Posts tagged big money
Holding Politicians Accountable
“In a blow against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, the second-largest city in the U.S. sent a strong, if symbolic, message against corporate personhood and unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns.
“Los Angeles voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition C, a resolution that instructed local and state officials to promote the overturning of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. With 100 percent of precincts reporting by 3:16 a.m. Wednesday, Prop C had won 76.6 percent of the vote, according to the LA City Clerk’s unofficial results.”
Mother Jones: Billionaires Now Own American Politics
Dark money is already shaping the 2016 race as motivated megadonors handpick the candidates and the issues.
Winning elections is more expensive than ever. Ironically, that makes it harder to ‘buy’ elections, in the conventional sense, because both sides in marquee elections raise so much cash that each marginal dollar becomes less consequential (principles of inflation apply). But it also means that candidates are required to spend an egregious and unprecedented share of their time getting rich people to donate. Having a Rolodex full of wealthy folks is a prerequisite for winning federal representation. It’s also a recipe for having your priorities shaped, if not determined, by hours spent going over rich-guy problems.
Such is the way of Washington, home of the scheme and the fraud, where the unbreakable chain between money and governance weighs heavy and drags us ever deeper into a sinkhole of inaction and mediocrity.
Cartoon of the day, via New York Daily News.
FEC: $7 billion spent on 2012 elections
“Presidential and congressional candidates running in the 2012 election cycle, political parties and political action committees (PACs) received more than $7.1 billion and disbursed more than $7 billion in 2011-2012, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission that cover activity from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012. Filings submitted to the Commission in this two-year period indicated that disbursements for independent expenditures and electioneering communications totaled nearly $1.3 billion.”
Tennessee Lawmakers Block Effort to Raise Contribution Limits
Good news. A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers in Tennessee blocked an effort to give wealthy donors more power in the state:
“A push to raise some campaign contribution limits in Tennessee has likely died for the year. The bill received just 48 votes, needing 50 for passage.
“Ultimately, arguments from the minority party won the day. Democrats railed against raising the amount of money political parties could give individual candidates from the roughly $60,000 allowed currently to $150,000.”
…
“The legislation also would have allowed insurance companies to make direct campaign donations to candidate. And it would have dropped the requirement that corporations disclose contributions, though their political giving would theoretically show up on a candidate’s disclosure form.”
Fresh from Election Day 2012, House members and challengers are already raising big bucks. Sunlight Foundation:
“On the heels of the most expensive campaign in the nation’s history, members of the House and the candidates who want to replace them are already raking in cash for the 2014 mid-terms. In the first three months of 2013, they collected a total of $68 million, records just submitted to the Federal Election Commission show.”
Mother Jones: Inside the NRA's Koch-Funded Dark Money Campaign
“But in the past couple of years, the NRA has also turned to deep-pocketed conservative allies. Last year an organization allied with the donor network of billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch gave between $2 million and $3 million to the NRA’s election efforts, according to two Republican fundraisers familiar with the gun group’s campaign work. The gift, said one of the fundraisers, was seen as a smart investment beyond what the Koch-affiliated Americans for Prosperity was already doing to boost conservative turnout. (The NRA did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)”
Fighting big money with big money?
Interesting EJ Dionne column in the Washington Post today on people like Mike Bloomberg fighting back against the NRA, or how to feel about a fight between liberal special interests and conservative special interests when you oppose things like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision:
The Supreme Court has stuck us with an unsavory choice. If the only moneyed people giving to politics are pushing for policies that favor the wealthy, we really will become an oligarchy. For now, their pile of dough needs to be answered by progressive rich people who think oligarchy is a bad idea.
But playing the game as it’s now set up should not blind anyone to how flawed its rules are. Politics should not be reduced to a contest between liberal rich people and conservative rich people. A donor derby tilts politics away from the interests and concerns of the vast majority of Americans who aren’t wealthy and can’t write checks of a size that gets their phone calls returned automatically. A Citizens United world makes government less responsive, less representative and more open to corruption.
