Here are some Elect Democracy campaign highlights:

• “How Wall Street is Burning Democracy” Report and Legislative Scorecard: We made it easy to find out how much Wall Street gave to Congressional campaigns to check how often Congresspeople voted in line with Wall Street’s lobby position on free trade bills, Wall Street regulation, the bailout, and more. The Huffington Post, Yes! Magazine, Alternet, Nation of Change, Daily Kos, and dozens of other news outlets covering our shocking revelation that Wall Street spends over $1,331 per minute on political influence via lobbying and campaign money.

• RNC/DNC: We brought our legislative scorecard and report to Tampa and Charlotte where we marched on both conventions with our call to get corporate money out of our democracy.

• Stick It to Super PACs: Just days before the most expensive U.S. election of all time we used email, phone, and social media to clog the gears of the ominous Super PACs! GOOD magazine, Upworthy, and others helped us spread the message. Over 1,500 people Stuck It to Super PACs on October 25th! You can still take action here.

• Election Day: do you remember that exact moment when the election was called and we learned that Barack Obama would remain President? I do. What has this election meant to you? Leave a comment on our blog.

• #StopTPP: I joined social, labour and faith based groups on the US/Canada border earlier this month to stop the TransPacific Partnership. To learn more about this ominous, 13 country free trade deal (and our work to stop it), read my blog about the TPPxBorder rally we attended on the U.S.-Canada border.

All that and so much more! A great place to read all about it is our online Media Center which has a vast collection of articles about our work this year.

Next year, we have even more ways to take action. Elect Democracy is taking on the hired hands that call the shots in DC: big shot lobbyists. From challenging Super PAC millions to lobbyist billions, our work is going to be fun, tough, and more important than ever.

We’ll also need your help. Compared to the amount of money flowing from Wall Street to Washington, when you see all we have accomplished, we truly make the most of every penny.

Consider giving a Global Exchange membership to a friend this season and support Elect Democracy.

Again, thank you so much for your action. I look forward to starting 2013 with refreshed energy and refueled strategies.

Happy Holidays!

Arianna DeMario, Elect Democracy Campaign Intern Extraordinaire

The following is a guest post by Arianna DeMario. Arianna is currently supporting the Elect Democracy campaign as an intern/volunteer. Before moving to the States, she worked as a project manager at Citizens For Europe e.V., an NGO based in Berlin, Germany, mainly active in the field of European citizenship and migrants’ political rights in the European Union.

A European Perspective on the 2012 U.S. Election

In my past two months here in the States, I have been asked numerous times how it felt -from a European point of view- to witness the 2012 U.S. electoral campaign and presidential elections from here in the U.S. But actually no European could answer this question without referring first to the initial impact of the previous elections in 2008.

By 2008, after 8 years of Bush era, a big slice of the European public opinion had lost their traditional admiration and interest in American politics and in Americans in general. The American dream, from the point of view of the old continent, was long over, and the U.S. had become for many not much more than a synonym of imperialism justified by the war on terror, social inequality, and environmental unconsciousness.

Then Obama happened. The electoral campaign of 2008 was maybe more passionate for most Europeans than Americans, with people supporting the Democrat candidate and engaging in various ways from Scandinavia to Southern Europe, in some cases moving to the States for some months to work with the Democrats. In July 2008, 200.000 people went crazy in Berlin listening to his speech under the Victory Column. In Europe, Obama had won longer before the elections of November 4th, because he had managed to bring back to Europe the American dream. Some months later, Americans did elect him. And the vote was so strong that everybody on the other side of the Atlantic had to recognise the fact that in spite of all that came out of the Bush era, American citizens had the courage to renew themselves and believe that a better country (and world) was possible.

The truth is, despite the support that Obama gained in Europe, I doubt that Europeans would have had the same courage and elected him, if they were to go to polls. In fact, a few months later we elected the most right-wing and regressive European Parliament ever (EP elections in June 2009).

That year, for the first time after a while, the U.S. gave Europe a lesson of democracy.

Then reality bit back. A couple of years later, Obama had proved not to have the magic wand to solve problems accumulated by years of bad governance, and not to be able to live up to such huge worldwide expectations. Most of his 2008 promises hadn’t turned into facts, the U.S. economy was not exactly blowing, and little had been done to reduce the Wall Street power and redistribute wealth from the 1% to the 99% in the American society.

Disillusion was deep on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially after the mid-term elections of 2010 American politics seemed to be meant to go back to the bad loop once again.

As if it wasn’t enough, the story of the Super PACs entered the game with the 2012 elections. Billions of private funding to the electoral campaign allowed by a ruling of the Federal Court…this would be science fiction in Europe, where most countries don’t even integrate lobbying practices in their political system and reject the idea of group of interests being able to influence the policy making. If all the above-mentioned conditions would have happened in the disenchanted, critical and politically unfaithful Europe, you can be sure that it would have been enough for a significant part of the European electorate to turn away from the previously much beloved candidate and fall into the hands of the first talented populist passing by. Those less impressionable would have nonetheless turned away their vote and either have given it to the other main candidate as a punishment or done what Europeans can do better in times of political disillusion: abstain. But once again, in 2012, a big democracy lesson came from the American citizen: For better or for worse, voting still remains one of the strongest democracy tools in the hands of the people (though a healthy democracy needs much more civic engagement, of course). As long as we don’t have valuable alternatives, there is no point in not making use of it. Of course the American vote, in most cases, was not a vote for the best as 4 years ago, but just a vote for the less worse…but still it showed the courage of American citizens to believe that it’s worth to give democracy one more chance.

