Exciting news from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit…and no, that’s not an oxymoron. Nonprofit groups running campaign ads now have to reveal the names of their donors, thanks to a ruling by the court on campaign finance law.

NPR reports:

Several weeks ago, a federal court in Washington told the Federal Election Commission it could not allow the buyers of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of ads to remain anonymous.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit late Monday, on a 2-to-1 vote, refused to grant a stay of that decision pending appeal. It ordered the full appeal to be heard sometime this fall.

At issue is the ability of tax-exempt groups that run political ads within two months of the general election — or within one month of a primary — to keep secret the names of their donors. Such groups spent some $80 million in the 2010 congressional elections, primarily supporting conservative candidates or attacking their opponents. The donors behind less than 10 percent of that amount were ever disclosed.

The Huffington Post points out that this applies to Karl Rove’s Crossroads groups and those supported by the Koch Brothers. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll actually listen:

…But whether the non-disclosing groups will suddenly change their behavior — or gamble that they can continue to skirt disclosure requirements — remains unclear. ‘That is the million-dollar question,’ Malloy said. ‘Or more like the $100 million question.’ Campaign law expert Rick Hasen blogged that he expects the ‘stay request to now end up before the Supreme Court, where the outcome may be different.’”

Nearly half of all Americans will be obese by 2030, researchers reported at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Weight of the Nation conference in Washington earlier this month. 42 percent of us are projected to be obese, placing a huge strain on our already compromised health care system. Brian Fung at The Atlantic points out that the healthcare costs of obesity — $550 billion over the next two decades — is more than the U.S. Department of Defense asked for in its fiscal year 2013 budget.

There are a lot of reasons — chemical, psychological, environmental — for why people are obese. But explaining societal obesity means looking at what the food system is providing for us to eat — and how government policies might promote certain foods over others.

“In the political arena, one side is winning the war on child obesity,” a new Reuters report on the food lobby begins. “The side with the fattest wallets.”

That’s entirely true. As Reuters reports, the food and beverage industry has been relentless in Washington lately, more than doubling their spending in Washington during the past three years, completely outpacing public interest groups looking out for children’s health:

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, widely regarded as the lead lobbying force for healthier food, spent about $70,000 lobbying last year — roughly what those opposing the stricter guidelines spent every 13 hours, the Reuters analysis showed.

The food and beverage industry has definitely outsmarted the federal government when it comes to targeting children: Efforts to tax soda have been crushed; 16 states have been persuaded to prohibit lawsuits over fatty foods; Congress has even declared pizza a vegetable, for Pete’s sake. The Boston Globe notes that young people fighting obesity have little chance against the food and beverage industry who “have waged an unprecedented war against even voluntary guidelines.” Even supposed Obama allies, like former White House communications director Anita Dunn, have been hired by the industry to lobby against obesity initiatives.

Obesity is complicated enough on an individual scale, societal obesity even more so. Certainly, we can blame marketing sugary cereals and 2,000-calorie burgers to kids for part of the obesity epidemic. But we can trace the roots of this problem even further, back to the 1930s, when taxpayers started subsidizing American agriculture.

The farm bill, first enacted during the Great Depression and renewed every five years or so, includes food stamps for the poor, international food aid, conservation programs, and subsidies for farmers, which lets them ride out bad crop years and compete with farmers in other countries. Critics have long derided subsidies, noting that they promote the growing of crops like corn and rice over others, like vegetables. The farm bill is up for reauthorization this year.

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is one of those critics. He traced the massive amounts of subsidies received by corn growers  – $73.8 billion over 15 years — to the rise of high fructose corn syrup, the fattening substance that Vice President Joe Biden said was more dangerous to Americans than terrorism. Variations of the farm bill over the years have helped make “Twinkies cheaper than carrots and Coca-Cola competitive with water,” Pollan wrote in the New York Times during the last debate over the farm bill, in 2007. The 2007 version of the farm bill expires in September.

The 2012 Farm Bill, which recently passed through the Senate Agriculture Committee, seems to reflect some of those criticisms. As part of the federal government’s effort to cut spending, the Ag Committee proposed a massive overhaul of the current subsidy program. The Senate bill eliminates $5 billion of annual subsidies in the form of direct payments and counter-cyclical payments to farmers, as well as the Average Crop Revenue Election Program, which started with the last farm bill. This might sound like Congress is actually listening to the concerns of food activists.

But the Senate proposal continues to give away tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to Big Agribusiness, at the expense of programs benefiting conservation, nutrition, and new farmers. The food blog Civil Eats calls the proposal an “all-you-can-eat-buffet for the subsidy lobby“:

[L]egislators created an expensive new entitlement program (called “shallow loss”) that guarantees nearly 90 percent of the income of farm businesses already enjoying record profits. It also leaves untouched a bloated $9-billion-a-year crop insurance program that pays about 60 percent of farmers’ crop insurance premiums, no matter how large the farm, and sends billions to crop insurance companies and their agents.

Most of the benefits of these proposed programs would flow to the big five commodity crops (corn, soy, cotton, rice, and wheat) that provide feed for livestock, raw material for processed food and corn ethanol fuel for our cars.

There’s no data available yet on lobbying on the new farm bill, but by taking a look at OpenSecrets’ database on the 2007 bill, provides a look at who might be involved this time around: Big Agriculture — which spends millions lobbying the federal government on food policy. The agriculture biotechnology giant Monsanto spent $8.8 million on lobbying in 2008, much of it on 22 specific issues contained within the farm bill (which was renewed a bit late). Other big names shelling out big cash on the farm bill are Verizon, the American Farm Bureau, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, Koch Industries, the American Beverage Association, and, naturally, the American Corn Growers Association.

