marchfordemocracy

Democracy is about "one person one vote," not about serving the interests of the elite, regardless of whether their intentions are good or bad. When special interests have so much influence over our political process, it weakens our democracy by drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans.

Politicians spend 30-70% of their time fundraising because they need to fund their campaigns. You can't run for office without being able to fundraise thousands or millions of dollars. When this is a fundamental aspect of running for office, you must be loyal to a very small fraction of the wealthiest donors. Furthermore, these donors can spend unlimited amount of money on political advertising to propagandize the American public. Yes, in theory, we can vote out members of congress when we don't like how they vote (Eric Cantor, hello), but when the system is set up in this corrupt way, every politician is going to play by the same rules that prioritizes the voices of the donors over their constituents.

We tried "please" and even "pretty please" but that hasn't worked very well! But when over 90% of Americans agree that we need to end the corrupting influence of money in politics, we don't think that "demand" is too strong of a verb to use.

Before politicians will listen to the people, we need to remove the money influence that is plugging their ears!

That being said, we fully support greater accountability and transparency in government, and technology can certainly help. It does seem that the MSM has failed the American people on this issue, as the vast majority of the population believe the system is corrupt, however we rarely see investigative reporting into the influence of money in politics. Is this because these issues aren't "sexy" enough? Maybe, but it would be great to see citizens hold government and the media more accountable with the direct and very public interaction that new media provides!

Thanks for your support u/anjrou!

*Issues that have had minimal public support, like gay marriage and racial equality for much of our history, needed significant cultural changes before legislation could even be considered that addressed these injustices. But when the majority of Americans already agree with us, it's more about activating their support to put pressure on our lawmakers to fix our corrupt political system.