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More than 31,000 people signed our petition to Can the Catfood Commission. Sadly, the White House says that Alan Simpson will remain as co-chair of the President’s deficit commission.
Simpson says that Social Security is “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.” He and other members of the commission are determined to cut the deficit by slashing Social Security benefits.
The time to raise the red flags is now, before the November election. But many people who care very much about this issue don’t know what’s going on.
We want to micro-target likely voters in key districts with online ads, and let them know that now is the time to protect their future by raising hell.
People who have been around FDL for a while remember the moment the Catfood Commission got its name in February of 2009, when it was a still glimmer in Pete Peterson’s eye. It represents the outrage against a hedge fund billionaire who got rich because he didn’t pay his taxes, who thinks that senior citizens should pick up his tab – even if it forced them into poverty and onto a diet of cat food.
Since that time, the “Catfood Commission” monicker has spread like wildfire throughout the online world, with 70,000 mentions on Google. The forceful imagery instantly communicates what’s at stake.
But the same media elites who believe it’s a sign of “seriousness” and “fiscal responsibility” to support slashing Social Security benefits are not covering the story. They never have. And they’re not going to.
FDL was virtually the only media outlet covering this issue for a very, very long time. But if we’re going to alert the public in time to derail the commission, we really need to step up our campaign, and quickly.
It’s clear cutting Social Security is the Catfood Commission’s goal. And we’re going to have to go directly to the public to alert them, because we can’t rely on traditional media to get the word out.
Can you please help us run online ads to call out the Catfood Commission?
Every $5 will show our ads 500 times. Click here to donate now and help step up our campaign to save Social Security from the Catfood Commission.
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Sending the message out.
Thank you.
I guess I shouldn’t be shocked any more that nobody is covering this, and yet here we are.
Fortunately we’ve had really good luck learning to microtarget with ads on the Just Say Now campaign, so we’re going to do it on Social Security too.
Donated. Why through ActBlue, though? Why not set up the donations straight to the Lake?
Anywho, keep fighting the good fight, Jane.
I even left a 10% tip :)
Congrats, you’re one the right track now. And it’s an effort that (finally) does deserve my money. But… You’ve still got that “elite” mindset. Online ads won’t really reach people, not the people who need reaching.
Let me take an example from my own business as a web-design firm: $5000.00 in targeted web-ads, 2 leads, 1 customer. $500.00 in targeted snail-mailers: 35 leads 18 customers.
People read the dead trees you send them. They don’t pay attention to web ads, especially not the small-format, unsaturated ads a campaign like this can afford. In addition, I think you’ll agree, web users are either more likely to already be informed, or are more likely to have already decided on such an issue.
I can’t tell you how far $5k would go towards getting your message out, if it was, for example, targeted at residents of Sun City, here in AZ. Or similar communities around the country.
It seems to me that, fundamentally, web ads are still preaching to the choir. And, I agree with KrisAinCA about using “ActBlue”.
$ sent. Hope the ad is seen everywhere. Thanks, Jane
well in this case, the choir still thinks it’s the mean ol Repubs coming for their safety net
Posted a quick one at Eschaton and sent Buzz a tip with the link. I’ll continue to spread the word as I can today.
Threw some dust at ya.
Time to start identifying and mentoring leftists for 2012. We got a late start for this year but methinks we know which side of our bread is buttered now.
Yep. I wish Bernie Sanders would become President TODAY!
should have added that I’ll hustle a few more chicken-frieds and send some $$
p.s. about FDL’s stellar coverage – TPM got my tribal hackles up the other night when I saw their big splashy ’18 People Who Could Cut SS’ post, recalling Jane covered it in much more depth over 2 weeks ago
support real time reporting
The chance of changing or dismantling the commission is nil. Influencing it might have a better chance of success.
The commission is going to recommend various ideas, none of which have to be acted upon. Public pressure will be a big factor.
Because of the deficit, the commission is not going to be dismissed or Simpson replaced. There is no chance of it.
