LIBERTAS - In the Name of Liberty

After the Senate passed the financial reform bill last week, the Center for Responsive Politics compared the senators' votes with their campaign funding.

The results are all too familiar.

Senators who opposed the legislation received 16 percent more money from the financial industry than senators who supported it. For the House version, it was even more egregious: Representatives who voted No got 70 percent more money from commercial banks than those who voted Yes.

Is it a coincidence? You probably know what I think.

Special interest money continues to poison our politics, creating the impression that votes in Congress are bought and sold to the highest bidder. According to the CRP, the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors -- those that would be regulated by the financial reform bill -- showered $2.3 billion onto candidates, leadership PACs, and party committees since 1989.

We're going up against some deep-pocketed interests in our fight for electoral reform, but with your help I know we can beat them.

Please support our work with whatever you can afford. Your contribution will allow us to continue building this movement to make Congress accountable to the people. You'll help fund a series of TV ads and nationwide lectures aimed at recruiting new supporters and increasing the pressure on Congress to pass electoral reform.

Contribute now:
http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/YourContribution

Given the finance industry's lavish campaign spending, it's amazing the financial reform bill made it through Congress at all.

But for every good bill that survives Washington's economy of influence, there are dozens more that are blocked by special interest pressure. If their spending didn't work, they wouldn't waste their money. But since the campaign contributions are still flowing, the special interest groups must be getting something in return.

Together, you and I are going to stop this flow of special interest money. We're going to convince Congress to pass the Fair Elections Now Act to create a system of publicly funded elections. And we're going to restore the people's faith in our democracy.

Since the Citizens United ruling in February, we've been busier than ever. The Change Congress community has sent more than 20,000 letters to Congress urging their support of the Fair Elections Now Act. And in the past few weeks, more than 4,000 people have taken our Funders Pledge, vowing to withhold more than $4 million in campaign contributions from Congress members who oppose the Act.

We've got tremendous momentum, but we need your help to keep it going. We're running this organization as leanly and efficiently as possible, so you can be sure your contribution is used wisely.

Please contribute to Change Congress today:

http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/YourContribution

Thanks again for all your support.

-- Lawrence Lessig

Bruce Dixon, of the Black Agenda Report, and a member of the Move to Amend steering committee, wants to know. As a corporation, its assets are protected and its liability is limited; but if its board, officers, or major shareholders want to throw the company’s weight behind a candidate, it has the same speech rights as a person. BP won’t be indicted for murder or even negligent homicide in the deaths of the 11 oil workers on the Deepwater rig even though, as Dixon writes, “most or all of the first wave of Gulf Coast states where the oil slick will wash all have capital punishment for people.”

“Centuries ago,” Dixon writes, “most of the humans who mattered agreed that kings, queens and nobly born… had the god given right to ride roughshod over humanity.” Corporations, and those who control them, have much in common with that old-style aristocracy. How long before we come together to toss them off their thrones?

Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about her new book, Infidel, and discusses her life as a fugitive, how to fight radical Islam, and the need for what she calls legitimate intolerance.

As others claim to be victims of global colonialism, Ayaan takes responsibility for her world. She argues that since the end of colonial rule, many Islamic nations have turned backward, instituting slavery and female genital mutilation. Her well spoken thought and story have been an inspiration to the west, as she claims her freedoms come not from rebelling against the past mistakes of former colonial powers, but from acceptance of the liberal reforms of modern western civil rights movements.

It's been forty years since National Guard troops opened fire on anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University and stunned the nation. On May 4, 1970, the students on the campus in Ohio gathered to protest the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. The Ohio National Guard, in its attempts to disperse the crowd, shot and killed four people and wounded nine others. The event deeply divided the nation both politically and culturally, and many important questions remain in regards to why the Guardsmen shot into the crowd. 


Remember Kent State!