Fat Cat Get Back

In the fall of 1996, Arkansas passed statewide campaign finance reform

In 1996, Arkansas passed the most progressive campaign finance reform in America at that time.

That still surprises people.
It shouldn’t.

What surprised me more was what it took to make it real.

I learned—again—something that has followed me my whole life: ideas don’t become real because they’re good ideas. They become real because a small group of people decides not to quit.

We built a coalition.
ACORN at the center.
Common Cause.
The Arkansas AFL-CIO.
The New Party.

Different groups. Different instincts. Same decision.

We were going to get it on the ballot.
Not talk about it.
Not study it.
Do it and Win.

From the start, it felt heavy. In a good way. Everyone knew this mattered. This wasn’t a campaign you dipped into. You showed up, or you got out of the way.

The work was brutal.

We needed around 60,000 valid signatures, which meant collecting something like 140,000. Petitioning isn’t abstract. It’s physical. It’s standing. It’s heat. It can be boring. It is very repetitive. Sometimes it is sort of fun.

“Would you like to sign the petition to get the fat cats out of politics and limit campaign contributions to $100?” I must have asked that question at least 100,000 times that summer.

That summer was asphalt and sun. Walmart parking lots until we got kicked out. Then Kmart. Then drive-thrus and gas stations. Anywhere people slowed down. When one place shut us down, we packed up, drove somewhere else, and started again.

We were soaked constantly. Clipboards slick with sweat. Bugs everywhere—flies, gnats, mosquitoes—crawling on your arms, your neck, your face while you tried to keep eye contact and not lose your place. Chafing was a given. You just accepted it. You smelled terrible. Everyone did.

Weekends were festivals. Strawberry festivals. Frog festivals. Bluegrass festivals all over the state. Camping. Sleeping on floors and couches. Pulling folding tables out of trunks. Standing all day, then standing some more. Nothing glamorous. Just endurance.

At the center were ACORN leaders from neighborhoods—people with credibility, people who could look someone in the eye. Maxine Nelson and Johnnie Pugh, ACORN’s statewide leaders, became the public faces of the campaign. Clear. Grounded. Real.

People like Larry Kelly from the labor council stepped up when it counted. And Jim Lynch, once Little Rock City manager and a New Party leader in Little Rock, was instrumental in this effort—as he was in so many others. Jason Murphy was a hero.

Organizers. The folks at the KABF community radio station. Volunteers. Coalition partners. Most of them won’t ever be named. They didn’t do it for credit. They did it because the idea was right.

Working with Common Cause, we wrote legislation that didn’t mess around.

• It capped individual contributions to legislative candidates at $100.

• Statewide races at $300.

• Limited PAC money.

• Strengthened disclosure.

• The Bill created a small tax credit so regular people could participate.

The ballot initiative directly addressed the campaign finance problem. Money warps politics. Everyone knows that.

Very few politicians supported it. Even many Democratic allies were cautious—nervous about donors, worried about consequences. That told me something.

The momentum didn’t come from elected officials deciding to lead.
It came from people deciding not to wait.

When the vote came, Arkansas passed it two-to-one.

That should have been the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

The courts moved fast. Business groups challenged the law, arguing that contribution limits violated free speech. Over time, the courts agreed. What voters passed was dismantled—not by public opposition, but by litigation.

Arkansas became an early testing ground for the idea that money equals speech. That corporations deserve the same protection as people. That logic would later be nationalized through CITIZENS UNITED.

The message was clear: people can vote. Money has other ways to win.

What this says about AI and other unregulated systems

The erasure of campaign limits has lessons for other systems where excess challenges our lives.

Technology should be making people’s lives easier. That’s the whole point. Instead, too often, we’re using it to make systems harder, more expensive, and more dependent than they need to be.

Right now, people are being asked to pay—literally, on their electricity bills—for the biggest expansion of computing power in human history. Data centers. Infrastructure. Scale. And yet most people are told they don’t get to control any of it. They don’t get to understand it. They don’t get to own it.

That doesn’t sit right with me.

AI shouldn’t be something you rent forever from a handful of giant companies. People should be able to afford and control their own tools. Their own models. Their own systems. Communities should have choices—not just watch every industry get eaten in the name of earnings.

How we organize as a society matters.

The technology itself isn’t the problem. It never is. The problem is the decision made by a relatively small number of people that they need to own everything. Scale now means centralization and no privacy or control.

Even now, with open-source software everywhere, the ecosystem still pushes everyone back toward the same giant providers. The defaults favor concentration. The incentives reward monopoly. Dependency gets labeled “efficiency.”

I’ve seen this movie before.

Money warped politics because we let it concentrate without limits. Technology risks doing the same thing—not because it’s evil, but because we haven’t been intentional enough about how it’s shared.

That summer in Arkansas gave me a reference point.

If politics were made in Walmart parking lots instead of through algorithms and big-money financing, most people would get along just fine. That’s what I learned. Most people want common sense. They want systems they can understand. They want a fair playing field where they can compete. They want a say as citizens.

Democracy has always been built by effort, not comfort.

Technology must be built with democracy and freedom in mind.

It should make life easier, not harder.
It should reduce friction, not concentrate power.
It should belong to the people who use it—not just the people who can afford to own everything.

A country doesn’t get better by accident.
It gets better because people put work into it.

That was true in 1996.
It’s still true now.