All ideas will be on the table. It’s likely a combination of things will be done. Or, maybe nothing, and we’ll kick the can down to road until another crisis hits us in the face because no one wants to sacrifice anything. They always want the OTHER guy or gal to carry the load.
The population trends are staring us in the face. Less and less people will be supporting more and more as time goes on. It can’t go on that way. Something needs to be changed.
Again, one side’s solution is get somebody else to pay for it. Don’t ask them to kick in.
After Bernie sold us out on HCR I don’t pay much attention to what he says any more.
I’m confused. Why does Obama think cutting Social Security is a good idea? And why does Pelosi send out emails saying that Democrats should be as energized now (having seen that promises are not being kept) as they were in 2006 and 2008 (when the promises were made)?
As someone who runs an online advertising agency, thanks for the advice, but this is the quickest and most financially efficient way to reach “likely voters” who will care about this issue.
Unless you’ve got a cool million and a large staff to design, place and run ads in newspapers across the country, this is without question one of the best ways to target and activate them.
True. I think he wanted to support a change and was stabbed in the back. You are probably right though. His fight dwindled down like a candle being snuffed.
Thanks so much. People don’t believe it is happening because they think if it was, they would have heard something about it. It’s a Catch-22.
Getting a memorable image out and exposing people to the concept helps correct that.
And, Twolf’s image is priceless.
My read was he was offered some money for clinics in his state in exchange for his “Yay” vote. It’s said we all have our price. His, imo, was in the bargain basement range.
“Getting a memorable image out and exposing people to the concept helps correct that.
And, Twolf’s image is priceless.”
LOL! That it is. That it is! Don’t make granny eat cat food!
How did I miss that? OMG! I guess that was when my unemployment bennies got messed up and I was caught up in dialing for dollars for a month.
Is there one of them that does not do a Chipendale dance?
I would eat tree bark before I would eat cat food. eeeeeeewwww
Mercedes Benz
Fancy Feast grilled chicken ain’t so bad on a nice bed of brown rice. jk
Bless you!
:( Throw in some Tabasco and maybe…..
‘zup Stranger !
speaking broadly, my own understanding says it’s HCR all over again. Obama makes deal with oligarchs on SS, oligarchs keep their $$$ out of 2012 GOP coffers
as for Madame Speaker – yet more stellar FDL coverage
As Jane says, the elites that control our media are allied with (and in many are some of the same people as) those who want to gut our futures so they can have an extra house in the Hamptons or on Hobe Sound.
Aside from Krugman and a few other lonely voices, we can’t depend on the mainstream press to even be a neutral force much of the time. It’s up to us, as so much is nowadays and always has been.
Representative John Conyers has a cross-post up: My Letter to Secretary Geithner: Fannie Mae Must Stop Bankrolling Lawsuits Against Underwater Homeowners with Our Money
Yeah, that worked out so well for us after HCR.
Actually, I was talking about direct mailers, not newspaper advertising… and, honestly, a lot of the work I do is in correcting the mistaken beliefs of “Online Advertising Agencies” who wonder why they aren’t getting the impact they want. So, I’m not unfamiliar with the myths and mores of your profession. Myths such as you require millions of dollars to reach consumers who aren’t net-savvy. You don’t need a Mercedes to to drive to 7-11.
But, as I said, this is a positive step and I’m happy to support it over the endless vanity campaigns other seem to adore. So please, don’t get your back up. It’s not rank criticism, just trying to be helpful.
If I had an extra nickel, I might be inclined to give it up. As it is, I just spent $2 on a poney pak of lettuce, hoping to last through the fall.
I’m only on the internet because the mister works in the industry and he has to have it.
I’ll share that one time when I came out of Big Lots, and someone panhandled me, I said, Holy Cow, I just bought peanut butter and bread at the cheapest store in town, are you nuts? Although, the truth was I had just passed out my last few bucks in my purse in another parking lot. Timing Is everything.
Wish I could help with bucks, folks, but you’ll have to settle for my wit and compassion.
I know how grossly generalized that must sound, but really, isn’t this what it boils down to ?
Emanuel, that’s hebrew for One Trick Pony, aint it ?
Yep, to both.
