by George Lakoff (Foreword by), Antonia Scatton (Contribution by), Julia Bernd (Contribution by)
A tsunami of money has flooded the American political landscape, leading to the overwhelming influence of powerful interests on the process, and to the domination of politicians' time by fundraising, rather than governing. This book shows how to disrupt these effects using an organized grassroots approach that significantly reduces the cost of effective campaigns, undercutting the need to raise huge sums in order to win. The book begins with a foreword by George Lakoff, the Berkeley linguist and cognitive scientist who has written extensively about the political process. It then describes the problem, current approaches to its solution, and finally, a new way to fix it. The big idea? No big money. No attack ads. Just people and candidates working together to run clean, affordable, and powerful campaigns.
Author Biography
Nelson Morgan is the CEO of UpRise Campaigns, a California Social Purpose Corporation, which was formed to disrupt the influence of big money on our politics. In his previous life, he was the director of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and a Professor-in-residence at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley. His research specialties were the processing of signals such as speech and signals recorded from the brain, including the use of neurally-inspired approaches to machine intelligence. Since retiring from the ICSI and Berkeley positions in 2014 he has focused his efforts on working with his UpRise colleagues to strengthen democracy by restructuring how our elections work, incorporating technology to organize campaigns in a much more effective way.