The Kentucky senate race serves as a prime example. The Democratic candidate, Jack Conway, is currently Kentucky's attorney general. Conway is also currently prosecuting a nursing home for allegedly covering up the sexual abuse of one of its residents.
But that nursing home is owned by Terry Forcht, a millionaire who gives prodigiously to right-wing causes. He poured money into Karl Rove's organization, American Crossroads GPS, which ran ads backing Conway's Republican opponent, Rand Paul. Guess who came away with the victory last night?
As Holland emphasizes, the mid-term elections are just how the first phase of the justice system's corruption plays out. Eventually the mere threat of attack ads could be enough to prevent needed prosecutions. Corporate bigwigs could literally get away with murder, and pay for it only through attack ads.
Think this is bad? Just wait for 2012
As David Corn details for Mother Jones, the Supreme Court's ruling has put American democracy in grave danger. This year's big spending is just a warm-up for the 2012 presidential election. Karl Rove has already pledged to keep running attack ads after the mid-terms, and there's no doubt that he'll make good on that. As Corn emphasizes, this issue doesn't just affect how campaigns are financed-it will permanently reshape the very nature of American elections.
The permanent, neverending campaign will become even more permanent and neverending. These big-and-secret-money groups will be working 24/7, opposing and discrediting President Barack Obama and the Democrats in the so-called off-year and then revving up for the 2012 presidential and congressional elections. The negative ads never have to stop.
That, ultimately, is the major take-away from last night's elections. Not the number of seats Republicans picked up in the House, or the Tea Party's ability to infiltrate the Senate, but the formal incorporation of American politics. With literally no limits on the amount of money they can spend to influence elections, corporations and secret billionaires are going to be tipping the democratic scales wherever they smell profit.
As noted by counterspin in a quick hit comment, the UK Guardian has a very interesting story:
Tea Party climate change deniers funded by BP and other major polluters
Midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites DeMint and Inhofe have received over $240,000
BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama's energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.
An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.
The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe's biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: "The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people."
The report itself can be found here. The money comes from US citizens employed by these companies who contribute to the corporate PACs, so it's all perfectly legal. (OpenSecrets, the source of the data used in the report, has a listing of foreign PACs here.) But the report points out that these same companies who fund climate legislation obstruction in America then turn around and cite that obstructionism as a reason that Europe should not take any further measures. It's not quite the Menendez brothers asking for mercy on account of being orphans, but it's damn close.
Here's a chart of the contributions from BASF, the second-largest donor in the report:
Okay, so here's the point: These foreign corporations have already voted.
Today is the first election in American history in which corporations have been allowed to spend their own money to buy political favors. This legalized corruption comes courtesy of the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which injected massive amounts of corporate cash and unprecedented levels of secrecy into American politics.
And all of this crazy corporate spending will not be restricted to elections. That's right. As Jesse Zwick reports for The Washington Independent, two front-groups founded by GOP strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie plan to keep running ads attacking Democrats well after the elections are over.
As Zwick emphasizes, this is actually a way to help keep one of the organizations, known as American Crossroads GPS from breaking the law. Many groups that spend money on elections register as 501(c)(4) organizations, which must devote no more than half of their activity to political operations. In return for limiting their political activity-advocacy or condemnation of specific candidates-they don't have to disclose who their donors are. So groups like American Crossroads GPS plan to run "issue ads" focusing on the budget deficit and immigration reform this fall to balance out the ads directed at specific candidates that they've already run.
Under the Citizens United ruling, so long as corporations or wealthy elites launder their political expenditures through a front-group, they can give as much as they want without ever being held publicly accountable. But the high court's decision also allows these front-groups to keep their actual expenditures secret as well. It's not just that we don't know who is funding them-in many cases, we also don't really know what they're funding.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce's foreign dues
The secrecy surrounding anonymous donors may very well extend to foreign corporations. As Harry Hanbury emphasizes in this video for GRITtv, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-a lobbying front-group for the largest American corporations-is facing heavy scrutiny over is foreign contributions. Nearly $900,000 in annual dues to the Chamber come from foreign firms, and the Chamber aggressively courts foreign donors who might benefit from weak U.S. laws-particularly environmental laws. The Chamber insists that it's playing by the rules, but Hanbury catches them lying twice about the nature of the group's foreign funding.
