If someone won $500,000,000 in the lottery, what would be the most effective way to spend it to change the political situation in America?
Edit: Asking for a friend.
Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion to run a distraction campaign, taking headlines from Bernie Sanders’ repeated wins in the early 2020 Democratic primary. Bloomberg spent $500M the first week to flood the internet with influencers and meme makers being absolutely distracted by the low torrent of low effort shit post memes about Bloomberg. It was so obviously an astroturf campaign built on fake sentiment that everyone forgot Bernie won 5 states in a row and was crushing Biden. By the end of the month, Elisabeth Warren also bowed out and took her progressive voters to Biden.
So for $500 Million you can ruin a grassroots campaign! Buy bad memes and pay influencers to distract people.
It’s funny when you pretend that each of those weren’t 100% coordinated by the DNC to prevent Bernie from winning a bunch of states and perhaps the presidency.
Donate to GOP’s campaign, so they win next presidential election. This will effectively change current political situation
You’d be competing against multi-billionaires and huge corporations. It wouldn’t be enough, even though it’s a ridiculous amount of money for one person.
Changing the US would probably be impossible. Maybe changing your state would be possible. Changing your local community would be much more realistic.
Helping people get homes and food would likely help reduce crime.
Helping people get educations would help some people escape certain situations.
If you’re fixed on changing the US political situation and you think there’s a party that can change the situation, you can go with political donations. I believe whichever party spends the most money on their campaign is the one that wins more often than not.
Assassins
Don’t bother. Enrich the lives of those around you. Feed homeless. Help friends start small businesses. Fix single mother’s cars. Ensure your own stability first, though.
I really like the idea of testing alternative business and corporate structures and definitely not developing a model library for medical devices to print.
Hire a couple people who are really good at making memes and other easy to digest content relative to your cause, then hire 1000 3rd world workers to constantly spam that content on the 10 biggest social media outlets, chat boards, etc. being sure to hit all the big groups that are in the ballpark of your cause. Amplify existing messages favorable to your cause with reposts and reactions.
Basically just a big astroturfing campaign.
Fuck, if only i was good at making memes. I’ll just have to keep spreading seeds and hope the grass takes root!
Don’t focus on a national scale, focus more locally. Look at state legislatures. Look at mayoral and school board races.
You can’t. That’s not enough money.
Make the lives of your community better instead.
My first move is to think about safety and longevity. I’m going to need a private island as a base of operations. Caution also dictates having a few backup homes, so my enemies never really know where I am. Beyond that, I need to spread my message, so I’m going to need a private plane. Something modest and a few years old is fine. This is a charitable effort. It isn’t about me. And in the name of charity and effectiveness, let’s go ahead and add a boat on there, too. Now, to really clear our heads before we get going and make sure we’re enacting the right policies, we’re going to want to bring in some girls…
Fund an antifascist center in the top 200 cities in the country (one per state minimum)? Run a study on how to overthrow capitalism and mail a game plan for a general strike to every single American? Start a land bank for a large area that completely collapses western land ownership laws?
Ads on every billboard everywhere.
Y’know, I don’t think that’s enough to make any significant change. It takes more than money - it takes generations. Nothing will change until things get so bad that the comfortable (I assume they’re comfortable if they’re not engaged) majority get involved at all levels. I’m not pessimistic…
You’d start by attending $10,000 plate dinners, and shaking hands with candidates and expressing views. Hire a few $60k a year idealists for a think tank to publish papers. Pick 1-2 issues and hammer them. Pay lobbyists to set up meeting and propose/write legislation and amendments.
As some of your (hopefully idealistic) candidates win, you ask them to help drive your issues through. Get them to make concessions to other people’s proposals for support on theirs, helped by your lobbyists. Use your think tank to drove issues and provide talking points and legislation.
That’s the traditional view. A better approach might be to create a 501c3 and run positive message ads that give you a warm feeling about america in general, say nothing of substance, and include a candidate you like’s name sometimes. Then another pac showing pictures of the candidate you don’t like and chanting “hate hate hate” behind them. Play to your audience.
The fundamental cause of America’s problem is the two-party system. If you want to get rid of that you have to switch to a proportional representation system. I would suggest working at the local or state level. I do not know of any organization working on this issue. You would likely have to start one yourself or hire someone else to do so.
If you’re genuinely going to do it, any suggestion I make here about specifics would be pointless, as you should do significant research before deciding on what flavor of proportional representation to push and where. But, the key is to adopt a system known for accurate and small party representation. If a party gets enough votes to win a single seat, they should be awarded a single seat. If they get a third of the votes, they should get a third of the seats.
Let me know if you want to talk specifics.
I used to say this too, but living in a multiparty country for 20+ years now (NL) I don’t see it as an advantage when you need to govern so large a country. It sounds like an easy solution until you try to get agricultural and city people to agree, and then now try multiplying it by 50.
Unfortunately, a two-party system will likely work best as you’ll need a common consensus to move the country in a single direction.
Not sure why the downvotes on OP, it’s a reasoned opinion and worthy of discussion.
I think you’re saying that if you have too many political parties then the whole system gets watered down so much that nothing happens and the direction of the country can change at any time because there’s no unified agenda. Isn’t there a system to elect a leader who’d set the agenda and coordinate?
One would hope that through conversation we’d have more reasoned information but it appears camping on a platform is where people go to “win”.
We’ve dozens of parties trying to win to form a coalition, so sheer numbers don’t help. You can easily argue that our politics have grown stale and ineffective here in the recent years, and there’s a growing need for change.
For instance we’ve already had a few elections where a farmers collective party and the far right party have won their elections, but immediately afterwards (sometimes within a day, as in the farmers (BBB)) they’ve abandoned key parts of the platform that helped get them elected. Or their positions are so vile that no other party will work with them.
I’d argue that there are the side effects of taking a position first and wanting change at any cost. This is the cost - only more stagnation.
My point is “more” does not mean “better” - often, it’s just more of the same. Vote for and demand “Better”.
We’ve dozens of parties
We have, not we’ve
The conjuction doesn’t work when “have” is the verb in the sentence
Buy yourself a couple of supreme court judges. They’re a bargain these days.
