What I am tweeting to #Bernie2016

This is the tweet message I am sending to tweeters who are using the #bernie2016 hashtag.

If you back Bernie, please consider synergy with the campaign finance reform movement. Thank you. http://campaignfinancereformers.blogspot.com/2015/05/synergy-with-bernie2016.html

I hope you will  choose to do your own tweeting in the foregoing vein.

I hope the campaign finance reform organizations will decide to support this tweeting and urge their grassroots supporters to participate.

I noticed that #bernie2016 is doing its own tweeting, and one recipient tweeted:

Just received an adv tweet from the campaign of #Bernie2016 . I loved tagging it as OFFENSIVE! #tcot

— Bill Hibbs (@BiHiRiverOfLife) May 31, 2015

To me, the critical matter is what the policies of Twitter are about this. I have had some experience with them, which you can review in my blog entry Spamming on Twitter.

If you can provide additional helpful information about the Twitter standards and practices, please pass them along to me.

@YoBenCohen

Dear Ben Cohen,

I have received the below email from you transmitted via <moveon-help@list.moveon.org>. In the email, you say:

I've decided to put my money where my mouth is by building a national, grassroots campaign to get Big Money out of politics.The truth is that I can't outspend the big political donors whose influence is corrupting our political system. I can't chase them out, scare them out, or shout them out. But together, we can all stamp them out.

Your email then, in effect, espouses joinder of the StampStampede campaign and MoveOn's campaign seeking overturn of Citizens United.

I applaud your joinder of forces.

I want to contribute to that if I can.

In March, I initiated I tweet to defeat the money monster. My idea is for this tweeting campaign to be as broad based as possible. A branch of the campaign right now is seeking synergy with Bernie Sanders. See Synergy with #BernieSanders2016.

I tweet to defeat the money monster is a grassroots campaign. It needs organizing, and volunteers who will do tweeting, and also support of as many campaign finance reform organizations as possible. To obtain the latter means that the campaign must be structured and do messaging in a way that all campaign finance reform organizations can support.

I invite you and StampStampede to help me out with advice about how best to structure I tweet to defeat the money monster, and its messaging, so that all campaign reform organizations can support it, and so that can help get grassroots volunteers who will do tweeting.

Please let me know if I can talk with you or another representative of StampStampede.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
Rob Shattuck.

P.S. Please pardon my public way of communicating to you on this, but it is very hard to get the attention of the campaign reform organizations, and I do this public communicating to try to help accomplish that. Maybe I shouldn't, but, until someone tells me and shows me something else that will work better, I am doing it this way.


From: Ben Cohen <moveon-help@list.moveon.org>
Date: Wed, May 27, 2015 at 11:05 AM
Subject: First, Ben & Jerry's. Now, Citizens United.
To: Robert Shattuck <rdshattuck@gmail.com>

Hi MoveOn member, 

This is Ben Cohen, the "Ben" of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I've decided to put my money where my mouth is by building a national, grassroots campaign to get Big Money out of politics.

The truth is that I can't outspend the big political donors whose influence is corrupting our political system. I can't chase them out, scare them out, or shout them out. But together, we can all stamp them out.

The Stamp Stampede is a movement of tens of thousands of Americans legally stamping dollar bills with a simple message: "Stamp Money Out Of Politics—Amend the Constitution." 

I know my fellow MoveOn members have been sending that same message through phone calls, rallies, and petitions for years, which is why I want to invite you to also spread that message by stamping your money—and support MoveOn in the process.

Will you donate at least $10 to support MoveOn's important efforts to overturn Citizens United? If you do, MoveOn will send you your own stamp so you can spread this message about getting Big Money out of politics.

Click here to chip in, join the campaign to overturn Citizens' United, and help stamp big money out of politics.

Want to break up the big banks? Want to reduce the Pentagon's budget? Want to strengthen—not cut—Social Security? Want to take real steps to fight climate change?

Then your first order of business is to stamp money out of politics—because as long as big corporations, the 1%-ers, and their lobbyists can buy as much influence as they want, the rest of us will see no progress on the issues we care about the most. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

You can stamp your foot ... and you'll end up with a footache. Or you can stamp your dollar bills (yes, it's perfectly legal) and let your money do the talking. As your bills circulate, so will your message about reclaiming our democracy. It's like a petition on steroids—each bill will be seen an average of 875 times!¹

And while you're taking action individually, you're also funding MoveOn's collective action—which is key if we're going to overpower the Big Money that wants to keep buying and selling our political system.

Will you chip in $10 or more—so MoveOn can continue to fight to overturn Citizens United and beat back the influence of Big Money, and so you can get your own stamp and join the Stamp Stampede? Click here to get your stamp—and help stamp Big Money out of politics—with a donation of $10 or more.

I'm excited to be working with MoveOn because they get the importance of this fight.

• MoveOn members helped push the Senate to hold a historic vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United last fall.
• MoveOn members were part of the coalition that delivered 5 million signatures calling to overturn Citizens United this January.
• Over 100,000 MoveOn members signed petitions, made phone calls, and attended rallies urging President Obama to issue an executive order that all federal contractors must disclose political spending.

If this fight were easy, we'd be done by now. But we're battling against the wealthiest corporate interests in America—so we need the strongest, boldest grassroots movement we can build. That includes MoveOn and the Stamp Stampede, and it really relies on all of you.

Can you pitch in $10 or more today? Your money will make sure MoveOn keeps pushing for executive and legislative action to reclaim our democracy—and you'll get a stamp so you can tell the world: "Stamp Money Out of Politics—Amend the Constitution."