Sounds like a square deal to me.
At my house direct mailers go from the mailbox to the trash, no exceptions.
It’s all I got left. SD thinks I go camping to “rough it”. It’s all I can afford. :) But, honestly, I don’t mind it, neither. Good eats. Crickets. Beach. Yeah, man, bring it on. And, I don’t have to tip the waitress. Oh, wait, forget that. Kiss your girl for me, will ya?
You meant the recycling bin, or shredder, didn’t you?
Hell, I thought you went camping to take yer pupper to the beach.
The blue recycling thing is the same as the trash. Along with the weekly mailers with all the coupons for shit I never buy. I’m an advertising director’s worst nightmare.
That too. He still has to be on a leash, but we’ve got a really looooong chain one, and he can splash in the waves. It’s heaven, really. Campfire, bag, rocks and tree stumps. Girl’s happy. For a few days, anyway. :)
Because I live in a community, we have a central mail box area, and I go through the stuff before I come home. Ditch, ditch, ditch. Do other people really read that shit?
Your experience may not be typical.
In my experience, we generally show a return rate of about 2-5% on shotgunned (ie, non-targeted) direct mailers. Compare that to a return rate of about 0.02% (with a click-through rate of about 1%) on web ads.
But, as I said, it’s advice not criticism as the basic idea of targeting Dem voters is the right path to take.
That deal doesn’t seem to be paying off for Dems in 2010. If only Obama and the Dems had kept their promises…
So, Obama’s going forward with cutting Social Security and hoping no one will notice? If they don’t see it coming, they’re sure going to know about it after it’s done.
Twolf’s image is priceless, but there should be a new one with Obama serving Simpson the can. Why take the heat off Obama?
*g* No, I’m not your typical “consumer.”
Hi Twain!
(Now I really gotta run.)
My thoughts exactly! I would never waste my time and money on a direct mail campaign for that reason.
Jeff Greene spent millions on mailers. Hardly a day went by that I didn’t get at least one heavy card stock mailer from his campaign. He lost by 19.5 points in the primary.
Back to work.
Namaste
Just threw in some bucks ..
Btw, every time I see “Catfood Commission” I think what a genius meme it is .. shows that our side can play the “Death Panel” game too .. (and unlike the wingers, do it without even making up bullshit out of whole cloth) ..
“LOL! That it is. That it is! Don’t make granny eat cat food!”
Granny already has the Social Security she paid for. This is about YOUR social security, and your children’s. You and they are the ones Obama’s targeting to rip off with the Catfood Commission.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=402544
My contribution is in the can.
By the way, some time ago a phone solicitor asked me to give to the DCCC. No way! was the short version of my reply. To his “Why not?”
I simply asked “Do you know what the Catfood Commission is?” He folded like a cheap suit.
No denigration intended, but this sort of post illustrates why I despise centrist liberals almost as much as the far right. You are essentially arguing that the position of a 68 year old woman nearing the end of her ability to work (I use this example because I know someone in this position, who walks around 2 miles every day to work as a custodian for $7 per hour) is morally equal to other unnamed individuals, e.g. the wealthy, who now do not pay SS taxes above $200K. This mealy-mouthed, “it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other”, “everyone needs to share the pain” (regardless of their current situation, a millionaire or living below the poverty line) is a big reason that liberals will be wiped out in November: they have no clue about how the majority of the population lives, what it is like to live on $1200 per month, and most of us out here have seen that clearly over the past year and a half.
Direct mail is even more expensive than newspaper advertising. It’s between $2-$5 minimum to mail a single piece.
$5 can buy 500 online impressions.
You can buy maybe 1.5 pieces of direct mail for that, and have a pretty good chance that those 1.5 people will throw it in the trash and ever open it.
You’re right that online advertising is not the panacea that it’s often sold as, but in this particular instance, I think it’s the best bang for the buck.
Except that the oligarchs are now pouring 70% of their contributions into GOPer campaigns.