California's environmental laws for sale
Corporations aren't just targeting federal elections to influence public policy. As Tara Lohan explains for AlterNet, big oil companies have financed a campaign to repeal California's carbon emission reduction law. Two major polluters-Valero and Tesoro-have spent a combined $7 million boosting the repeal, while Koch Industries-a major Tea Party funder-has kicked in about $1 million as well. A full 70 percent of the $10.7 million that has been spent to bolster the anti-environment ballot initiative has come from out-of-state sources.
Even the Tea Party's worried
When the Tea Party Patriots received an anonymous $1 million donation for get-out-the-vote efforts, left-wing bloggers weren't the only people upset about it. As Stephanie Mencimer reports for Mother Jones, some of the Tea Party Patriots' own members were nervous: Who was funding this operation, and where was the money going?
We'll probably never know, because the Tea Party Patriots aren't legally obligated report their donors or expenses. The group has only disclosed $15,000 worth of expenditures of the $1 million donation, $10,000 of which was re-granted to another organization run by the father of Tea Party Patriots leader Mark Meckler. The remainder is anybody's guess.
But wait, there's more!
Writing for In These Times, Sam Ross-Brown highlights a potential legislative solution to some of these campaign finance shenanigans. The Fair Elections Now Act would limit individual campaign contributions to $100, and match them by a factor of four-to-one, increasing the spending power of ordinary citizens and helping to level the distorted playing field created by Citizens United.
Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones details who got hit the hardest this election season in the final push leading up to Election Day: Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) got some of the biggest expenditures. This year also smashed previous campaign expenditures, coming in at $443 million.
Suzy Khimm reports on voter intimidation tactics for Mother Jones from a McDonald's fast food franchise in Ohio's 16th district. Employees were told to vote for Republicans or their wages would go down. McDonald's may have been emboldened by Citizens United even though such tactics are still clearly illegal.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the mid-term elections and campaign financing by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit The Media Consortium for more articles on these issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Politico's article today is the latest in a string of articles about the massive edge in money pro-Republican outside groups have over pro-Democratic groups. The article cites a $23 million to $4 million dollar ratio in advertising so far. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that outside groups tend to be trusted more than political party advertising.
The article makes pretty clear that some Democrats on the Hill want to blame the outside groups on our side for not doing enough, and we will see more of that kind of blame game in the coming weeks. It is certainly understandable that individual members who take tough votes are frustrated when big corporate interests dump money on their districts for ads that in many cases are just blatant lies, and no one comes to their defense. I know the party committees are pulling their hair out with the barrage of corporate money being thrown into targeted races everywhere. But here's the deal: congressional leaders need only look down the street, Pennsylvania Avenue to be precise, to find the answers as to why there isn't more money going into independent expenditure efforts on the Democratic side.
This is in part a historical problem, a pattern in the party leadership that I sometimes refer to as the curse of the control freaks. Republicans for many years have understood far better than Democrats that outside issue and ideological groups ought to be empowered, not discouraged. Haley Barbour, Karl Rove, and other top Republicans have for years happily worked hand in hand with Grover Norquist, the NRA, the Christian Coalition, the Chamber of Commerce, the Koch Industries front groups, and the entire right-wing infrastructure. Republicans came to their strategy meetings, attended their fundraising dinners, signed their direct mail pieces and emails and Tweets and text messages. Republican operatives have for decades understood that conservative organizations with well-known brands had more credibility with key blocs of voters than either political party and most candidates.
The same is true with progressive groups and key voting blocs as well, but the Democratic Party has never paid these groups much attention. Polling shows quite clearly that many swing suburban voters find ads or mailings from Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters, and groups like them far more credible than ads from the Democratic Party. Union members are far more likely to read and respect a mailing from their union than a partisan mail piece.
