 Welcome to the show here on Think Tech and our show is the politics for the people. And we're here to have a panel to discuss some issues having to do with where do we send our money to save the country when we get all of these requests to do so. And I'm your host, Stephanie Stahl Dalton. So let's start out with Jay today and let's talk about how many innumerable requests or not from causes, organizations and candidates. Do you cross your mailbox threshold, Jay? Are you inundated? Yeah, I was inundated on my primary mail. So I said to myself, well, why don't I take out some other males and then I'll divide my correspondence up among a number of email addresses. But they found me. It's like a bird feeder, you know? You put a little bird feed in the feeder and for the first few days, no birds come. But then after a while, every bird in the world comes. They sort of, they talk to each other. This is the same thing here, you know? So I have a number of email addresses and they found me on every single one of them in a matter of a few weeks. And so now I get multiple mails on multiple email addresses and a good percentage of them. I don't know what your experience is like. A good percentage of them are requests for money by political candidates and organizations. And although, you know, at first I felt, well, okay, there's a certain benefit in actually giving money of this organization or that. After a while, I was getting so much like the bird feeder that I didn't believe any of them. I began to question and become suspicious if I didn't know exactly who it was or didn't have some, you know, third party objective measure of credibility I wouldn't give to anybody. And, you know, over time I have come to think and maybe it's just suspicion but I've come to think that there are people out there who would like to inundate me with this. They think I'm, you know, a Democrat. They would like to make me feel that none of these places, none of these websites, none of these newsletter sources is legit. So I won't give to anybody. And in a way they have succeeded. So their purpose is like an internet attack, you know, a denial of service attack on the internet. We give you so much noise that you're locked up. You don't do anything. And if you wanted to stop people from giving to the Democratic Party or Democratic candidates, just feed them a million emails asking them to give to the Democratic Party and candidates and they'll stop doing any of that. So you've essentially cut off the supply of funding for a lot of candidates and institutions. That's my own personal journey on this. Well, thank you for your personal journey. It's reflecting, I'm sure by you, our first panel member to speak, Jay Findell, we can go over to the next panelist we have to talk about this topic and go to Winston Welch and ask Winston if he is also inundated or has, and how does he choose with this information coming in, what to look at closely to understand? Do you have the experience of examining or scrutinizing them when you get so many? If you get so many, Winston. It's, so I recommend to our gentle viewer that to save the planet, what they do first of all is they go to do not mail and look for, there's an opt out form that you fill out and send in and also do not call. And it's under the Direct Marketing Association. I think it is, is DMA. And basically you fill that out and you fill it out for every variation of your name that comes in. Now that will not cover the place. If you give to the kidneys, they won't take you off their list, but they'll take you off the other lists where you haven't given them to them. And those are the ones that subscribe to that. And I think they subscribe to that knowing that it's irritating for people, but more important is that it costs them a little bit of money to send that out all the time. So, but I think that they may be required and the same for the do not email. So what you need to do is just take the time, go through your trash and your spam and your regular email. And they're basically required at this point to say unsubscribe. Or I also recommend for people to sign up for something called a mail amalgamator that pulls all of your subscriptions together. And then you can easily and quickly delete or straight from there and they send the notice and they take you off. So that is one way to reduce the volume of noise. Now, as soon as you sign up for something else, as soon as you give to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, they sell your name to other like-minded organizations. If you give to guns are us, they are gonna sell your name to the National Rifle Association and whoever else. And the same thing all the way down the line. So be aware who you're giving your money to. And if there's a way you can say in your letter, do not sell my name. I don't think that the person cashing the check, that goes to the left and your information goes to the right. So you're gonna get on the list and you constantly kind of have to tend that garden. Yeah, but I do go on regularly and you can do this also for your relatives. They get hit up for everything. If they give money to one organization, they're gonna