Click here to chip in and help stamp money out of politics.

With you in the fight,

–Ben Cohen, Stamper-in-Chief

P.S. Here's an example of what a stamped bill looks like:

What do you say? Are you ready to get stamping?

Click here to chip in $10 or more, get your stamp, and join the fight to stamp money out of politics.

Source:

1. The Stamp Stampede, accessed May 12, 2015

http://www.stampstampede.org/pages/build-the-movement

Seeking synergy with #bernie2016

There is a lot of tweeting going on under the hashtag #bernie2016.

Bernie is probably becoming the leading national spokesperson on behalf of "getting money out of politics."

MAYDAY.US, MoveToAmend, Represent.Us, WolfPac, Stamp Stampede, Take Back Our Republic, NHRebellion and other campaign finance reform organizations should seek synergy with the #bernie2016 movement.

I propose to tweet to tweeters who are using the #bernie2016 hashtag to try to inform them about the efforts of campaign finance reform organizations, and to solicit "synergy" between the #bernie2016 movement and the campaign finance reform movement.

In my tweets, I will include a link to this blog entry.

So let me set forth the solicitation here in large font:

SOLICITATION TO ACTIVISTS IN THE #bernie2016 MOVEMENT:
Please consider synergy with the work of the campaign finance reform organizations MAYDAY.US, MoveToAmend, Represent.Us, WolfPac, Stamp Stampede, Take Back Our Republic,  NHRebellion and other organizations. 

Update 6/1-- Please bear with me if I tweet to you more than once. To push this forward, I need to keep tweeting as I seek participation and support from the campaign finance reform organizations and their followers. See @YoBenCohen and What I am tweeting to #Bernie2016. Thanks.

Update 7/19-- See Proposed messaging re: Congress; Tweet to AZ Cong'l delegation

Back to tweet spamming question

Having complied with MAYDAY's request that I change my blog URL name (see Transition to new URL name), I wish to return to my tweet spamming and the discussion of the same in Do you agree with the MAYDAY Team?

The MAYDAY Team has had this further to say by email:

As far as spamming, spam is specifically defined as unwelcome, and widely perceived as unethical. Congress has even passed laws against much spam because it is so unwelcome and unpopular. The lack of even a few comments on your blog should be an indication to you that your Tweeting is "unwanted or intrusive advertising on the Internet," as the definition of spam goes.

I can only repeat that my tweeting has attracted a great deal of positive interest from MAYDAY supporters and supporters of other campaign finance reform organizations. This interest has been manifested by hundreds of retweets, favoritings, follows, and other favorable reply tweets from recipients, and also by thousands of page views of links to my blog that I have been tweeting. (A partial listing of blog entries and numbers of page views is set forth in Do you agree with the MAYDAY Team? .)

As to numerous favorable reply tweets I received expressing interest in my ideas and suggestions, I sent reply tweets to the senders to further encourage the their interest, and I included @MAYDAYUS as a recipient so MAYDAY could see the interest and do its own encouragement of the senders.. To my knowledge, MAYDAY made no encouragement of any of those senders.

I acknowledge that some people have strong negative reactions to receiving unsolicited tweets from tweeters they do not know, and some people I have tweeted to may have decided to oppose campaign finance reform because I tweeted to them.

The negative reactions, however, have been minuscule, and the favorable reactions I have received from my tweeting, in my view, far, far outweigh the negative reactions.

The MAYDAY Team can and should estimate the negative side to my tweeting, and weigh that against its estimate of the benefit of my tweeting inspiring greater interest and activism by MAYDAY supporters and other campaign finance reformers. In doing that estimating and weighing, the MAYDAY Team is entitled, it it wants, to conclude it does not want me (or presumably anyone else) to do spam tweeting such as I have been doing.

Keep in mind that the estimating and weighing of positives and negatives of the tweeting I am advocated ultimately needs to be extended to the matter of spreading the MAYDAY name and the cause of campaign finance reform to the public generally. 

I replied to the email I received from the MAYDAY Team referred to above, to the effect that, if MAYDAY wanted no part of my tweet spamming, I would point that out to MAYDAY supporters as a reason they should not spend their time within the confines of what MAYDAY specifies and they should go outside MAYDAY to seek activity, including with other campaign finance reform organizations. to engage in more aggressive publicizing of the campaign finance reform cause.

Transition to new URL name

The Campaign Finance Reformers Blog has heretofore been published using the URL name http://maydaysupporters.blogspot.com/ .

MAYDAY.US has requested that  this URL name be changed so that the URL name does not include "mayday." To accommodate MAYDAY's request, I am changing the URL name to http://campaignfinancereformers.blogspot.com/.

Blog postings in  The Campaign Finance Reformers Blog will hereafter be made using the URL name http://campaignfinancereformers.blogspot.com/

To avoid broken Internet links, The Campaign Finance Reformers Blog that has heretofore been published using the URL name http://maydaysupporters.blogspot.com/  will be preserved.

Posts hereafter made using the URL name http://campaignfinancereformers.blogspot.com/ may contain links to that which is preserved under the URL name http://maydaysupporters.blogspot.com/ .

Hopefully this transition to the URL name  http://campaignfinancereformers.blogspot.com/ will be reasonably seamless, and broken Internet links will be avoided in the transition.

This entry is being posted under both URL names.

To help keep you straight, in the blog title above, I have put "(old)" for the blog under the http://maydaysupporters.blogspot.com/  URL name, and I have put "(new) in for the blog under the http://campaignfinancereformers.blogspot.com/ URL name.