These trends are even bigger in an election cycle like 2010, when both parties' brands are in the mud. Independent group messages have far more credibility and clout than those from party and candidate committees- even groups with generic-sounding names no one has heard of. Republican strategists like Rove got this early, and went about methodically organizing a network of corporate money to get involved in independent expenditure ads in swing races all over the country. But the Obama White House, sure of its fundraising ability and organizing genius, has consistently sent the signal to Democratic donors to not support outside efforts. They did it after they won the primary in 2008; they did it when they set up OFA to operate solely inside the DNC in 2009; they did it during the health care fight when they felt HCAN was being a little too independent in pushing for a public option, sending a clear signal to donors not to give to them at crucial times during the fight; they did it when ACORN had some bad publicity, very quickly making the decision to distance themselves and let them die even though no group has registered more voters or turned out more people in the last 10 years than ACORN.
I have been fighting this battle inside Democratic strategy circles for 15 years now, but the problem is worse with the current team at the White House. The folks running the Obama political operation have always believed they could control the message and the resources of the party better than anyone else, and that they didn't need or want to empower outside progressive groups. Now embattled House and Senate candidates are paying the price, and it is a bitter price to have to pay. The groups that do have resources that are pro-Democratic- labor, MoveOn, Emily's List, the trial lawyers- are doing their best to stem the tide. But corporate money in the post-Citizens United era is swamping us, and unlike in some cycles in the past (2004, 2006), wealthy progressive donors were sent signals not to engage, or just not cultivated at all, and the result is that we are being badly outspent.
One final note on all this: the irony of outside progressive groups being blamed for not doing enough to help the Democrats when the White House has been complaining about the "left of the left" and the "professional left" for many months- and de-motivating donors the whole time- should not be lost on anyone. You can't attack progressives for being too strident and then wonder why they aren't doing more and still have much credibility.
As I have written in recent days, I still have hopes that Democrats can do better this cycle than the conventional wisdom suggests, especially if the Democrats use a pro-reform populist message that is actually effective. But the curse of the control freaks is not helping anything.
A while back, a couple of us here at Sum of Change got involved in meetings with a great group of folks about working together to provide insider reporting of Capitol Hill with an outsider perspective. In time, we became Main Street Insider. Today, Main Street Insider released a new show, 90 Second Summaries.
The purpose of 90 Second Summaries is simple, provide citizens on Main Street with a quick synopsis of what a bill is all about. The first three episodes come out today, tomorrow and Thursday, with new ones every following Monday. Each video comes with a one-page summary (which you can view online or download as a pdf) containing everything you will need to learn even more about any piece of legislation.
Without further ado, presenting Season 1, Episode 1: H.R. 4790, Shareholder Protection Act
Big business, bolstered by the terrible Citizens United decision allowing them to spread corporate money to buy elections, is throwing money around like there is no tomorrow. Here are a couple of the most egregious examples:
1. Target has become the poster child for bad corporate behavior in the CU-style corporate spending in elections realm, giving over $150,000 to an effort to help elect far right wing Tom Emmer in the Minnesota Governor's race. Emmer wants to abolish the minimum wage, gave money to a group that condoned the death penalty for being gay, and loves Arizona's immigration law. MoveOn.org, LGBT groups, and other progressives have pushed back, launching a campaign to target Target for this behavior. We need to show corporate America that if they want to spend their corporate money backing right wing candidates, it will hurt their brand and their bottom line.
Check out the MoveOn campaign, add your name, and get involved here.
2. The Chamber of Commerce is sliming Alexi Giannoulias with a nasty personal attack ad. Giannoulias has been making his campaign about taking on big corporate interests - his reform platform echoes MoveOn's Clean UP Washington Corporate Corruption campaign. He has been making these very strong reform proposals the centerpiece of his campaign so far, and because he takes on special interest corporate control of DC, the Chamber has decided to make an example of him.
The political problem is that Alexi doesn't have much money, and the Chamber has a ton, mostly raised from the very biggest corporations. This is a crucial time for the progressive community to get behind Alexi and make a major push for him. Sending him some money is a good way to push back at a Chamber of Commerce that is working hard to keep DC safe for corporate lobbyists.