get it. That name is gonna be sold 20 times. And so you're doing a service by going on and showing them this is how we take it off. Are you okay with that? Then take them off so that they don't get hit up with so many requests because they get these begging letters that makes them then feel guilty if they don't give money. So, well, y'all, thank you for the address. I wanted to say this DMA is on news. Do not mail, do not call. I'm gonna pursue that later. So that's very helpful information. And if we can reduce this, do you agree? Our third panelist is Karen Buzzard. And let me follow up with you on the amount of incoming you have and is it across all platforms? How does that work for you? Well, I just moved to Hawaii. So they haven't found me in the mail here yet. But I do get tons of emails from various groups I've never heard of, you know, democracy for this or, you know, vague sounding names. I'm even become suspicious of Nancy Pelosi now. I get emails from her. I'm like, Jay, I like, oh my God, who is this really Nancy Pelosi? Or is it some scam organization, you know, using her name or whatever? So I think it is a problem. One of the things when I knew we were gonna do the show, there's a couple of ways you can research these groups. And some of them are fake packs as they call them. So like there's a group called, or a watchdog called Open Secrets. I don't know if any of you found that where you can put in the name of your, the name of the group. And then what you need to look for is what percent of their money actually goes toward what they say it's going and what percent is going toward the administration, i.e. the salaries of the, you know, people who run the organization. For example, the Lincoln Project got into major issues because they had four founders and they were getting a third of the, they got $67 million in funding and $27 million or a third of it went to the four founders where they siphoned it off into another pack thing. And basically it was their salaries. So the thing you have to watch for is to see what percent actually goes to where it's supposed to go. Also the Federal Election Committee has a website where you can research it. But I have to say in looking at the FEC website, it's very complicated. You almost need a course to figure out how to read it. Yeah. Well, that's interesting, that information. And do you think it's justifiable that they take a portion of that donation to use for what? Administrative costs? Some, but not more than probably 10%, not certainly not one third, 33%. So I think, you know, the better organizations, the money goes where you think it's going. It's not going to, you know, the higher the level that's going to the administration, the more scam, you know, people set up these scam organizations to make money. So then that's a red flag if it's going mostly to poor salaries. Well, are you seeing it being mostly one third? Is that, I believe you mentioned that it's that high and would that be considered scam? Well, that was the Lincoln Project. I don't know if you followed them, but they got it. Actually they were, it's hard to know how successful they were. They did some, I don't know if you remember their ad, Morning in America, M-O-U-R-N, which was a spinoff of Ronald Reagan's ad, but they were, you know, it's hard to know, it would be worth it if you knew, you know, if you could determine how successful that ad was, but there's no way to really know kind of like of all the things going on, how much influence it had. Yeah. Well, I want to move over to Jay, find out. And Jay, tell me if you think this is, you know, an effective way to reach out to us as, as Karen said, I mean, Nancy Pelosi, it comes across pleading and begging and I'm coming to you for the last time. It turns me off. Well, yeah, I mean, I have several thoughts about that. First, you remember, it wasn't too long ago when it was revealed that Donald Trump, when he was asking people for money in the internet and they agreed to give him whatever, 20 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever it was, that he would convert that into monthly, indefinite monthly. And then they would see in their credit card report, the statement that every month they were giving what they thought was only a one-off contribution. And some of them complained and he stopped it and he had to make substantial refunds at that time. But this was for the 2020 election, I think. It was in the run up, you know, in the months before the 2020 election. And some of them said, well, you know, I didn't know what he was doing that to me, but, you know, he's a great guy, so I'll abide by it even though he tricked me, okay? And it's just an example of how you can get tricked. Well, who's to say that people send you these emails are A, legit, are honest and so forth? You know, and the old thing, we haven't talked about it yet, but to look at the address below the name of the sender. If you run your mouse over the name of the sender, it'll show you what address is sending that to you. Then if it says xj67.com below the name Nancy Pelosi, you know it's a phony, you know, because it's not coming from her or even any name of an