JUST SAY NOTA

Federal election spending has skyrocketed from $7.1 billion in 2008 to nearly $15 billion in 2024, treating human data, individual sovereignty, and working-class votes as commodities to be bought by the highest corporate bidder. $24M has been spent on just the CD-1 race alone. The loudest speech for me, a whisper for thee.

By allowing corporations and unions to raise and spend unlimited sums, the system gives deep-pocketed organizations an unequal megaphone to hijack local narratives, drowning out the fundamental individual rights of actual people. Money is amplification; it is not speech.

Special interests route hundreds of millions of dollars through 501(c)(4) nonprofits, manipulating political psychology behind a curtain of total anonymity while completely violating the transparency and privacy rights voters deserve.

The balance of political influence has fundamentally shifted away from grassroots organizing toward faceless corporate donors, leaving individual candidates and the authentic needs of our communities completely sidelined by institutional megadonors. Grassroots candidates are regularly deplatformed by the three major parties.

The corporate capture of our politics is called fascism. It is precisely why we must fight back at the grassroots level by pushing to challenge corporate overreach, safeguarding our personal autonomy, and separating capital and state to invert power to the bottom up.

Elected officials have become disconnected from the needs of everyday people, convincing themselves that the ends justify the means. If they don’t take the AIPAC money, or vote away due process, their opponent will. They’ll tell you it’s all bigger than any individual, or even 340 million individuals, or that they are privy to information you’re not. Of course, it’s never just fear-mongering. You’ll just have to trust them on that.

And finally, despite the fact that we as voters know all of this, we continue to elect and re-elect the politicians in question. Only the most active in politics tend to vote in primaries, even fewer in mid-terms. Then everyone “votes for the lesser evil” in general elections, even when they’ve collaborated with the greater evil. Nobody ever says, “enough is enough.”