BREAKING! After passage by the House of Representatives, a new campaign finance law is now ready to be bloccked by the Senate. Sam Stein:
The House of Representatives passed major reforms to campaign finance law on Thursday following a heated debate over whether an exemption granted for the National Rifle Association had sullied the final product.
The final vote was 219 to 206 in favor of the DISCLOSE Act, with only two Republicans -- Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) and Joseph Cao (R-La.) -- crossing party lines. The bill would provide tough new disclosure rules for groups that invest in the election process. In addition to forcing all 501c4 groups to stand by the ads they sponsor during elections (with the CEO of the organization literally forced to appear in the spot), the law would also require groups that met certain criteria to reveal who was funding their election activity.
The bill doesn't actually put any restrictions on the amount of money in politics, it just requires disclosure that is intended to make the money less effective.
With only narrow passage in the House, prospects for the bill clearing the 60-vote hurdle in the Senate, unchanged, are grim. Thirty-six Democrats voted against the bill, with only two Republicans in favor. Most of the Democrats who voted against the bill came from the right-wing of the Democratic caucus, because, you know, they are arch-populist, super-geniuses who don't want corporate CEO's to have to say which hundred million dollar ad blitzes they are funding. This is especially the case when those ad blitzes are going to be targeting those same, right-wing Democrats for re-election in red districts, as most of them will.
While some analysts think the bill will be blocked in the Senate, others think it will be merely watered down to the point of worthlessness. In truth, however, it will be watered down to the point where it is worthless, and then blocked anyway. Because, hey, that's who governance in America works.
At least we have a good men's soccer team now.
Update (Adam): Politico reports an amendment to exempt "dues-funded groups" was also added to the bill at the last minute.
A Democratic amendment tucked into campaign finance legislation Wednesday night also drew fire from Republicans and their allies, who contend it gives special treatment to Democrat-allied labor unions. The language in question would exempt from disclosure requirements transfers of cash from dues-funded groups to their affiliates to pay for certain election ads. It was inserted into the bill by Rep. Robert Brady (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Administration Committee and a big union backer.
Though unions sought the change because they thought an earlier version of the bill would have forced them to disclose granular information about non-political functions, Brady's spokesman Kyle Anderson said the change "applies to all membership, dues-based organizations." And he blasted efforts to cast it as a union sweetheart deal as "just another attempt by Republicans to grasp at technical straws because they can't find a valid argument against the legislation that the American people will support."
The contours around the Van Hollen campaign finance bill are getting interesting. The bill would exempt organizations that have over 1 million members, have been around for at least 10 years, has operations in all 50 states and receives less than 15% of their contributions from corporations. That exempts only the NRA. The bill's backers also cite AARP and the Humane Society, but the AARP says it wouldn't qualify:
"We haven't been involved in this process at all," says Jim Dau, spokesman for the AARP. "We don't endorse candidates, make political contributions, or more relevant to the DISCLOSE Act, do any election-based advertising for or against any candidate or party."
While the Humane Society says it would not qualify for the exemption because of the way it is organized.
Yesterday, a coalition of 45 progressive organizations, from groups like Progress Now Colorado and Media Matters to USAction and the Brady Campaign, wrote a letter to Speaker Pelosi urging that the language exempting the National Rifle Association from the Van Hollen bill requiring disclosure be removed. On the other side, a coalition of over 200 business and trade association groups led by the Chamber of Commerce joined the progressive organizations in coming out against the bill. Meanwhile, today, the WaPo editorializes against the amendment but comes out in favor of the bill, saying, "For those who believe that disclosure is the best defense against corrupting the political process, this new reporting is crucial. Exempting the NRA is obnoxious, but the alternative is even worse.", while groups like Wertheimer's Democracy 21 and Common Cause are in favor. The White House, via Dan Pfeiffer, praises the bill.