organization about her. So I mean, you know, that's step number one in intelligence. And then you can go look at these other sites and this and that and the other thing, but me, when it comes up with, you know, do you believe that Trump is a bum? Yes or no? Okay, so I say yes. They take me down a little garden path and before you know it, they want some money from me. And it's the bright colors that knocked me out. If I see bright colors, if I see that yes or no, this kind of phony baloney survey thing, you know, this isn't serious. This isn't really serious. Now, there are other more, what do you want to call it? Conservative, I hate to use that term, conservative websites and emails and newsletters that are very matter of fact, they don't use fancy fonts or color and they make a, you know, a rational pitch to you, but it's the same problem. You don't know who it is. You don't know where the money's going. Could be going to somebody else's pack. It could be a fraud, a complete absolute fraud and you don't know. And I don't know about you guys, but I do not have the time to sit around and investigate each one of these things. So, you know, that's why I turn off on all of them. And I conclude that it's either a scammer or it's somebody working for Vladimir Putin, you know, who wants to divide and conquer and knock off all democratic contributions. So what's the solution to this? First, before I get to that and I won't take too much longer. You know, first of all, what can the ordinary Schmo do? Well, he can come on ThinkTek and use a platform like this and speak his mind or her mind and, you know, and have whatever effect that provides. He can vote or she, but then voting is in a cocked hat now. Can you really have confidence, especially in some of those battleground states and Republican states, can you really have confidence your vote's going to be counted or maybe it'll be thrown out? You don't know. And I think people, you know, have fatigue about that. And maybe a lot of people will vote like they did in 2020, but maybe a lot of them won't vote. So voting is not a solution. And it doesn't happen now. We're talking about now. Voting is, you know, at least seven or eight months away. So what can you do now? You're not going to go stand on the street. You're not going to get involved in a confrontation. Winston always talks about talking to his family, trying to convince them, you know, that's really inefficient time and it's not likely to succeed. So all those options really don't work if you want to affect the process now. The only thing that I can think of that would affect the process now is sending in a check, okay? And so that's the way we can vote with our checkbook. The problem is to whom? If I send money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, you know, and it says that as the return address, that's a pretty safe, you know? If I send it into the Democratic Party, you know, the DNC, whatever, and it says that on the, you know, that's pretty safe. Although I don't know how efficient they are. They haven't been all that efficient in other ways. So you have to deal with familiarity. You have to deal with an organization you know about and you can't respond to these multi-color survey type ads from organizations that you can't identify. And you can't be too scared of it either. Once in a while, you're gonna make a mistake, it's okay. But you've got to do the reasonable thing. And that looking at it, and that was one of the questions I had was how clear is the information? How can you get to what it is? In other words, you bring up Jay, the survey. That seems to be a recent trick to get you into, but it's just one question, but Winston, I wanted to ask you, are you seeing this come across all these platforms full bore now? Because I seem to recall that maybe the email wasn't as attacked previously as it is now, but now they're coming through every single platform. So are you seeing that too? And is that possibly a wedge for action against it or paying attention to what comes in what platform? Well, as we were talking earlier, go to for our gentle viewer, do not call.gov or DM as in David Mary, a dmachoice.org. That will take you off of the paper and the telephone calls. The email, again, there's programs out there, Google, how do I stop unwanted email? And there's programs out there that suck everything up and then you can delete en masse. You were probably subscribed if you're someone like Jay or me to hundreds of emails, newsletters, and they might be from Nancy Pelosi or they might be still coming from Ronald Reagan's estate. I don't know, but you can unsubscribe immediately right there. So you just gotta take some time, invest, weed your garden, but definitely take yourself off of these lists so that the things that are coming in, at least you can narrow down, that might get rid of 80% of them. They're still gonna be 20% coming in. If you feel like it's a scam, then Google, what is the official address of Pete Buttigieg for president or Pete Buttigieg's website? And it will tell you it. So sign up for the ones that you like so that you're getting the information you want. That's perfectly