As the 2012 farm bill heads from the Senate to the House of Representatives, it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t just a farm bill — it’s a food bill, helping to dictate what kinds of food people can afford. Not everyone on the House Agriculture Committee sees it that way: last month, Republicans on the committee voted to cut $33 billion from food stamps while keeping farm subsidies intact. With recent high crop prices and a record of $136.3 billion in farm exports in 2011, big farmers growing corn and soy don’t really need the help (even the powerful Iowa Farm Bureau agrees). Instead, the farm bill should work on making healthy foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables, available at lower prices. Because if there’s one thing that the country can’t afford, it’s having a population that’s half obese.

The entire reason for United Republic’s existence is made plain on its front page: we are here to Get Money Out of Politics. The primary source of money in politics is corporate lobbying at all levels of government — local, state, and federal. Combating the corrupting influence of legalized corporate bribery (see Citizens United) is a daunting task — like being a fireman facing a raging 20,000 acre fire. Greed and corruption certainly have the capacity to burn down the global economy.

So…where to start?

Begin by recognizing corporate lobbying activity for what it is — a sophisticated, defensive organism, evolved over time toward pro-active self-preservation — highly resistant to attack, requiring multi-pronged approaches to overwhelm defenses. But much like living organisms, even transnational corporations have vulnerabilities.

Regardless of specific strategies, there are three ironclad rules that apply if we are to get money out of politics:

You must organize.
You must communicate.
You must be relentless.

Organize.

Let me restate that:

We must organize.
We must communicate.
We must be relentless.

Because none of us working independently will get this done.

No firefighter can put out a 20,000 acre fire. No citizen can sway the votes of every congressman. No one lobbyist can pass a new law — unless he comes with, say, 20,000 Ben Franklins to help make the case. Either way, it’s a numbers game — votes and dollars. Dollars can buy votes. But this is still a democracy, and voters can overwhelm dollars when they are sufficiently energized and organized.

You must take action, but for your effort to yield results, you must coordinate your effort with others.

The good news is, with Net access at our disposal, we are in a better position to organize than ever before. The main hurdle to doing so is an old one — apathy, our own and that of others. Daily people will tell you we live in an oligarchy or plutocracy, that political parties and candidates are all the same, that voting doesn’t matter. That attitude is poison for change — treat it as such. As Robert A. Heinlein noted:

“Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you – if you don’t bet, you can’t win.”

United Republic is a platform for organizing. Use it. Not only online, but in your local real world.

Communicate.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.”

- Frederick Douglass

This oft-quoted recognition of reality is focused on people in power, but the people in power are only half of our situation. The other half are the voters who select the leadership. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, had something relevant to say about that recently when asked what he would do if he were president:

“One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.”

The point here is not to belittle voters, but to recognize that all efforts to reform power structures will fail if we keep electing leaders and lawmakers who obstruct and dismantle reforms. That’s not to say we should abandon reform, but we badly need a focus on education and enlightenment of the electorate.

This means changing the culture we live in. The single greatest influence in that direction over the past 30 years has been the Occupy movement, which raised awareness of gross inequities in income. Although the full potential of Occupy remains unrealized, it has already begun what we need to continue — inform, educate, enlighten. That’s how culture is changed. The impact of cultural change can be lasting.

“The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Occupy’s initial tactics have been blunted, but the strategy of getting attention while bypassing traditional media remains essential. Here again, we’re looking at a numbers game. Traditional media, primarily the large television networks, count audiences in the millions. Online audiences are smaller and fragmented. How can we reach larger audiences and deliver our message — get money out of politics — in a way that resonates with people who discount any message that isn’t from someone they already know and trust?

We must earn trust. That’s precisely why United Republic’s credo includes a commitment to nonpartisanship. Regardless of whether you view it as realistic or not, a non-partisan approach is the only way to get people communicating. Hyperpartisanship simply drives people back to their skirmish lines. Verbal grenades soon follow. Fragging each other doesn’t get us closer to our goal.

The fastest, easiest way to earn trust is to listen — even if you have to grit your teeth and bite your tongue to do it.

Listen first.

Before you respond, remember this – facts follow feelings.

This is so important, it bears repeating – facts follow feelings.

Meaning: empathize first, acknowledge their concerns and fears. When you can, acknowledge that you share the same concerns and fears – from a different perspective. Use facts to explain why. If you overlook and dismiss how others feel, they sense this quickly and dismiss your facts. Trust blown, game over.

This approach requires us to get out of our comfort zones and engage with people we might not ordinarily deal with. And again, it’s a numbers game. You plant a thousand seeds through conversations. Some will take root and flourish, others won’t. That’s why you must…

Be Relentless.

Not relentless in the sense of an obsessive zombie in search of brains. This is about being relentless with yourself. Yes, you have many other obligations and responsibilities — school, family, work — and just the thought of evangelizing for the ideals you care about may be exhausting.

But let’s eat this cow one hamburger at a time. If you lack experience engaging with others, you’ll surely stumble and make mistakes. Okay — learning experience. Get over it, try again. And again. And again, with different people. When you get the hang of it, go back to the folks you messed up with and try again. You will make some new friends along the way, sometimes with people you never imagined you’d be friendly with.

Anytime you tackle something new, the early efforts are always hardest – that’s why it’s called a learning curve, and the curve goes UP. But eventually the art of persuasion becomes a skill like riding a bicycle — once you know how, you can can communicate your point of view effectively enough that you’re understood and respected. Practice and persistence pays.

All of us working together through United Republic is a wholesale operation for culture change. Individually we are the retail operation — we engage people one on one, changing minds, changing hearts, changing culture. But it only happens if we actually do it. So make a plan, make some mistakes, learn, and keep at it until we Get Money Out of Politics.