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###LA Times: Harvard professor's 'super PAC' aims to end power of 'super PACs'
Is it possible to create a "super PAC" that would end the power of super PACs by drawing enough Americans into the system to limit the influence of big money in politics? And is it possible to get voters excited about a subject as dry as campaign finance? Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is leading a crusade to answer both those questions with a yes.
If the Mayday PAC is able to take out five members of Congress this cycle “who are on the wrong side of this issue,” Lessig said, “then when 2016 comes around, magically a whole bunch of members of Congress would be on the right side of this issue, and we would have a narrower range of people that we would have to be going after, and we would have very good data
###The Huffington Post: The Super PAC To End All Super PACs Gets Off To A Super Start
WASHINGTON -- On May 1, Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig launched what he calls a "super PAC to end all super PACs." Lessig, one of a new breed of campaign finance reformers, wants to change the corrupted system by which politicians now raise money for their campaigns.
The irony is to get money out of politics, reformers must raise money of their own. On that measure, Lessig's new organization has gotten off to a super start.
Just when you were fed up with our petty, craven politics and were ready to write off the next few years as a circus of filibusters, gridlock and investigations, comes an idea so simple yet subversive that it offers a glorious ray of hope.
Call it Lawrence Lessig's "money bomb." It’s an ingenious plan to make the drive for small-dollar publicly funded elections a central issue in 2016. With a little luck, the Harvard law professor’s idea could help save the republic.
Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig, the crusader for campaign finance reform, feels that his fellow reformers don’t think big or boldly enough to inspire the kind of grassroots campaign that might break elite donors’ stranglehold on America’s political system.
In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Lessig argues that public cynicism about the prospect of deep reform actually working is the only thing keeping widespread outrage at our slide toward plutocracy in check. And he thinks that only a “moonshot” campaign — an ambitious, collective, national effort “unlike anything they’ve seen before” — can “crack this cynicism” and usher in a more democratic system.
Mayday PAC was already 8 percent of the way toward its goal by Thursday afternoon with more than $75,000 pledged and nearly 31 days left to reach its target.
To say Mayday PAC faces an uphill fight is an understatement. Proponents of serious campaign finance reform face strong opponents in both parties, and the Supreme Court and lower courts have issued rulings in recent years striking down or throwing into doubt a wide array of restrictions on political spending.
If the idea behind Mayday PAC sounds absurd, that’s by design. Cynicism and defeatism about government run so deep through American politics, Lessig believes, that the only way to “crack this cynicism” is with an idea so exceedingly ambitious—a “moonshoot,” he calls it—that people might be roused to get behind it.
“We must show Americans something unlike anything they’ve seen before,” Lessig writes.
Recent studies have found that wealthy Americans’ influence over politics has grown significantly over the past few decades. Just a few hours after the launch, the Super PAC had raised nearly $50,000 — 5 percent of its $1 million goal.
So far, it’s working. In just a few days, with hardly any publicity, they’ve managed to raise over $350,000 dollars with a short-term goal of $1 million.
Upworthy: A Brilliant Plan To Give Billionaires Who Try To Buy U.S. Elections A Taste Of Their Own Medicine
How bad has the money-in-politics situation gotten? A new study by researchers at Princeton and Northwestern universities found that, and I’m quoting directly here: “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Huffington Post: A Brilliant Plan To Give Billionaires Who Try To Buy U.S. Elections A Taste Of Their Own Medicine
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