I apologize for this brief interruption of a self-imposed promise to not post politics on this blog, but I posted this general policy statement on someone else’s walled garden, and it seemed useful to have a copy posted here that I may point to in the future. The statement is as follows (feel free to ignore it if you do not follow this blog for politics):
At some point in college I made a pledge that I would never again donate to a political campaign until there are major and massive reforms to campaign finance laws. (Including and especially a revocation of the Citizens United decision and the elimination of Super PACs.)
The DNC has built this finely honed instrument of mass spam trying to convince you that they run on “bake sale money” and that you can and should “vote with your wallet”.
What they fail to tell you—what they are afraid to admit—is that when you vote with your wallet you agree that rich people “deserve” more votes than you. It’s a terrible system and feeding it money only makes it worse.
What they also fail to tell you is how much of the “bake sale” is a lie. They don’t actually give a hoot about your $20 “donation”. That barely covers (and often doesn’t) the postage and labor in sending you all those letters, emails, texts, and phone calls. The illusion that you are contributing to the bake sale keeps you complicit. The DNC is just as much financed and run by Super PACs as the RNC. Even if we don’t have as many examples of outright grift and stealing on the DNC side such as the “We Build the Wall PAC” that helped a millionaire finance his next yacht, you are still wholly complicit in the darker grift that when a Super PAC is named something like “Citizens for Liberty” they imply that they mean ordinary citizens like you that donated $20 and maybe got a tote bag to remember it by. Super PACs can never mean any such thing. The citizens that Super PACs actually care about are rich jerks, whether or not the PAC is financing their next yacht or the PAC is their next yacht because they thought sailing the political waters would be a fun hobby or sport.
Having not donated in a couple of decades has greatly dropped the amount of spam I get from this horrible system. It hasn’t solved it, though. I do appreciate that the system accidentally merged the records of my father and I which makes it a lot easier for the spam to go directly to my spam folder when it doesn’t have my name on it. I’d recommend more people try that, but I cannot tell you how it happened.