This is really about two things:
a) Obama was a Trojan Horse/Manchurian/stealth candidate to accomplish what a GOPer prez could never do: gut SS and Medicare, water-down FinReg, and insinuate the health insurance industry directly into the tax pipeline.
b) Protecting rich Dems (like Pelosi) and soon-to-be-filthy-rich post-presidency Obama from having to pay higher taxes to redeem those otherwise worthless T-Bond IOUs for money stolen from the SS Trust Fund.
I’d like to hope that this campaign will bear some fruit, but my instincts tell me it’s futile. The die is cast.
I also think that on-line ads and petitions proved during the HCR debate that they don’t work. I remain convinced that only massive demonstrations, in Washington and at November campaign events all across the country, are the only way that we can actually change the outcome.
LexisNexis search (Major Newspapers): “catfood commission”
Result: No Documents Found
Sad!
Obama’s desires to please the neocons is wrecking the country. Because he has no principles of his own, because he borrows his ideology from whomever he’s with at the moment (and he’s not hanging out with progressives), because he’s as spineless as the rest of his party, he’s dragging the country down the toilet. Ptoooey!
The more people know about this the better. We can help make that happen.
Plus, no one runs off copies of a direct mailing they gotten and mails them to their friends. New Yorker cartoons, on the other hand…
Now that Alan simpson is also going after Disabled Vets as another prime cause of the deficit, how about we partner up with VoteVets.org, IAVA, the VFW, etc., to get this “commission” shit-canned, as we say in the military?
Contributed.
Like a lot of others people I really can’t afford much BUT on these issues (SS and Veterans compensation/healthcare) I can’t afford NOT to give.
I searched on the New Yorker site. They have not printed an article about Social Security that I could find, since Bush year 2005. When are these NE liberals going to wake up?
They are awake. Wide awake. And they mostly happen to be upper-income types who don’t want to redeem those SS Trust Fund IOU’s with increased taxes on their money.
As Cenk Uygar says, “Our nobles will always betray us”.
I followed the news last weekend on Google, entering ‘social security cuts’ and kept getting misinformation articles on WSJ and F*X news. Where’s the press? Where is AARP with their obligatory, “We did not say that.” in response to the quote from them in the WSJ article last week?????
Meckler’s article in WSJ 8/20/10:
“”We’re prepared to be quite supportive of a real engagement on the issue,” said John Rother, director of public policy for AARP. Acting sooner allows for changes to be made gradually, he said, and will reassure younger workers that the program will be there for them. He dismisses those who said they can never support benefit cuts. “I know all these people personally and they’ll say we have to be hard line now to influence the debate…I kind of take it with a grain of salt, these emphatic statements.”"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704476104575439792287255372.html
Damn good idea.
“The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess,” said Simpson, an Army veteran who was once chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.
[...]
Paul Sullivan, executive director for the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense, said it would be unreasonable for veterans to have to prove on a case-by-case basis that their illness came from Agent Orange. He believes the science supports the decision by VA to grant presumptive benefits.
[...]
“It’s the kind of thing that’s just driving us to this $1 trillion, $400 billion deficit this year,” Simpson said. “It’s not that I’m an uncaring person, but common sense is the most uncommon thing in Washington.”"
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i51binYNGhTWqS0oMMp8itl20ZjgD9HUPG780
Absolutely repulsive, the son of a bitch wants to run disabled veterans through the wringer so they can CONTINUE FUNDING PAYMENTS TO MILITARY CONTRACTORS!
Absolute scumbag, intentionally selected by Barack Obama.
Link that would not stick to the Edit!!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704476104575439792287255372.html
Thats a legitimate comment, and I dont send him money anymore when he asks for it BUT, his constituency is Vermont. His responsiblity is to Vermonters first, who 10 years ago decided it was important to provide adults with health care, through a medicare buy in. That was responsible on the part of vermonters (sanders was one of the leaders of that effort along with gov. dean). The WH was threatening Vermonts medicare buy in and told Sanders to play along. I dont blame him, even though (sadly) i cant feel like hes working for all of us anymore. hes not.
I don’t see any retraction of the WSJ remarks on the AARP website.
