MAYDAY: Larry Lessig launches a Superpac to get money out of US politics

[Cowicide]

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[snafder78]

@SamSam

wo

You beat me to it!
I’ve already donated to http://www.wolf-pac.com/
Interested people should support and watch YoungTurks (available on YouTube).

[mr_raccoon]

…so, you become the monster to fight the monster?

[dobby]

@PatRx2

Regulation does help. Up here (Canada), we got through the 2008 meltdown quite well, at least as far as primary effects went, because our banks are regulated. (Couldn’t entirely avoid the knock-on effects of a slowdown in our customers’ economies, though.)

Culture, like the one found in Canada, actually allows regulation to be respected is far more important.
Until the culture around American finance ceases to resemble pirates raiding beach towns of the Caribbean regulation will just be treated as an obstacle to be overcome. Without internal regulation and a sense of shame for obscene behaviour how can laws be respected?

[OtherMichael]

@crashproof

The Green Party received 0.7% of the vote [… Their] spending on the 2012 campaign was approximately 0.00014% of the $7 billion total [edited from crashproof’s original].

That’s a pretty good vote-per-dollar ROI right there.

[daneel]

So logically they’d win with 0.005% of the total spending? How much would that be? $400k?

Is there zero chance of campaign spending ever being sorted out? Does the first amendment prevent sensible spending limits being set, or central funding rather than private funding?

I’m imagining campaign spending being limited to about 1% of what it currently is, access to TV adverts being strictly limited, perhaps banning private funding in favour of a central pot funded from general taxation given in equal amounts to all candidates (perhaps you’d need to set some kind of barrier to getting said funding).

[jandrese]

There isn’t a linear relationship between money spent and votes received. It has diminishing returns. That’s why you sometimes see people spending what turns out to be enormous sums of money per vote, especially in local elections. The first million got them to 40%, the second million got them to 45%, their million to 47%, and after awhile the million only adds a handful of votes.