There has always been transpartisan alliances in campaign finance- I recall groups like the AFL-CIO joined with the Chamber of Commerce in supporting Sen. McConnell's case against the McCain-Feingold legislation when it went to the Supreme Court. The same went for Citizens United, with Alliance Defense Fund filing amicus curiae briefs along side the ACLU. In this case, what will be interesting is whether a coalition of all these major groups of varying ideologies and issue priorities can unite to amend or remove a ridiculous provision against one single actor, the NRA. Frankly, I doubt it, but who knows. And, the amendment is ridiculous. Campaign finance was one of my favorite topics in college and when I first got down to DC. There's no serious reason for having a 10-year exemption over 8- or 9-year exemption, for example. It's literally a shakedown by the NRA of the House members who are in their pocket designed to favor a single actor. I don't know whether to be more depressed that the NRA has this much clout on the Hill or irritated that Van Hollen is going along with it.
You can read the letter from the progressive orgs here.
Update: Van Hollen and Rep. Castle editorialize in favor of the bill, without addressing the criticism.
Update 2 (1:24 PM EST): David Dayen has more off a conference call with Van Hollen and Wertheimer defending the bill. Meanwhile, the 1 million member threshold exemption has been lowered to 500,000 to appease critics. The House is expected to vote tomorrow. It's not yet clear if the votes are there in the Senate.
In a lengthy interview on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, Congressman Dennis Kucinich explained why he would not vote for the present health care bill and defended his position against attacks from people on the left like Markos Moulitsas. He also spoke about the subjects of Afghanistan, campaign finance, and the passing of activist Granny D.
I mean, I have a responsibility to take a stand here on behalf of those who want a public option. There's about thirty-four members of the Senate, at least, who have signed on to saying they support a public option. If I were to just concede right now and say, "Well, you know, whatever you want. All this pressure's building. Just forget about it," actually weakens every last-minute bit of negotiations that would try to improve the bill. So I think that it's really critical to take this stand, because without it, there's no real control over premiums. Without it, we have nothing in the bill except the privatization of our healthcare system.
Congresswoman Donna Edwards' bill proposing a Constitutional Amendment to deny corporations the free speech rights of persons in the form of unlimited election bribery spending has now been cosponsored by: John Conyers, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Jim McGovern, Keith Ellison, Chellie Pingree, Barbara Lee, Andre Carson, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Betty Sutton, Raul Grijalva and Ed Markey.
With the exception of Carson, these congress members are also all cosponsors of the Fair Elections Act, which seeks to address the fairness of our elections by providing public financing for campaigns.
Approaches to fixing the corporate ownership of our elected officials are proliferating, and many organizations and individuals will be backing more than one of them. Here are some of the courses of action already underway:
In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited funds to influence American elections, overturning a century of legal precedent. The Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC undermines the integrity of the U.S. government, as President Barack Obama emphasized at his State of the Union address. But the decision also deals a damaging blow to the U.S. economy by encouraging lawmakers to write economic rules that benefit specific companies at the expense of everyone else.
The editors of The Nation lay out the High Court's hubris in no uncertain terms:
The Citizens United campaign finance decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and a Supreme Court majority of conservative judicial activists is a dramatic assault on American democracy, overturning more than a century of precedent in order to give corporations the ultimate authority over elections and governing. This decision tips the balance against active citizenship and the rule of law by making it possible for the nation's most powerful economic interests to manipulate not just individual politicians and electoral contests but political discourse itself.
Citizens United and the financial crisis
How does this ruling have any bearing on the economy? Markets are not simply the product of random interactions between consumers and producers. Even under the most radical, laissez-faire economic theories, markets are defined, coordinated and policed by the government. For the economy to function at all, we need the government to define what constitutes fair play.
But over the past few decades, we've watched Congress and the executive branch rewrite those rules of the game under heavy corporate influence, creating artificial profits for a set of favored companies with very bad consequences for the broader economy.