Only 3 of the 28 New York congress persons and neither Schumer nor Gillibrand have promised to leave Social Security alone: http://www.ourfuture.org/handsoffsocialsecurity
This should be a requirement for all representatives. If you want to get re-elected you had better commit now to do the right thing when the Catfood Commission makes its now not-so-secret demands to gut Social Security.
Great idea!
Ditto that. Shoot, this was supposed to be a reply to the poster @34 who said direct mails go directly to the trash. Darned NoScript Firefox addon keeps tripping me up. I almost never read any advertising mailed to me–can’t be bothered.
I’ll scrape up a few bucks to support the cause.
We have an abundance of unemployed workers, that suggests that our productivity is far outpacing our costs of supporting the elderly.
Social Security payments are hardly a luxury. On thier own they amount to a very humble retirement living. Basically it’s a line in the sand which preserves some sense of humanity within our otherwise barbaric economic system. Politically skewering barbarians every time they attempt to cross that line is an absolute must-do.
That would be a good idea. Vote Vets, in particular, is very active in pressing for issues they favor.
Granny already has the Social Security she paid for. This is about YOUR social security,…
Not quite. Obama is targeting anyone who receives Social Security now as well as in the future: seniors, disabled (of all ages who have worked), survivors (which includes children), etc. Discussion includes changing or eliminating the cost-of-living increases for those currently on SS. And more. Most Americans seem to think that it is the Republicans who are currently out to slash Social Security. Most don’t seem to be aware that it was Obama who set up the catfood commission and chose the commissioners. The MSM and even liberal blogs are not getting the word out on this point. Why can’t this be made clear? We are fighting on several fronts to save Social Security (against Obama, the Republicans and bluedog Democrats, to name a few.)
…this sort of post illustrates why I despise centrist liberals almost as much as the far right.
Yes, indeed. Social Security does not contribute to the deficit. It is funded separately. The Commission has no business even discussing Social Security. Apparently, the President and his Commissioners don’t know how Social Security is funded. Or don’t care.
I received an email from Jim Dean, Democracy for America in which he said “The Deficit Commission is the most dangerous threat Social Security has ever faced. Reppublicans stacked the bipartisan commission with right-wingers who’ve spent their careers trying to kill Social Security…” Correct me if I’m wrong but this is Obama’s baby. He appointed Alan Simpson. He has all but provided us with the can-openers to help us with our catfood.
Correct me if I’m wrong but this is Obama’s baby. He appointed Alan Simpson. He has all but provided us with the can-openers to help us with our catfood.
Thanks for pointing this out. Democracy for America also appears to have wrong information. Yes, this is Obama’s baby. After Congress voted down such a deficit commission early in 2010, Obama created the catfood commission by executive order and, among others, appointed Erskine Bowles and Simpson to be the co-chairs. It upsets me that knowlegeable people are not discussing this. I am just a retired lady who has to wait for September’s Social Security to contribute to Jane Hamsher’s request re ads. I am hopping mad – and my occasional responses are usually overdone. If I remember correctly, the average Social Security annual benefit is under $18,000 per year. Most of those people have little other income.
Thank you very much for pointing that out, cate! I had assumed that there would be no way in hell Obama’s commission would cut the benefits of those people who are actually receiving their social security. I’m shocked they would attempt it. There appears to be no end to these people’s mendacity.
Thanks. Maybe this is why the commission had been working in secret. I wish I knew how to get involved. My local democrats are all Obama cheerleaders. My progressive Rep. in Congress caved on finance, health care, etc. Sometimes, I think that this is all a nightmare.
You and me both. Our country has become a kleptocracy, all of them liars and thieves. Things can’t go on like this, and I’m sure they won’t.
Dear cate,
You are a saint, and my hero, for you are all of us. There are some posters here who dazzle all of us, the list may vary for each of us, I include Hugh, workingclass, victortruex, reddflagg, ratfood,all recent posters, and so many more in my personal list of whom I’m in awe.
I welcome and include you for you speak from the heart.
I was shocked when the White House asked David Obey (chair of the House Committee on Appropriations) to cut food stamps.
