If you haven't already, go right now and read The New York Times article on who is funding the 2016 presidential race. Here's a tease:
The Chicago hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, for example, earns about $68.5 million a month after taxes, according to court filings made by his wife in their divorce. He has given a total of $300,000 to groups backing Republican presidential candidates. That is a huge sum on its face, yet is the equivalent of only $21.17 for a typical American household, according to Congressional Budget Office data on after-tax income.
I missed it the first time. That's "$68.5 million a month after taxes." So, yeah, for him, $300,000 is pretty much chump change and will always trump your $10 to Bernie Sanders.
James Fallows of The Atlantic has a few choice words on our long-term coup:
Normally I shy away from apocalyptic readings of the American predicament. We're a big, messy country; we've been through a lot -- perhaps even more than we thought, what with Abraham Lincoln and the vampires. We'll probably muddle through this and be very worried about something else ten years from now. But when you look at the sequence from Bush v. Gore, through Citizens United, to what seems to be coming on the health-care front; and you combine it with ongoing efforts in Florida and elsewhere to prevent voting from presumably Democratic blocs; and add that to the simply unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the years since the Democrats won control of the Senate and then took the White House, you have what we'd identify as a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.**
Today: Allegheny County Council members Amanda Green Hawkins and John DeFazio, are sponsoring a Motion "expressing the Sense of Council of Allegheny County supporting the formulation and ratification of a Constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and to restore Constitutional rights and fair elections to the people" (6871-12).
The Council may vote on this motion at its meeting TODAY, April 3!
Members of several groups (including Coffee Party Pittsburgh) will be making comments at the Allegheny Council meeting on Tue, April 3, 5:00pm, County Court House, 436 Grant St, 4th floor, Gold Room. Please come to the meeting to show support for this Motion, and/or email (or call) your council person ASAP.
ACTION: We are asking you to send an e-mail to or call your County Council member NOW and ask him/her to support the motion. Find your County Council member in this list (if you click on their photo, you can get to their bio and e-mail): http://www.alleghenycounty.us/council/members.aspx
(Here in the good ol' US of A, they're out in broad daylight)
Last year, the Supremes decided 5-4 in the Citizens United case that money = free speech (even though money is, of course, not free) and opened the floodgates for the unrestricted flow of corporate money into political ads (yes, less well-financed union money too).
Yesterday, the Supremes decided -- again 5-4 -- in McComish v. Bennett that if a candidate opts out of public-financing, other candidates cannot receive matching funds to level the playing field.
This case strikes down a law that doesn’t prevent people from spending as much money as they want if they choose and represents a net increase in political speech.
Or, in other words, money is speech for thee, but not me. Not only do those with the most bucks get to spend those bucks, unfettered, to support a candidate, but the candidate with the most bucks gets to prevent other candidates from getting more bucks. From Justice Kagan's dissent:
This suit, in fact, may merit less attention than any challenge to a speech subsidy ever seen in this Court. In the usual First Amendment subsidy case, a person complains that the government declined to finance his speech, while bankrolling someone else’s; we must then decide whether the government differentiated between these speakers on a prohibited basis—because it preferred one speaker’s ideas to another’s. But the candidates bringing this challenge do not make that claim—because they were never denied a subsidy. Arizona, remember, offers to support any person running for state office. Petitioners here refused that assistance. So they are making a novel argument: that Arizona violated their First Amendment rights by disbursing funds to other speakers even though they could have received (but chose to spurn) the same financial assistance. Some people might call that chutzpah.
Indeed, what petitioners demand is essentially a right to quash others’ speech through the prohibition of a (universally available) subsidy program. Petitioners are able to convey their ideas without public financing—and they would prefer the field to themselves, so that they can speak free from response. To attain that goal, they ask this Court to prevent Arizona from funding electoral speech—even though that assistance is offered to every state candidate, on the same (entirely unobjectionable) basis. And this Court gladly obliges.
Add this to the recent Wal-Mart ruling -- which some in the media erroneously labeled unanimous -- but the heart of the matter was yet another 5-4 decision which questioned the whole idea of class action suits and set up a too-big-to-fail standard where if you screw over enough people, you win and you get the following:
1. The public can set no limits on how much the richest companies can spend to buy an election for a candidate.
2. There can be no attempt by the public to level the playing field among candidates so that the richest candidate cannot attempt to buy an election.
3. If a company is big enough and rich enough and screws over enough people, the public cannot band together to try to achieve justice against wrongdoing.
Talking Points Memo is spot on when they called this ad against Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn (D) -- running in a special election to replace the retired Democratic Rep. Jane Harman (CA-36) -- "Willie Horton on steroids." But its all that and more. Let's go down the check list:
False accusations about her actions regarding gang members: ☑
False inference that the gang members in question are African-American -- Obama! -- when they were primarily Latinos: ☑
Depicting the opponent as demonic: ☑
Calling the opponent a "ho" and a "bitch": ☑
Depictions of various gangsters (Al Capone), gang members, Che Guevara and Charlie Manson (?!): ☑
Depicting the opponent as a pole dancing stripper with (bonus!) a smelly crotch: ☑
Depicting Hahn as about to be sexually violated with an automatic weapon...WHAT?...WTF? This has got to be the sickest, most vile ad ever.
And, we get to thank Citizens United for this one. The ad is not being run by her opponent, tea party Republican Craig Huey. It's being run by the brand-new Turn Right USA PAC. Via TPM:
Turn Right USA, the sponsor, is a brand new political action committee which only filed its paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Monday. The paperwork indicates that Turn Right USA intends to operate as a so-called "super PAC," capable of raising funds in unlimited amount, but will not use those funds to directly support federal candidates or committees.
The Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case last year opened the floodgates of corporate money into American politics. One of the first companies to take advantage of the change in law was Target which made a $150,000 contribution to support a strongly anti-gay, pro-chamber-of-commerce candidate. Target faced a backlash when their contribution became known, but according to http://www.protesttarget.com/why.html, "Target responded to the uproar by implementing superficial changes to its political giving policy. But today it STILL continues its political spending."
We need to:
It's time to remind Target and other corporations gearing up for the 2012 elections that our democracy is not for sale, and that when companies try to buy our elected officials to do their bidding, we the people will be watching.
Protest the Target shareholders meeting June 8 at noon Target store 6231 Penn Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15206
In a ruling that has major implications for how elections are funded, the Supreme Court has struck down a key campaign-finance restriction that bars corporations and unions from pouring money into political ads.
The long-awaited 5-4 ruling, in the Citizens United v. FEC case, presents advocates of regulation with a major challenge in limiting the flow of corporate money into campaigns, and potentially opens the door for unrestricted amounts of corporate money to flow into American politics.
Yes, it was the right wing of the Supremes who overturned a century's worth of laws and voted in favor of allowing elections to be bought and sold like any other trinket.
Hey, assholes, if speech really were "free" than lil ol me could run ads on *your* TVs 24/7.
Also from TPM:
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) warned last week that if the court found unconstitutional all efforts to ban corporations and unions from financing political ads, it would take the country "not just back to a pre-McCain-Feingold era, but back to the era of the robber barons in the 19th century."
Give it up, America. We've lost. Elections will now be one big infomercial and the win will go to the highest bidder.
