The Patriot's Pledge Home Page


Introduction to the Patriot's Pledge
The Patriot's Pledge
Instructions for citizens who want to sign the Pledge
Instructions for Pledge coordinators
Information for concerned citizens
You are visitor number
Email me: mathog@cco.caltech.edu(only really important messages please, I get tons of mail already - thank you)
This page last modified October 25, 1996
Author: David Mathog
Central Patriot's Pledge web page (at http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~mathog/pledge.html)
UP

Introduction to the Patriot's Pledge


The Patriot's Pledge is a grassroots initiative, an experiment in participatory democracy, the ultimate goal of which is to publish before the 1996 election advertisements signed by as many citizens as possible, in as many local papers as possible. Each advertisement will contain, in addition to the names of those who signed and financed that particular advertisement, the Patriot's Pledge, which consists of a strongly worded statement that the sorry state of our electoral system is the result of actions by the Democratic and Republican parties, and that those who have the Pledge have vowed to oppose those parties' candidates until such time as meaningful reforms are enacted. The Pledge also calls for the rest of the American people to educate themselves on this issue and join in demanding better government. Many Americans agree with the statements in the Pledge, or at least they do once they have had a chance to read the relevant material. The politicians must be made to understand the depth of our feeling and our commitment to change. If we are to be succeed in this, we must act quickly to:

The Patriot's Pledge is in no way an endorsement of a particular alternative candidate or party, nor is it an attempt to form a new political organization. Moreover, if it actually takes off, this will be a true citizen's movement. It will be distributed and essentially leaderless: the coordinators are performing nothing more than secretarial tasks (albeit, important ones if the Pledge is to succeed); the author of this work hereby swears his intention that, after this work is completed and disseminated, he will perform no action other than those expected of every other Pledge signer - an equal among many, and will eschew any further leadership role whatsoever.

The cost of publishing advertisements is large newspapers can be very high. For instance, in the daily L.A. Times, a full page costs about $20,000. To come up with this much money hundreds to thousands of people will need to organize themselves, contribute small sums of money, and sign the Pledge. Conventional political wisdom would suggest that the general population is too lazy and too uninvolved to mount such an effort, which is what the Democrats and Republicans are counting on to keep these issues from seriously entering into the current campaign. It's up to you to prove them wrong - the success or failure of this initiative is up to you.

The author grants the right to any party to reproduce this document on any other web site, subject to three conditions:
Printouts of this document may be freely reproduced and distributed, but may not be modified in any way.

The Patriot's Pledge


We, the undersigned citizens of the United States of America, do hereby charge that the Democratic and Republican parties have conspired within and between themselves to subvert the electoral process for their exclusive benefit, have prostituted themselves and our government to the desires of the rich and the powerful, and have by these deeds and others, violated the fundamental ethical principles upon which our great nation was founded. By their actions, these two parties have shown that they will never willingly correct their behavior, and that to restore fairness and honor to our electoral system, we must carry out our patriotic duty to remove them from power, and to place in office others committed to this cause. We pledge that we shall actively, but peacefully, oppose all candidates of both parties, that we shall cast our votes solely for qualified third party or independent candidates, and if that if none be available, we shall write in "NO" for that office.

We respect the intelligence and integrity of the American electorate, and request only that each of you independently investigate the validity of our claims. Read the Federal Election guidelines, published by the Federal Election Commission to learn the letter and intent of the current law, and then determine for yourself who gives, who gets, how the money moves to its final destination, and the benefits that the contributors and recipients obtain. Study the history of campaign reform, and consider the fairness of the existing campaign laws and institutions. The information you need may be found rapidly on the Internet, or with more effort, in your local library. We are confident that all citizens who familiarize themselves with this subject will be as outraged as we are, and will vote with us to restore ethics and fairness to our electoral system.

Instructions for citizens who want to sign the Pledge


If you are a registered voter and wish to sign the Pledge, please contact the local office of any of the third parties ( Reform, Green, Libertarian, U.S. Taxpayers, Natural Law , etc. ), at least one of these should be active in your area. Tell them that you want to speak to their coordinator for the signing of the Patriot's Pledge. If none of these know yet what the Pledge is, take the initiative! Print a copy of the Pledge off of the net and take it to them so that they can pick a coordinator from their crew of volunteers. Tell your family, friends, and acquaintances about the Pledge - the more signatures we get, the better.