reasonable. As they sell your name, immediately hit unsubscribe so that they don't do it again for the other organizations. And with great deference and respect for our founder and colleague, Mr. Fidel, the butterfly flaps its wings here and creates the hurricane somewhere else. So we do need to reach one or two, whether it's our family, our friends or our neighbors, and coming across as a moderate person who's trying to reach the moderate person inside of the other person, whereas we all may come across as a little bit histrionic or extreme sometimes, which is very easy to do in this society. If we can try and reach that other point in someone else, the butterfly flaps his wings a lot harder or her wings or their wings. If we're being modern, which we should be these days and woke as much as possible, that said, I do give, we all should have a will when we're eight, as soon as you can drive, you should have a will basically. What have you chosen for your charities in your will? Is it a medical organization like the Kidneys or a hospital? Is it environmental organization? Is it, who have you designated in there? Pick some favorites that you like, that you know do good work and just focus on the good work that they do. Maybe you wanna be a better contributor there. Maybe you wanna step up and be a lifetime member. Maybe you wanna make a scholarship in an educational foundation at a school that you went to or a program that you like. Those are meaningful ways for you to channel your dollars rather than getting hit with 100 emails a day begging for money for every political thing. Now that said, Jay is right, politics is money. When you're feeling like you gotta donate, let's face it. There's how many races are competitive in this country? 10, maybe, I don't know. So find out where those 10 races are, whether it's in Georgia or in Virginia or Nevada and pick your candidate. I remember the fellow that stood up and screamed at Obama, you lie. You remember that one, a number of years ago? Yeah, and immediately I thought, oh, this is ghastly behavior. This man should not be a representative of whoever he's representing because he's a horror to them too if they're in their right minds. So I just Googled candidate running against man who shouted, you lie to Obama and boom, right there came up the candidate who was running against him and I sent him some money. So those are also ways you can find out who is there, where is my money gonna make a difference if you're gonna give to these candidates? That's a targeted way that you can give to causes that you like or in the situation of our country yeah, to candidates where they actually where their race matters. You don't need to give money to make sure that a Democrat's gonna stay in office in Hawaii any more than you need to give money to make sure that a Republican's gonna stay in office in Idaho, those are done deals. So choose your political causes wisely, invest deeply I would say in the causes that matter to you and delete the rest and get on the do not call, do not mail, do not email lists. Thank you Winston, Karen, are you feeling more excited about the Democrats when you get all of this mail? How does it make you feel? And is this effective for the Democrats to be doing this kind of money raising at the rate that they're doing it? Well, I'm not sure it's Democrats it's just people taking advantage of the system set up by the Supreme Court to take our money basically for campaign reasons. But I do feel like I just wanna make a couple of recommendations. There's Emily's List which has a very good record and their goal is to put women Democrats in the house and in the Senate and they've been very successful. They've like started with like nobody in the Senate now they have, I don't know how many women are there now but they've like tripled it. And the same thing in the house they started with like four women and now they've got like 30 women or something. So you can see based on their goal that they've achieved they give money to women candidates who wanna run for office. The other one that I found when I was is something called I hadn't heard of before way to lead and that gives money to down ballot candidates not to. So like they go to the States like Georgia where they have people are seriously needed to check, meet the Republican or whatever and give money in that regard. So if you look on, I looked them up in the FEC and they have a lot of big donors including George Soros, the hatred person of the Republicans but I figured that if George Soros is giving us money there it must be a valid, a lot of believe it or not of the Waltons also give money to that. So I think they didn't want Trump either for whatever reason but. Well, those are really that's a lot of information. Karen let's do one last round we're getting close to the end of our time and reiterate or add another guide rule rail if you have more to say on that that the viewers can make note of because it sounds like we're gonna continue with this and not knowing a little bit more about how to get some help to understand and handle it, manage it is a very good message for this show. So Jay, can you give us a few