Friday, August 08, 2008

Bomb the lawless lawmakers today!

Become a StrangeBedfellow!

In honor of the 34th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Nixon, forced out by public disclosure of his disdain for the rule of law, the Accountability Now PAC/Strangebellows campaign is gathering a "moneybomb"* today. They are collecting funds for a populist campaign, in the words of Glenn Greenwald to work for:

...the preservation of core Constitutional principles, civil liberties, basic accountability, and to undermin[e] and remov[e] from power those who enable the assault on those principles.

Given the inevitability of Democratic control of Congress for the foreseeable future, our campaign has thus far focused, and will continue to focus, on those incumbent members of Congress who, through both their active complicity and craven capitulation, ensure that there is no real "opposition party" standing against any of these assaults.

As I explored last month, putting together a serious campaign to impede the national surveillance state is going to require some reconfiguring of the political landscape. Neither existing parties nor existing politicians value preserving privacy and legality in the context of cheap and easy technological assess to universal spying. And that goes for both our aspiring Presidents too.

I gave to the Strangebedfellows campaign this morning and urge others to do so, even if you run across this entry after the August 8 "moneybomb." Rolling back the national surveillance state is going to be a long haul.

*A "moneybomb" is the tactic of aggregating donations on one day to maximize the sense of mass community involvement in a campaign distributed across the net.

UPDATE: As of 8:20 am, Saturday August 9, this effort had raised almost $150,000. A good start.

1 comment:

Nell said...

Thanks for the fundraising update, Jan; I was surprised not to find a total anywhere today among the blogs promoting the moneybomb. Where'd you see it?

I'm more optimistic about this development than most of the political stuff I've given to.