What do you think donations are? No need to do the extra crowdfunding step.

Even large groups of people can’t put together enough money.
It also costs a lot of money to organise that kind of thing.

Would anyone accept the money if the purpose was so obviously to expose corruption?

This is basically what various nonprofit orgs that people can join amount to.

Like, if you join the NRA your subscription cost is going to lobbying politicians on gun issues, among other stuff like keeping the org running and paying for nice things for the head of the org.

To really have influence we’d have to crowdfund an island where we can film politicians molesting children.

In America business and government are not actually separate. This is important to understand because it’s a structural feature of the American economy. We are a true capitalist libertaria. The government is comprised of the companies and people in business

American business is America itself and the government is a co-leader whose purpose is to facilitate American business interests.

This isn’t corruption like in the movies where you pay off crooked cops (which doesn’t really happen here). This is what businesses and individuals competing for political power looks like in a true capitalist libertaria.

In a corrupt developing country, anyone can bribe officials for things, especially if its small and within that officials purview, in a dysfunctional semi-corrupt developed capitalist democracy, only the rich 1% can.

Example: One Child Policy was officially policy in China, but you pay their “fines”/bribes/extortion (or whatever you wanna call it) and voila, problems go away. Ask how I know… I am the second son in my family lol, and no, we aren’t a rich family, it was like from savings over a period time or something, or maybe my parents borrowed from relatives, idk the details… like… people just bribe for a lot of small everyday stuff, I heard about even getting jobs or getting into university, and people talk so casually about it. There’s a term for it “走后门” (2nd definition: to pull strings; to call in favours; to use the influence of someone in authority to achieve one’s goal), usually someone you know (关系 Guanxi), and you give them money, like probably in the form of a 红包 (Red Envelope, you know, the new year thing).

In America? Nah, there’s law and order… or something… you can’t just bribe for stuff…

Its a “gift” lol, not bribe. Thomas Clarance has declared so. Just ask him about it while he’s on vacation on the yacht of some random 1%er.

Wait, you wanna do the same? Wanna buy a supreme court justice or a congress member? Nah fam, come back when you’re part of the 1%.

(TLDR: Every country sucks and is corrupt in one way or another.)

Would be easier to just call Luigi often enough.

I always thought a “buy a lobbyist” would be a good crowd funded service. lets build it, I can offer up designs.

1. You can already do this. There are tons of nonprofits that lobby the government for x, y, and z.
2. But these non-profits don’t tend to engage in much explicit bribery, because the people working at these organizations and who donate to these organizations think outright bribery is wrong.
3. Finally, if you started a gofundme to bribe a politician, they would 1,000,000% not take your money. When you bribe someone, discretion is part of the deal, and with a public gofundme, you’ve already broken that discretion.

Isn't this just taxes with extra steps?

The top ~5-6 people l wealthy people own more than the bottom 51% on the planet combined. Let alone a single country.

But there is something like WolfPAC

In a way that is what trade unions do. Here in the UK they donate to the Labour party, for some reason.

Here’s a better use for all that money.

Start a non-profit organisation that harasses and annoys the hell out of people who take bribes. Stuff like putting laxatives in their coffee, banana peels on their path, water buckets on door, and so on. You get the idea. Also, they should video those pranks and post them online. Name and shame anyone who takes bribes.

In civilised countries that would be illegal. In the USA - I don’t know.

There are a lot of large PAC’s that effectively do this, pulling together a sizeable voting block and donation base. AARP, an organization for retired people, is one of the larger ones. It just happens that it is hard to a large group of people to agree on policy.

Poor people don’t have disposable income. Especially not the throw at a politician and hope kinda income.

I think the main reason is that your average working class person, even if they have the money to contribute to that, doesn’t have the time and energy to get involved in politics. Looking at history, most people seem to be happy as long as they have food on the table, a roof over their heads, and some pretty basic rights, and only start to act when something big goes wrong, usually famines, but also things like plagues and cases of injustice that a lot of people hear & care about.

The reasons I think this doesn’t happen:

• most people don’t have enough interest, time, energy
• a lot of people don’t have enough money to contribute
• this would require lots of organization and connecting to others who agree with the idea
• it’d probably be easy to get caught, and a lot of the time (especially in countries where corruption is widespread) poor people will get punished harsher than the ruling class.
• even if you somehow were able to do this despite the points above, it still probably wouldn’t be enough; the gap between the average and a billionare is incomprehensibly huge. Less than ten people have more wealth than half of the world’s population.

If you are talking about lobbying They do

mass of funds. corps have larger available capital to spend, individuals, even collectivized, do not.