seconds of recommendations for our guidelines? I've been thinking about it during this discussion and it's very constructive. Emily is spelled E-M-I-L-Y usually but suppose I get an email from Emily's list E-M-I-L-I-E somebody is impersonating Emily's list. So you really have to be sure that even the consolidators so to speak that you're giving your money to is the one you're really thinking about. You know, the credibility is everything and you can't make any assumptions but I wanna, in my final comment here I wanna suggest two things. If there was an Emily's list that I believed in and that was reported in other media I could triangulate on that and that stated its goal and for that matter stated who was giving my money to candidate by candidate that would be a big encouragement and that's what we need. We need a 10 foot tall organization that gives you money to who you want and they make the decisions like a stock broker giving you recommendations. You tell them in general you wanna do conservative or something or utilities and he picks the stock and the funds and you trust him for that. And that's what we need. We need organizations like that that will help us make the right choices or at least make recommendations. Okay, that's one thing. The other thing I'll tell you the truth just suppose Winston went into the business of representing me in terms of making those representations and he was willing to put the time in and he knows what I would like to see. So I would give him my money he would distribute my money you got to do it in a lawful way he would distribute my money and I would pay him. He'd be like my stock broker and he'd be my political contributions broker and I would trust him and I would feel confident that he wasn't throwing it away he wasn't giving it to the wrong person he wasn't being scammed he wasn't giving it to Vladimir Putin and it was a safe bet. And that's sort of like the first choice I mentioned except it's personal. And so if somebody, it's a new profession, right? A new profession, political contributions manager. And I think this is time for that. And is that a reasonable 33% contribution part? No, no, no, no, no, that's much too, that's ridiculous. That's a rip off. I mean, I heard that from Karen about the Lincoln project that changed my whole view of Lincoln project. No, it should be a very tiny, tiny 1%, 2% maybe and that's all. All right, thank you. Winston, guidelines. Yes, you've given us much information. Anything else? If you're looking at 501C3s, which would do good organizations, go to charity navigator or guide star. You can find out everything about the organization. But Winston, let me stop you. 501C3 is not the right kind of company to do this. If you're talking political, it's a C4, most likely. But for the C3s, I just don't wanna throw that out there in case people are looking at the Kidney Foundation or the other organizations. As far as being a personal manager and you're the analogy to Charles Schwab, for those people that just wanna make it easy, you go to actblue.org or .com and you log in and you can choose your candidates from there or they consolidate everything there. And most of the money that they do are involved in salaries and paying people. I mean, that's the huge majority of this. It's not in the email programs. It's in paying people to figure out how to use the email programs and how to manipulate the messaging so that we respond best. So, yeah, as far as personal manager, be your own personal manager and figure out those causes that are important to you. Eliminate the noise so that you can focus as best as you can. If you're concerned about it, ask is blank a scam. Google it and Google will tell you everything. So, but it's good to get involved. It's good to feel like you're contributing towards a cause which furthers, you know, the promise of America. Let's just say that. So choose wisely, make your dollars count when you give. More important, give of your time. Give to the girl scouts and the boy scouts and the scouts and everything else. That's where your dollars are really gonna matter is in civic education for our young and those sorts of things, as much as they are at the very highest level of who you're giving to the Senate for. So again, you know, think globally, nationally, act locally. Very good. All right, thank you. And Karen, last comment. Well, I agree with Winston, but if we're talking about immediate this next election, giving to those groups is rather indirect of way of getting your money. You might see some return after your debt or something, but I would say you need to really go to the direct groups that are handling the presidential and Don Ballot election and find those groups and give your money to those because the next election, I think is critical. You know, we really need to put our money there and not worry about, you know, other charity groups are good, but not when, you know, democracy is in danger. Thank you, guests. I'm your host, Stephanie Stoll Dalton and the panel guests have been Jay Fidale, Winston Welch and Karen Buzzard for this show, Politics for the People. Mahalo for your attention. Thank you, everyone. Aloha.