voters, an organization that has been around for 100 years, conducts sound, thorough research on issues, and devotes thousands of hours to educate people on the voting process. And, for the next level of anti-corruption activism, consider RepresentUs. They have a state-by-state strategy to end dark money and gerrymandering, and protect voting rights and access. Both of these organizations are non-partisan and do not endorse candidates or parties.
League of Women Voters: https://www.lwv.org/about-us
RepresentUs: https://act.represent.us/sign/our-strategy/
RepresentUs recently sent a message to all its allies, disturbed as they were by the ability of the U.S. Senate to end the impeachment trial without calling witnesses, when polls indicated about 75% of Americans wanted witnesses to testify. When an elected body can ignore the people so dramatically, it's a symptom of a much deeper problem.
And, to a large extent, that deeper problem has been exacerbated by the impact of Citizen's United, the Supreme Court decision of 10 years ago that changed the rules around campaign financing. The amount of money funneled through super PACs has skyrocketed over the last ten years, and represents an ever smaller slice of the American public.
The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) issued a report tracking the impact of this decision, and others. They found that corporations, by and large, are not taking advantage of the new rules. But individual donors are.
Among the most concerning results are the data that show outside spending (spending from individuals and organizations other than the candidates' campaigns) growing exponentially:
from $750 million in the decade before 2010 to $4.5 billion in the decade after
about $1.2 billion of that spending comes from the top 10 individual donors and their spouses
$963 million in outside spending came from groups that do not disclose their donors
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/reports/a-decade-under-citizens-united
All of this leads me to the tentative conclusion that the senators who voted for acquittal are not so much afraid of an insulting twitter storm from the White House, or loss of presidential support in their re-election campaigns. They are afraid of losing mega donor support. The CRP also finds that in about 90% of races, the candidate on whom the most money is spent wins. Lose the mega donors, lose the senate seat. That's the brutal math, in too many cases.
Our superpower in the next nine months leading up to election day 2020 is this: our vote is, in the end, up to us.
We can refuse to be swayed by mega donors, dark money, super PACs, twitter storms, social media disinformation campaigns, and any other attempts to reinforce the current abuses of power.
We can refuse to let the swirl of attacks from any corner knock us off our clear path: ending corruption; expanding and protecting voting rights; constructing affirmative solutions to climate change, health care, economic advancement, education; and protecting basic human rights for all.
We can educate ourselves on the issues, consider the candidates in terms of our values, understand their approaches to solving the problems facing our communities, and engage in conversations about the pros and cons of proposed solutions.
This requires work and time. Most importantly, perhaps, it requires resistance to cynicism. After the state of the union address, I was reminded that tyrants do not expect us to believe their lies. Their hope is that we give up on the notion of truth itself, so that they may replace adherence to truth with adherence to pure power.
We have nine months to prove them wrong, to demonstrate that true power is shared and multiplied through loyalty not to an individual, but loyalty to the principles of inclusion, compassion, respect, and love.
Thank you for walking this path, and being part of a loving community.
Liz