The U.S. banking industry serves as a prime example. Since the 1980s, banks have been spending like crazy in all kinds of elections, and getting just about anything they want in return. I interviewed Harvard University Law Professor and TARP Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren for AlterNet, and she presented a concise but unsettling economic history of consumer protection law:
Thirty years ago we had laws that put some basic fairness into the consumer credit market. Over time, the large financial institutions captured the regulators who were supposed to be the cops on the beat to enforce those laws. They also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Washington to make sure that no new cops were put on the beat. Without good laws, the industry started selling ever-more-deceptive products, and their friendly regulators looked the other way.
The bank lobby and the AIG bailout
In Mother Jones, Corbin Hiar reveals how even a bank that engineered a massive tax fraud scheme was able to benefit from the AIG bailout. Major financial institutions convinced Congress to block any regulation of credit default swaps (CDS) all the way back in 2000. CDS contracts were essentially insurance on the value of financial assets-if the assets lost value, banks would still get paid as if they were highly profitable.
CDS insurance encouraged banks to engage in risky mortgage lending, and allowed them to book huge profits on those risky mortgages during the housing boom, even though many of those mortgages were doomed from the get-go. AIG binged so heavily on CDS that the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in the fall of 2008. But an AIG bankruptcy would have hammered the major banks who served as AIG's betting partners, most notably Goldman Sachs. Those banks would have received just pennies on the dollar from a bankrupt AIG. But under the bailout, the New York Federal Reserve paid the banks off at full value, without demanding any concessions whatsoever.
"The credit crunch was an existential threat to every over-leveraged big bank. What's most shocking about the AIG bailout ... is that these endangered banks were able to extract such a sweet deal from the government," Hiar writes. "The banks were paid the full value of all the CDS contracts they had made with AIG-including those mortgage-backed securities they had bought when it was clear the subprime market was collapsing."
The only AIG counterparty to even consider taking CDS losses was Swiss banking giant UBS, which was negotiating a separate settlement with the U.S. government over a massive tax evasion scheme. But even the tax fraudsters at UBS ultimately received full payment on their CDS exposure, and it now appears that the Swiss bank will be able to protect its wealthy tax-evading clients.
With the AIG bailout, the corporate takeover came full-circle. The banks purchased radical deregulation in Congress, and when the deregulated banks destroyed themselves, the government paid out billions to save them. The rest of the economy was ravaged by predatory lending, and taxpayers, not bankers, footed the bill for bank losses.
Redefining corruption
So the Citizens United decision will not introduce corporate influence in elections. Instead, it takes an uneven playing field and tilts it further in the favor of corporate executives. The Roberts court didn't just open the floodgates for corporate cash in U.S. elections and call it a day. It also explicitly redefined "corruption" to give corporations-and anyone else-greater leeway to financially curry favor with politicians. Heather K. Gerken details the new definition for The American Prospect:
The most important line in the decision ... was this one: "ingratiation and access ... are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned.
Most of us would consider the key lawmakers ensnared in the Jack Abramoff scandal as fundamentally corrupt-Abramoff flew former Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas to Scotland for golfing vacations in an effort to win greater leverage over DeLay's legislative agenda. The court's ruling claims that this kind of activity is not corrupt, and bars Congress from passing any laws to counteract it. As filmmaker Alex Gibney emphasizes in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the court has essentially taken Tom DeLay's corporatist philosophy and made it a piece of constitutional law.
"Tom DeLay's view is, we spend more money on potato chips than we do on political campaigns. His view would be, let the money rush down like great waters,," Gibney says. "I think the court was channeling Tom DeLay when they issued their recent decision."
Why citizens need to speak out now
So what can we do about this? As GRITtv's Laura Flanders discusses in a roundtable discussion with several progressive leaders, there will be a long fight for a Constitutional Amendment to ban corporate influence in politics. Until then, as progressive strategist Mike Lux explains, citizens will have to take an aggressive stance against Corporate America as shareholders. Corporate power is exercised by a handful of executives, but the resources that support that power come from ordinary Americans who own stock in those companies, primarily through retirement plans. By demanding that the giant firms we own do not highjack our democracy with lobbying, we can limit some of the damage from the court's recent decision.
If you liked the bank bailouts, then there's plenty for you to love about the Citizens United decision. If you didn't, then it's time to speak up.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
How big is rightwing victimology? We now have two data points, and both say the order-of-magnitude range is 10,000 to 1!
