ReplaceCongress Movement Launches with South Carolina Win

Columbia, South Carolina (PRWEB) June 14, 2012

A new ReplaceCongress movement, challenging corporate funded candidates and ‘safe’ incumbents on ballots nationwide, launches this week amid a win by citizen candidate Deb Morrow. Morrow won Tuesday's Democratic primary in South Carolina’s District 4 with about 70% of the vote and will be on the general election ballot for Congress in November.

With Rasmussen polls showing approval of Congress at record lows of 5 to 7%, the ReplaceCongress movement aims to help citizens find and support new candidates who run on their integrity and ideas, rather than in a race for corporate and PAC money. The American public, which despises today’s Congress and instead embraces the economic message of the Occupy movement, has never been hungrier for this message.

The simple ReplaceCongress.org web site provides:

• an overview explaining how corporate funded and ‘safe’ seats undermine democracy
• video, animated messages, and social media links to help visitors share online and spread the word
• a directory of candidates running without corrupting corporate money, with links for campaign sites, donations, and social media

The key point throughout is citizen participation: we can get money out of politics now, but only by running and supporting such candidates, embracing their platforms, sharing to expand the movement, and voting for them on election day.

The initial candidate directory is small. ReplaceCongress will add entries for candidates widely known to be running without corporate money, and encourages contact from new candidates so they can be added. Deb Morrow has been in the directory from the earliest draft.

“I'm just thrilled that they had confidence in me and this would happen,” Morrow said Tuesday of Spartanburg and Greenville voters who cast ballots for her. “My message is that you should take big money out of politics and regular people should be able to represent us. We are regular people ... Our representatives should not be a separate species from us, and I'm very much a regular person who cares about issues that are important to my neighbors.”

Deb Morrow is a retired office worker, known throughout her South Carolina community as an activist concerned with Living Wage jobs, preserving the Medicare/Social Security safety net, veterans issues, ending wasteful war spending, and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Having won the Democratic primary against Jimmy Tobias with about 70% of the vote, in November Morrow will face Tea Party Congressman Trey Gowdy.

ReplaceCongress was created by candidates and their supporters, including computer scientist David Levitt. Dr. Levitt, an MIT and Yale graduate in Sebastopol, California, completed a long-shot run for U.S. Senate in California last week, earning 70,000 votes statewide and placing 3rd out of 24 in San Francisco, far ahead of 13 Republicans including party-endorsed Elizabeth Emken. Emken, the statewide runner-up, will appear on the ballot with incumbent and frontrunner Dianne Feinstein in November.

Levitt’s modestly funded campaign gained passionate supporters by building trust - challenging conventional wisdom and propaganda - and through popular policies that most Democrats and Republicans fail to stand up for: leaving Afghanistan, ending the war on marijuana, and Medicare for All.

David Levitt was a founding director of Be Your Government, a non-profit created to help ordinary citizens run for office without corporate money. His U.S. Senate campaign site is http://www.Levitt2012.org.