These people are truly heartless. In the end, $12 billion was cut from future food stamp benefits to pay for state aid. But now the Democrats want us to believe that they intend to put the money back before the cuts go into effect. They are just counting on people’s memories being short and the wealthy media celebrities not caring a whit about what happens to poor people.
Yes, I agree, and a critical element in that story was that Obama suggested cutting food stamps instead of using some of his Race to the top slush fund, hardly any of which has been used for anything. And look at this.
“When Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to meet certain members of the hedge fund crowd, seeking donors for his all-but-certain run for governor, what he heard was this: Talk to Joe.
That would be Joe Williams, executive director of a political action committee that advances what has become a favorite cause of many of the wealthy founders of New York hedge funds: charter schools.
Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm.
Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions, which strongly oppose expanding charter schools in their current form.
[...}
But with their lobbyists, phone banks and door-to-door canvassers, the pro-charter forces are turning up the heat by invoking the June 1 deadline by which the state must apply for $700 million in education grants from the federal government in the competition known as Race to the Top, which promotes charter school growth as one of its many goals.
[...]”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/nyregion/10charter.html
Cripes, I should have known, the Great and Illustrious David Dayan has the scoop on what I was trying to communicate.
“Why, exactly, are hedge fund managers, primarily concerned with their own net worth, bankrolling an advocacy campaign for increasing the number of charter schools in New York? You won’t get much of an answer to that from this article, which mainly restricts their answers to: 1) Mike Bloomberg likes them, 2) hey, free market! But if you go outside the New York Times, you’ll find that there’s more going on here:
On Friday, NY Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote a column about how big investors can double their money in seven years using a special tax credit to invest in charter schools, and he also discussed what he uncovered in a brief segment on Democracy Now! which he co-hosts with Amy Goodman. Here’s how he summarized it on the air:
There’s a lot of money to be made in charter schools, and I’m not talking just about the for-profit management companies that run a lot of these charter schools. It turns out that at the tail end of the Clinton administration in 2000, Congress passed a new kind of tax credit called a New Markets tax credit. What this allows is it gives enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities and it’s been used heavily now for the last several years for charter schools. I have focused on Albany, New York, which in New York state, is the district with the highest percentage of children in charter schools, twenty percent of the schoolchildren in Albany attend are now attending charter schools. I discovered that quite a few of the charter schools there have been built using these New Markets tax credits.
What happens is the investors who put up the money to build charter schools get to basically or virtually double their money in seven years through a thirty-nine percent tax credit from the federal government. In addition, this is a tax credit on money that they’re lending, so they’re also collecting interest on the loans as well as getting the thirty-nine percent tax credit. They piggy-back the tax credit on other kinds of federal tax credits like historic preservation or job creation or brownfields credits.
The result is, you can put in ten million dollars and in seven years double your money.”
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/05/09/evil-ed-inc-the-wall-street-charter-school-connection/
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/05/10/wall-street-hearts-charter-schools-gets-rich-off-them/
Why are social security treasury bonds bought by hundreds of millions of Americans contributing 12.5% of their hard-earned (Employee + Employer contributions) paychecks worthless IOUs. They have the same redeemable value as the treasury bonds held in a huge chunk by totalitarian countries thanks to our free markets and their protected markets courtesy of our investors who were able to repatriate their quick earnings to where ever they want to from those countries and also has the same redeemable value as treasury bonds held by wall street.
Social security keeps the 30-40% of the economy humming just fine irrespective of how DOW performs whether it crashes to absolute zero or not because these savings are not held by wall street to be spent in some Madoff type ponzi scheme but given to seniors in their golden years by people elected government in tiny amounts every month when they longer can work and need to spend their later years peacefully. It was the only reason we are not seeing the harsh realties of the Depression our prior generation saw. This social security concept which was a first time concept in the human progressive evolution which was their gift to us.
