Dark Money groups are growing in size, scope, and share of election spending with each election cycle.
The total amount of “dark money” — campaign spending that cannot be traced back to individuals due to intentional obfuscation of its source in recent elections.
Source: Center for Responsive Politics, 4/19/18.
The Center for Responsive Politics documents how corporations and the rich’s money flows through multiple front groups to ultimately influence elections, but without traceability. This is not “one person, one vote.”
I’m looking forward the summer release of this documentary film, Dark Money, on the history campaign finance reform in Montana from the 1880s to Citizens United.
Watch the film trailer here.
A century ago, corrupt money swamped Montana’s legislature, but Montanans rose up to prohibit corporate campaign contributions. Today, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — which allows unlimited, anonymous money to pour into elections nationwide — Montana is once again fighting to preserve open and honest elections. Following an investigative reporter through a political thriller, DARK MONEY exposes one of the greatest threats to American democracy.
Watch an interview with the director here.
“Our democracy is not supposed to be a tug of war between a couple of billionaires on the left and a couple of billionaires on the right,”
“Our democracy is not supposed to be a tug of war between a couple of billionaires on the left and a couple of billionaires on the right.”
Yes, unfortunately, it is.
As the charts below show, the billionaire class writes big checks to candidates and partisan campaign committees. Why? Because they want access to the politicians, once in office, to influence both the legislative agendas and the actual text of laws.
While we have a roughly and anachronistically speaking a “one man, one vote” democracy for elections, that doesn’t mean the output of our republican system of government is representative of the will of the people, because most people don’t have equal access to the candidates and office holders.
Source: NYT 4/13/18.
See other posts on this topic tagged #campaign finance, and below.
I’m shocked, shocked politicians doing the bidding of their campaign contributors
Campaign super donors make up about .01% of the population and yet were 40% of all campaign contributors in 2016.
A political system by and for the rich?
Source: NYT 12/17/17.
Far more than any check the N.R.A. could write, it is this mobilization operation that has made the organization such a challenging adversary for Democrats and gun control advocates
Far more than any check the N.R.A. could write, it is this mobilization operation that has made the organization such a challenging adversary for Democrats and gun control advocates
Lobbying and dark money in politics is bad and distorts our democratic system of one person one vote, but eligible voter complacency is the worst distorter of the people’s will.
When politicians and political appointees are overly influenced by industries rather than the people who elected them, what do we call that? — corrupt?
You all remember the famous lines of faux incredulity from Casablanca?
We all know that corporations make campaign contributions to gain access to elected officials and “have their voice heard.” An Energy Dept photographer caught exactly what “being heard” means in photos that were leaked to the press. The below images show the memo handed to the Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, with a list of Murray Energy wishes to protect their coal business, including:
Murray Energy has a long running list of coal mine safety violations and is aggressive in denying their responsibility for mine accidents, such as the Crandall Canyon disaster. See a bio of the owner here and a safety violations tracker here.
When regulators are overly influenced by the industries they regulate, they are called “captured.”
When politicians and political appointees are overly influenced by industries rather than the people who elected them, what do we call that? — corrupt?
Read the full story here.
[Democrat and Republican politicians should move toward the policy middle ground to win stable majorities….] This advice has one crucial shortcoming, Mr. Fiorina acknowledges: “They can’t do it.” One reason has to do with money. “The donors are most ideological of all,” he says. In the 1970s and ’80s, “a big majority of contributions to congressional races came from individual contributions within your district, and now the money is coming from outside. Texas is an ATM for Republicans, California and Manhattan for Democrats.”
He adds that “30 years ago, an Ohioan Republican and an Oregon Republican would have faced very different primary electorates that run different kinds of races. Now, you look at their campaigns—they’re going to be the same. They’re getting their money from the same kinds of people.” The Republican in Oregon, a more liberal state, is likely to prove unelectable. For this problem there is probably no remedy. “The only thing I can see mattering would be unconstitutional,” Mr. Fiorina says—to wit, a law requiring that “all campaign contributions have to come from within the jurisdiction of the race being held.” – WSJ 1/6-7/18, p. A9, emphasis added.
Morris Fiorina, Stanford U. Political Scientists, discussing the implications of the “unstable majorities” in our electoral system, in the WSJ.
His diagnosis is correct that the respective parties are more extreme than the plurality of American voters, because their respective donor bases drive candidates to extremes, even if the majority of the electorate is not on-board for their policy positions. While the majority of Americans are for some form of gun control, a similar majority of Americans are against any efforts to ban guns, for example. Ditto abortion.
The article is worth reading.
Uncontrolled and untrackable corporate campaign contributions distort state-level races as much, if not more, than federal races.
U.S. companies have found a loophole in state campaign-finance rules by funneling donations aimed at helping candidates through the [Republican Governors Association, or RGA, a Republican fundraising PAC] and its Democratic counterpart, according to multiple former officials. Donors can’t earmark money for a particular candidate. Instead, they can simply—and legally—tell the groups they have “an interest” in a race or are making a donation “at the request” of a gubernatorial candidate, these officials say.
An internal tracking system, sometimes called the “tally,” allows the [Democratic Governors Association, DGA] to keep tabs on how much individual governors raise for the association from companies and other donors, which later helps it figure out how to allocate the money, former DGA officials said. The RGA has a similar system, former RGA officials say.
…
Multiple former RGA and DGA officials described the practice of guiding donations as an open secret. The available public data hint at a pattern, too. Over the past decade, 42 S&P 500 index companies gave donations of $100,000 or more to the RGA or DGA. Donations by 19 of those companies were followed by an RGA or DGA expenditure of the same or greater amount within a month in a state where the company has operations, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign donations.
Source: WSJ 12/30/17.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-modern-campaign-finance-loophole-governors-associations-1514562975