The results that Tuesday night shot down much of the billions of dollars spent by some Super PACs to indirectly support the Republican campaign and influence the election results. This showed that the system of the big interests and the big money has an Achilles heel- it still can be beaten by participation. It shows that if people don’t turn away from politics, there is always a chance to shape a future that if it’s not going to be much better, at least is not going to be worse. It showed that if Obama can’t bring the change that he promised in 2008 (be it because of a lack of political will, or be it because of a lack of political power, with the House in the hands of the Republicans), people can do it by choosing not to have their vote sold to the highest bidder…

The day after the election Wall Street opened down: It can be defeated after all, if people don’t give up the exercise of democracy in its various forms. Restiamo uniti per difendere la democrazia!

TAKE ACTION:
What is *your* perspective on the U.S. election? Leave a comment below!

—

Arianna De Mario is currently supporting the Elect Democracy campaign as an intern/volunteer. Before moving to the States,  she worked as a project manager at Citizens For Europe e.V., an NGO based in Berlin, Germany, mainly active in the field of European citizenship and migrants’ political rights in the European Union. She has also worked at DPA, the German Press Agency, and volunteered in several human rights organizations. Arianna holds a MA degree in European Studies from the University of Bath (UK) and the Humboldt University of Berlin, and a BA in languages from the University of Milan, Italy.

Lobbying is a multi-billion dollar industry. While it’s technically true that any constituent can go lobby or try to persuade their legislators, the vast majority of lobbying that is happening in our capitals is funded by -and promotes- corporate interests.

Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists call the DC area home. Since 2008, Wall Street has spent over $2.2 billion on lobbying, largely in order to weaken and squirm out of financial regulations. Add in the pharmaceutical, HMO, agribusiness, business, oil & energy, and defense/militarism sectors and we’re talking nearly $4 billion since 2011 spent specifically to get corporations unprecedented (and undue) influence over all those folks we just elected into office.

In this year’s election, nearly $6 billion was spent to influence the 120 million votes of the American electorate. Compare that to the $2 billion spent lobbying by the top corporate sectors this year to influence a handful of decision-makers. No matter who gets into office, once the elections are over, corporations spend billions to influence the victor. While the corporate elite gave well-financed electioneering an old college try, now these interests will be lobbying harder than ever to influence the decisions of around 750 hundred key decision-makers (Congress, presidential administrators, and state and federal offices like the EPA, SEC and FDA) to get what they want directly from the people who can give it to them. If you were a greedy businessman, what would you do?

Sheldon Adelson may be lamenting, “I spent $60 million and all I got were these lousy House seats.” But now Adelson can just reroute money into lobbying, pay someone in a suit seven figures to put his feet up on the desk of a Congressperson, and still get a lot of what he wants, or at least less of what he doesn’t.

I don’t get to put my feet up on my Congressperson’s desk. I mean, I could try, but I would probably get in trouble. So why don’t lobbyists? They don’t deserve the proximity of influence and mental bandwidth of our elected leaders that their corporate-funded tactics afford them. Besides, these lobbyists usually aren’t even members of the constituencies that decision-makers were elected to represent!

Corporations are not people, and money is not speech. But the speech of people hired by corporations to do their bidding in Washington needs to be reined in. On the heels of an historical election and shifting political paradigm, we must be prepared in our civic activism to challenge corporate power plays beyond those unleashed by the Citizens United ruling. We must be vigilant in challenging the undue influence of corporate lobbyists. The voters and constituencies who just cleaned out DC expect integrity, and this means that legislators need to say NO to corporate lobbyists spoon-feeding them profit prioritizing policy and analysis… that’s not who they are elected to represent.

Voting truly does matter, but a healthy democracy requires ongoing participation.

If you want to take action to protect democracy now that the election has concluded, consider looking into Global Exchange’s Elect Democracy campaign and follow @ElectDemocracy and @GlobalExchange on Twitter.

See for yourself how much campaign money the last Congress received from Wall Street and their “Wall Street Loyalty Rate” based on how often their votes matched Wall Street’s lobby position. Most importantly, call your Congressperson and remind them that their job is to represent you, not lobbyists, in Congress.

Fact Sources:

• SuperPACs spent $629 million: MapLight.org
• Election cost $4.2 billion: Center for Responsive Politics:  OpenSecrets.org
• Lobbying costs: Center for Responsive Politics for a) $2.2 billion Wall Street in 2012, and b) $4 for top sector lobbying (opensecrets.org)

TAKE ACTION:

• Make the Call! Call your Congressperson and remind them that their job is to represent you, not lobbyists, in Congress.
• Leave a comment with your ideas about how to challenge the undue influence that corporate lobbyists have in DC.

Today, you have another opportunity to Stick It To Super PACs: vote!

I won’t tell you how you should vote, but I encourage you to defy Super PACs by voting using your values, your research, and analysis you trust, and not being swayed by 30 second misleading attack ads.

People around the world are impacted by the results of U.S. elections, and they don’t get to vote today. You do. So get out there and exercise your rights!

Here are some resources to help:

•    Find your polling place by web or text “Polling Place” to 69866
•    Nonpartisan social ballot analysis
•    Report any voter suppression issues by calling: 1-866-OUR-VOTE or video record any problems using your cell phone with VideoTheVote.org.
•    Remind your friends to vote.

Voting is just the first step to Elect Democracy for a change. No matter what the outcome is on November 7th, we’ll still have a lot of work to do, but together we are in it for the long haul. Thank you. Also, if you haven’t had a chance to Stick It To Super PACs yet, there is still time to take action and share it with your friends!

See you at the polls.