Sarcasm becomes you, my dear...

Thanks hoffa,
Although in retrospect I think I could have used one or two fewer exclamation marks. I was merely trying to hammer home the point that Nader had as much a right to run as anybody, and blaming the Greens for Gore's loss is like blaming the sun for global warming. I do think Gore was robbed in Florida, but he's the one who went off and left the door unlocked.

Back to a topic more closely related to investing -- if ever there was a link between politics and economics it's in the area of campaign finance. I dearly hope that what America learns from this election is that money (corporate money in particular) does buy power. It also buys better, more reliable voting machines and better equipped polling places so that the wishes of more affluent and better educated voters "count" more than those of less fortunate citizens. And I hope more than anything that the Greens and others don't draw from this the conclusion that what they need is more soft money. What we need is more power to the people and less influence from the major parties, extremely wealthy individuals, and big business.

To that end, I'd like to offer these sites where those who are interested can find out more about (and hopefully do something about) the influence of money in national politics. Now is a great time for us voters to let our Senators and Representatives AND the companies in which we invest know how we feel:

An alarming report by the Federal Elections Commission (http://www.fec.gov/press/pty00text.htm)

Public Citizen on campaign finance issues (http://www.citizen.org/congress/reform/refhome.html)

Just one page in an extremely informative site by the League of Women Voters (http://www.lwv.org/elibrary/pub/issue5.html)

Public Disclosure, which bills itslef as "A place to discover who gave what to which Federal candidates when" (http://www.publicdisclosure.org/)

"Know Your Congress" from Common Cause - provides contact info for legistalors along with info on how each financed his or her campaign (http://www.commoncause.org/congress/)

The Congressional Accountability Project (http://www.essential.org/orgs/CAP/CAP.html)
and this scathing article by its director, Gary Ruskin (http://www.rollcall.com/pages/news/00/05/21stcen0508.html)

Because most of these sites focus primarily, if not exclusively, on the Republicans and Democrats, here are the quite different guidelines followed by the Nader campaign (http://votenader.org/materials/houseparty/RegulationsDonationHP.html)

A very enlightening floor speech by Sen. Russ Feingold (http://www.senate.gov/~feingold/cfr.html)

An Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post by Sen. John McCain pub. Nov. 19, 2000 (http://mccain.senate.gov/cfrwashpost.htm)

The Environmental Working Groups's guide to anti-environmental Political Action Committees (PACs) and the corporations that fund them (http://www.ewg.org/dirtymoney/badguys.html)

That should keep y'all busy for a while. :0)

Yours in this and other kinds of Foolishness,
Susan