When you sign the Pledge you will be asked to make a small donation to help pay for the cost of running the final advertisement in the local paper. You should not give more than $50, and do not give even that much if it would push you over the $25000/year limit on personal political contributions. The coordinator is sworn to spend this money on the publication of the final ad, with any possible remainder to be spent either on a repeat publication, or to be donated to a neutral charity, such as the American Cancer Society.Never give your contribution to a person or organization who you do not have reason to believe is trustworthy.

Please understand that the reason the coordinators will be contacted through the offices of the party's mentioned above is that we want to make sure that all contributions are used for the intended purpose. The established third parties already have offices in place which are ideal sites to locate coordinators, since the members of those parties are known to share the common goal of reforming government and any citizen can find the office through the phone directory or Internet. Visiting the offices of one of these parties does not constitute a commitment to vote for their candidates, and your contribution will not be used to support their other political activities. If in your community no such third party organization exists, you will have to wing it. Try to meet in the foyer or entrance of your main public library, or town hall, in that order, and organize yourselves as best you can.

Instructions for Pledge coordinators

Your tasks are relatively simple, but will require some time and effort, and if your area spends more than $1000, will require that you fill in a few forms and send them to the FEC - complete instructions for doing are presented here.

First of all, you will need to make up a sheet that Pledges may sign, on it leave columns for:

Besides accepting Pledges, your other duties are these:

Each area's coordinators must agree upon a target date for publication (preferably as soon as possible), and determine where and when they will meet to pool the collected signatures and funds, and prepare the final print advertisement. If you possibly can, purchase a full page advertisement in the front section of your local newspaper. Note that such an advertisement can be very expensive - the L.A. Times quotes a weekday price of $159 per column inch, and the full page is 129 column inches (made up of 6 columns, 21.5 inches high.) Coordinators working in major cities will therefore need to get 4000 contributors of $5.00 each, or 400 of $50, or some similar combination. Alternatively, scale back to half a page, or whatever your level of contributions will support. (Be sure to find out if there is a special rate for political advertisements). The formatting of the final advertisement is left up to you. However, under no circumstances should you change the wording, and especially, never name particular candidates that you support or oppose, as doing so would change the nature of the action both in real terms, and with respect to FEC requirements. You will need to contact your local newspaper as soon as possible to find out what formatting requirements if any, they may have. For instance, some may accept electronically formatted documents, others may not. In any case, the final advertisement must include the entire Pledge, followed by a list of signatures, or if space doesn't permit that, something like "signed by 1234 American Patriots", replacing 1234 with whatever number is appropriate. In any case, at the bottom of the advertisement it should say "Organized and paid for by 1234 American Patriots - not organized by any candidate or candidate's committee."

If your group spends more than $1000 you must register it with the FEC using their form 1, and report the expenditure using form 3X. Neither is very difficult to do - it may look horrific, but since your transactions are very simple, you only need to fill in a few lines. Only one such set of forms should be filed in an area - if there are multiple coordinators, one should pool the data and file the forms. You can obtain the 3X form from the FEC web site, and form 1 from their FAX back system. (They apparently made a conscious decision not to make it available electronically - only they understand why.) Call 800/424-9530 and follow the phone mail system until you get to the FAX service, you want to retrieve document 361. The FAX back system supposedly puts your phone number on the document to identify the recipient, but experience has shown that this does not always work, so if you have the FEC send it to Kinko's or some such place, warn them that it is coming in without your name on it.

form 1 instructions

You are registering this action with the FEC.

form 3X instructions PDF format Postscript format

You should only need to fill in the first two pages, most of which will be blank.

Page 1
Page 2 only fill in a few lines
You should file both forms as soon as you pay for your advertisement. If you intend to try to publish multiple advertisements, then you should contact the FEC and seek specific instructions, since you will not be able to use the "terminal report" format for form 3X. In any case, make copies for your records, but never give these records to anybody other than the FEC, and mail the originals to:

Federal Election Commission
999 E. Street, NW
Washington, DC 20463

If you have any questions, they have a toll free number at 800/424-9530.

Information for concerned citizens


These links are to sites that contain information about the electoral process, and its abuse, that are relevant to the Patriot's Pledge. If you need more information before deciding to sign the Pledge visiting these sites may provide you with it. There are many more such sites, which can by found by searching the web. Newspapers, magazines, and even Television can be informative if you read them critically.
Other sites, newspaper articles, TV shows (in no particular order) Political Party sites and political sites