Two months ago I would never have never imagined we could actually quantify the magnitude of rightwing victimology, even roughly. But we now have two data points, both of which fall roughly into the magnitude range of 10,000 to 1. That means that rightwingers feel they're being victimized if their advantage over perceived adversaries is less than 10,000 to 1. If the advantage is a mere 1,000 to 1, they feel overwhelmed by 10-1 odds. If the advantage is 100 to 1, they feel inundated by 100-1 odds. In fact, the ratio is even higher than that. Here's the story:
Update: Republican strategist John Feehery on Ed Shultz just said that Move-On raised so much money in the last election that this ruling will level the playing field.
Plus, the little guy is employed by corporations so they can be confident that they'll be represented by them.
& pointing out, among other things, that in 2008 the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) Sector spent 12.5 times as much as MoveOn, and that if corporations could spend without limit, Chevron's 2008 profits were 626.9 times as much as MoveOn spent, while ExxonMobile's 2008 profits were 1,185.6 times as much as MoveOn spent.
I concluded that this line of argument was so preposterous that Feehery would be better off touting Saddam's WMDs.
But, apparently, it's time to party like it's March of 2003. Digby again:
Have you ever wondered why corporations like Exxon Mobil have free speech "rights" under the Constitution when corporations can't "speak," and when the Constitution was written to protect "We the People" and never mentions "corporations"? Do you worry that maybe, just maybe, the Supreme Court is putting the interests of corporate America over the rights of hard-working Americans?
If so, then you probably want to learn more about a piece of legal fiction called "corporate personhood." And you should probably start with this terrific lecture from that preeminent legal scholar, Stephen Colbert:
If, after watching Colbert, your interest is piqued - as it really should be -- then I urge you to take a look at this discussion draft of a report on corporate personhood, recently released by the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC, where I work), which tells you more than you probably ever wanted to know about the topic. (CAC is planning to release a final version of this report in January 2010). While we've already distributed this to a number of legal blogs in an effort to get feedback, we also wanted to publish it here, to reach a broader audience.
According to the CBO report on the health care bill Harry Reid sent to the floor of the Senate, the opt-out public option would have taken in $134 billion in revenue from 2014 to 2019 (see page 5 of the report).
That $134 billion, or more, will likely now go to private insurance companies. As such, why aren't the insurance companies paying the 44 Senators who said they would filibuster a public option (all 40 Republicans, plus Landrieu, Lieberman, Lincoln and Ben Nelson) an appropriate finder's fee for the massive amount of revenue they will generate for those companies?
I did some poking around looking for industry standard on finder's fees. Something around 3% of the deal seems to be normal:
from an investment banking perspective, 3% of value has long been a thumb rule used by M&A advisors. It may go up to much higher (~10% even) depending on how important the the organization views this deal to its future; complexity and expertise provided around jurisdictions, tax law, IP, funding and other factors.
This is certainly a find of major, long-term value to the insurance companies, so perhaps something more than a 3% finder's fee would be warranted. But hey, we are talking public officials here, and don't want to raise a whiff of corruption, so let's be modest and keep it at 3%.
3% of $134 billion is $4.02 billion. Divided 44 ways, that comes out to nearly $91.4 million per Senator ($91,363,636.36, to be precise). Quite a windfall for those Senators.
However, it would appear that the insurance industry has only contributed just under $11.8 million to all federal candidates so far in 2009. It will have contributed far less to each of the 44 Senators that just made them hundreds of billions.
What a bunch of chumps these Senators are. They go and make hundreds of billions of dollars for the insurance industry, and don't even bother to collect an appropriate finder's fee. Some believers in the free market, they are.
Last week, we covered the basics of managing and organizing a campaign budget. If you know little-to-nothing about campaign finance but would like to, or if you are just about to start putting together the budget for a campaign, you should definitely check out last week's Training Tuesday. Today is not for the basics. Instead, we are using this Training Tuesday to share with you four very important tips that will help you out along the way:
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