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Comment by icanhackit | Hacker News Reader

U.S. negotiators have basically functioned as drug lobbyists

I made a similar comment a few days ago - what we need is a crowd-funded lobbying platform for everyday people. A kind of Kickstarter for law and policy.

If a few thousand or even tens of thousands of people chip in a few dollars to lobby for a change in policy, we can compete with corporations who have bought their way into power.

While we're complaining on the internet big business is using pocket change to get what they want. It needs to be as easy if not easier to pay a few bucks for your desired policy as it is to complain about it in an online forum.

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There's no way everyday people can compete with corporations anymore.

There are approximately 244,673,000 adults aged 18+ in the US: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html 318,857,056 * (1 - 0.233% of Persons under 18 years, percent, 2013) ~= 244,563,362

And according to https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/ , to match the $3.24 Billion spent on lobbying in 2014 you'd have to get absolutely everyone in the US 18 or over to give you 13$ and a quarter just to match what corporations are spending.

It's not the least bit realistic, and if the pre-2008 growth rate in lobbying spend picks up again it'll just get more and more out of control.

What's really necessary to get this absolutely incredible amount of money out of politics. The two presidential candidates shouldn't have to spend over 30 billion dollars on an election. The amount of money in politics right now is just insane.

Yes but how do you do that when the supreme court has ruled that money equals free speech?

There's lots of people who can see that money in politics is the problem. How do we solve it though?

Wait for a supreme court judge to die and hope their replacement aligns with our views on this topic?

Petition the whitehouse?

Fund a kickstarter campaign to get our own people lobbying for this?

Fund alternative media whose cost structure is much lower than TV networks, e.g. this TISA explainer video on banking, public services regulation and corporations, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wwkikCpQ6pk . The Young Turks is the top online news show on YouTube, I wish they had episode transcripts. There is a related PAC to reverse Citizens United, http://www.wolf-pac.com

TYT isn't really news in that they require the news to function. They comment on the other news gathering interests. So they can't really standalone.

to match the $3.24 Billion spent on lobbying in 2014

Who says every dollar needs to be matched? If a corporation lobbies for rubber subsidies, no one will give a shit. If a corporation lobbies to make it a criminal offence to mention their brand online without a license, that crosses into free speech which might be worth a dollar or twenty to those who find that kind of thing important.

It's not the least bit realistic

You don't necessarily need to spend more than the corporations, you just need to make it lucrative to stand up for the good guy. If you can have $1m to be evil or $900k to be good, the $100k lost is more than made up for by the advocacy of those you served. It's free advertising.

Let's just bite the bullet and start an anti-lobbying lobby. Fund candidates that support transparency and anti-lobbying legislation.

> Fund candidates that support transparency and anti-lobbying legislation.

That would of funded the current President as well... that is, until he was elected President.

> There's no way everyday people can compete with corporations anymore.

Really? It's like you've never heard of a PAC before.

PAC's and Super PAC's are often heavily funded by corporations.

And regular PAC's really cannot compete with the unlimited funding a Super PAC can levy (PAC's have strict limits on contributions to parties and candidates; $5,000 per candidate, $15,000 per party per year).

How is this any different from the panoply of public lobbying and advocacy organizations that exist today? The Chamber of Commerce pulls in $200 million per year. EDF pulls in $121M. Sierra $98M. CAP $40M. Cato $29M. The Family Research Council $13M. The EFF pulls in $10M.

Even the smallest of these are not small numbers. And, if you're interested in policy or political change, you've heard of all of them, and they all make it pretty damn easy to donate money[0]. It's just people don't care that much, and for the people who do care, there's often someone else on the opposite side of things who cares just as much.

It doesn't seem to me that a crowd-funded lobbying platform offers much. Maybe it makes it easier to start up an organization? Sure, I guess, but it doesn't give me any confidence that they'll use any funds I give in an effective way. At least major, well-known organizations have a brand to defend and have to be able to prove repeatable successes.

[0] The EFF, which I got to in 5 seconds by DuckDuckGoing "EFF donate": https://supporters.eff.org/donate

Going by this argument there's no point using Kickstarter because you could already fund projects without it. But what Kickstarter did was act as a hub for many different projects (EFF won't help much for anything pertaining to health care), a public tracker to monitor progress and outcome, a means of describing what the goals are and what different fund totals will help achieve, and a trusted method to transfer funds.

Within each Lobby Kickstarter you could outline which organizations would receive funds for specific goals, e.g. ACLU for particular civil liberties that are under attack, EFF to address dragnet surveillance etc. Yes you're adding a middleman but you have a one stop shop for initiatives that range far and wide. You could also keep score of which organizations have been successful so that you have an additional trust mechanism, much the way a company might keep track of its subcontractors when choosing who to use to get a job done.

The EFF even has an Amazon Smile account, so you can donate that way too.

Cato is another front for corporate lobbying.

> what we need is a crowd-funded lobbying platform for everyday people

How about https://www.iWouldDo.it ?

You mean... what voting is supposed to do for free in a normal democracy? Demos Kratos, yeah right, Large Companies Kratos.

I think a more practical idea is the notion of people running for office that vow to take a public vote for all their decisions through the internet (yes it could be done realistically with public/private key cryptography)

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