Deficit commission should focus on fixing Deficit and not on gutting Savings. Deficit can easily be fixed by progressive taxation where we had 90% tax rate on the top tier and as a minor side-benefit this will fix all the CEO excesses we see now. When they see they can take only 10% of the extra million they get by firing 50 employees for short-term gains at the expense of long term company performance instead of current 85% of the extra million they are making they will see risk to reward ratio to be extremely high and they will make more humane and logical decisions in that progressive tax environment. No wonder I see a huge difference in the quality of 1950s movies when I see them since it is a reflection of the prevailing moral ethos of that time which had a really good progressive taxation.
I know that it’s not a good excuse, but I wonder how many people are like me: they have donor burnout after the HCR debacle. All of our spending didn’t really seem to accomplish much at all, and those of us who contributed can’t be faulted for wondering, in some cynical moments, “can I have my money back?”
I don’t fault ActBlue or FDL or anything. It was probably a losing battle from the beginning. But even though I agree that direct mailing isn’t a winning proposition, I have to agree with the bigger question: is online advertising really achieving our goals? With online advertising, the best you can do is a couple of things: get people to sign an e-petition (that probably counts for exactly zero in influencing politician behavior), and get people to… donate more money for more online advertising. Although both of those FEEL like they’re doing something, they’re not changing the process, really.
The only thing that would change the process would be changing politicians’ behavior. And the only way I can see to do that would be to either change voting habits (hard to do, because what people get angry about and promise to vote about today may have nothing to do with their voting habits in November, let alone 2012), or to change the primary source of their income, their lobbyists.
The latter seems more likely. It’s important to remember that we don’t live in a normal totalitarianism, but rather an inverted one. Perversely, it is all of us, as consumers, who control things. It’s just that most of us don’t realize that, and most of us lack the tools and knowledge to act collectively to effect change.
If sites like FDL can begin to supply those tools and knowledge, we can wield true power. For example, suppose that politician X supports the catfood commission. Ignore their politics and philosophy — this doesn’t matter. The simple fact is, they support the CC. So, figure out who the biggest campaign contributors to politician X are and undertake a concerted campaign to hurt the profits of those entities. Since corporations are by far the biggest contributors these days, this is a very real possibility. As long as the donor corporations get the picture — that their profits are declining because their pet politician X is supporting the catfood commission, you can expect to see real change.
To be effective, we need a large(r) organization like FDL or ActBlue to coordinate things; most of us simply don’t have the time or energy to track down all of the droppings on the money trail. Also, we’d need SOME avenue for communicating why we were boycotting company Y (which supports politician X) — if company Y just sees their profits drop, they’ll scratch their heads and move on. But if company Y sees their profits drop (maybe just 2-5%; don’t underestimate greed as a motivating factor… a 2% income drop in a Fortune 500 company is probably 100 times the size of their total political donations!) in concert with a publicity campaign saying we’re targeting them for a boycott because they support politician X, who supports the catfood commission, they may act.
Will company Y suddenly oppose the catfood commission? No, of course not. But they may stop supporting politician X. Enough of this type of withdrawal of support may cause politician X to really take notice, and change his/her tone.
More importantly, it establishes a precedent of power. We may have forgotten it, but we still are in control. If we can use the tools of technology and crowdsourcing to exert the power we already have, we might make a real difference.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take a case in point: all the kvetching and scoffing and finger pointing by the left haven’t altered Glenn Beck’s behavior one iota. If anything, it’s emboldened him. But remember when we went after his sponsors? All of a sudden, he took notice. It wasn’t enough pressure, and it wasn’t long enough, but the point should be clear: until you can hit these entities in their pocketbook, you won’t make a difference.
NB: it might be useful to show people how to boycott these companies. For instance, if we’re to boycott BP and Shell and other big oil companies, perhaps some technical wizard (like myself, and humble to boot) could put together a Google Maps mashup of neighborhood gas stations run by local independent concerns. In that way you can overcome the biggest consumer resistance to boycotts: the convenience factor.
I love FDL and ActBlue and the rest, but I share the concern that simple online banner ads do precisely zero to affect the political process. If we want real change, we have to get savvy and hit them in the pocketbook.
Thanks for your efforts, Jane. This SS recipient has just donated $25. That’s all I can afford. Can that commission!!