Join the Donor Strike For Publicly Funded Congressional Campaigns

Last year we launched the first online donor strike to persuade candidate Obama to deliver on his promise of "change we can believe in." Now I'm glad to see the donor strike idea embraced by our friends at Change Congress.

“I’m pledging not to donate to any federal candidate unless they support legislation making congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded.”

Corrupt contributions by Wall Street (mostly to Republicans, but also to Democrats) resulted in deregulation of the financial industry, which in turn led to the multi-trillion bailout we are struggling through now. The alternative is simple and cheap: publicly-funded Congressional campaigns.

So join the strike at Change Congress, and then call your Senators and Representatives using their cool whip tool.

Update 1: Howie Klein nails it as always:

Today Politico published an opinion piece by virulent anti-democracy Bush Regime shill Hans von Spakovsky, that asks a simple, and highly misleading question: Should taxpayers subsidize pols? What von Spakovsky misses-- quite purposefully-- is that taxpayers do subsidize pols. When Duke Cunningham, Don Young, Jerry Lewis, Tom DeLay, Jack Murtha, Roy Blunt, Thad Cochran, William Jefferson or John Boehner is selling earmarks worth millions for thousands, who is subsidizing that? Duke Cunningham's cars and mansions and yachts and whores cost the taxpayers millions and millions of dollar in earmarks through Jerry Lewis' incredibly corrupt Defense Appropriations Committee. Some estimates are as high as $100 billion dollars a year-- a year-- as the cost of corruption in Congress alone. We bear those costs!

It costs at least a million dollars to run for a House seat, sometimes five times that, and over ten million to run for a Senate seat. Those elections are largely financed by special interests with very specific agendas. The biggest special interest that's gone into perverting our electoral system has been the $2.2 BILLION (since 1990) by the FIRE (Finance/insurance/real estate) sector. What did they want? Deregulation so they could rip off the public. What did they get? TRILLIONS of dollars worth of deregulation. And what did we get? The Bush Depression.