Mountains of money on nasty ads:

[yeahwho]

How the wealthy wage class war,

E.J. Dionne / Syndicated columnist Washington Post via Seattle Times (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2013134380_dionne12.html?prmid=op_ed)

The 2010 election is turning into a class war. The wealthy and the powerful started it.

This is a strange development. President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.

Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats. One of the biggest political players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepts money from foreign sources.



The chamber piously insists that none of the cash from abroad is going into its ad campaigns. But without full disclosure, there's no way of knowing if that's true or simply an accounting trick. And the chamber is just one of many groups engaged in an election-year spending spree.

This extraordinary state of affairs was facilitated by the U.S. Supreme Court's scandalous Citizens United decision, which swept away decades of restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections. The Republicans' success in blocking legislation that would at least have required the big spenders to disclose the sources of their money means voters have to operate in the dark.

The "logic" behind Citizens United is that third-party spending can't possibly be corrupting. The five-justice majority declared that "this court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."

You can decide what's more stunning about this statement, its naiveté or its arrogance.

[p-branez]

i heard a good piece on the radio: the ads are basically madlibs

"Candidate X wants to privatize YOUR social security."
"Candidate Y sent jobs to CHINA."
"Candidate Z voted for a FAILED stimulus plan and bailouts.
"Candidate Q stands with Nancy Pelosi's LIBERAL agenda, not with you."

what's happening in my state is that the republicans are running more and worse attack ads (also more ads overall) and they are going to nearly sweep all state elections. so i think there's going to be a perception that these ads work because they are heavily used by republicans in an advantage-republican year.

it's going to become increasingly difficult to run an honest campaign. it's going to be another endless game of "well he's doing the ads, so i have to." like that conversation recently in California where Jerry Brown said, "Well I'll do it [end attack ads] if she does it." but we also to remember that attack ads aren't monolithic vote swayers.

i think it's going to be hard to stop these ads because the money comes from disparate sources. you can't hold the politician accountable, and say "hey, end this" because he's not paying for the ads. and "legally," a politician and his campaign can't coordinate with the organizations that pay for the commercials. also, it's hard to draw a line of what is an "attack" ad, "negative" ad, "nasty" ad etc.

[Drederick Tatum]

The "logic" behind Citizens United is that third-party spending can't possibly be corrupting. The five-justice majority declared that "this court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."
[/I]

as someone looking in from the outside, I see this decision as potentially the most dangerous thing that's happened to American democracy in recent years, possibly within my entire lifetime.

side note: I work in the tourism industry and get to meet a wide cross-section of Americans every day and one comment made recently by a guy from Str/Long Island has stuck with me ever since. "Americans are prouder of their capitalism than they are of their democracy."

whether you agree with it or not, I found it interesting/enlightening/frightening to hear coming from someone I would say was pretty average. any Americans care to comment?

[yeahwho]

I sort of blew my money shot all over in the Joe Miller thread (http://bbs.beastieboys.com/showpost.php?p=1745680&postcount=13), but what is interesting and also a recurrent theme of these mid-terms are the factless, useless and at times outright misinformation this money is being spent on.

My state, Washington State, has a very expensive heated race for senator between Republican Dino Rossi and incumbent Democrat Patty Murray who are both in the top 10 as far as money being spent this election cycle.

Yet they are vapid when it comes to any reason to elect them, the joke is on us, the electorate. Here is a question asked at their yawnfest debate,

Candidates can't bring themselves to talk straight about deficits (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2013242212_danny24.html)


KOMO-TV news anchor Dan Lewis was moderating a debate between Sen. Patty Murray and her challenger, Dino Rossi. He asked about the huge federal deficits and debt, and specifically, what they would do to cut back.

He begged them to spare us the shopworn spin. Pleaded with them to holster their budget-cutting clichés, such as "everything is on the table."

"I think it's time to propose some of those tough decisions," Lewis insisted. "So can you give us a couple specifics as to where you might make some of these painful cuts?"

Murray went first. She said she voted to freeze her own pay, and to cut the president's budget last summer by $14 billion. She also told how she called up the head of Housing and Urban Development and said "no" to a new building he had wanted funded.

"I know how to make those tough, responsible cuts," she said.

Except her cuts add up to less than one-half of 1 percent of federal spending.

Rossi then devoted his entire answer to decrying earmarks, aka pork. He said he would cut them all.

"These earmarks are bankrupting America," he said.

No, they aren't. This year Congress spent $16.5 billion on 9,129 projects around the country, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. Which is also less than one-half of 1 percent of all federal spending.

In fact, if you could retroactively undo every single pork-barrel project Congress has passed during the past 20 years — all 110,000 of them — you would have enough money to buy down the $13.7 trillion national debt by ... 2 percent.

I think Rossi's right that Congress should stop spreading the pork. But it's not a credible answer for how to heal the nation's sick finances. Not even close.



So yes between the two they have raised $30 million dollars, that's $15 million each and the collective solutions they have for our economy adds up to basically bullshit. And I'm just getting started at how lame these debates were. It's insulting.

[abbott]

Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats. One of the biggest political players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepts money from foreign sources.



Good thing the Democrats are not spending Tens of millions on attack ads?????? Fuck the two party system.

[yeahwho]

The democrats are just as guilty for taking as much money as the republicans, they also are as guilty as using money and 527 groups to attack and dumb down issues, or as the case of the two wars we are engaged in, ignore them.

That quote is from the Washington Post; Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats. One of the biggest political players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accepts money from foreign sources.

Is from the author, I do know the monies spent are aimed at any majority or law that provides taxation or inhibits profits. That is the nature of corporate structure and the current form of political representation our government is.

Which is a fact that Drederick Tatum pointed out in his post. We care as much, if not more about cheap crap than democracy. Otherwise wouldn't we have limits on political contributions by very wealthy influential interests?

[abbott]

seems we could have a zero dollar cap and give/have avalible public formats that are avalible for free like facebook etc. Wasting money on ads for politics should be crime, considering the public education my kids get is a joke, that money could be put to much better use.

[p-branez]

maybe this new wave of money will move more support to public financing of campaigns (http://www.publicampaign.org/)

drederick - you live in germany, right? how are campaigns financed there?

[saz]

cheers for bringing up publicly funded elections. elections in canada are publicly funded, which guarantees that big corporate money is kept out of politics, and politicians therefore don't have to spend the majority of their days calling donors and seeking financial contributors for the next election down the road. they are able to focus on the job at hand, ie serving the people, and are not distracted by concerns regarding the funding of their next campaign. this would solve a lot of the immediate problems america currently faces, and politicians would be able to get much more done, as opposed to chasing contributors for the majority of their work day.

[travesty]

I'm with saz and yeahwho and anyone else on this issue. The private funding is very suspect and leads to nothing good. In fact, I was the first to post here against the Citizens United ruling. Both sides use these shady tactics and both sides want you to believe that they are above it. Obama is as dirty as anyone he attempts to deride because he refused to accept McCain's offer for both of them to use only public funds. Once again, he's the biggest hipocrite of them all. They're all dirty.

[saz]

sad but true that wall street still rules the roost (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOD5cPs01_s)

[saz]

Midterms: money changes everything

Political donations from nefarious groups are strangling US democracy, and a former Bush adviser is cashing in.

Cliff Schecter
Last Modified: 26 Oct 2010 07:12 GMT
Indepth/Opinion
Al Jazeera English (http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2010/10/20101025143212130287.html)


"I went to the crossroad, fell down upon my knees." This was the powerful first line of "Cross Road Blues" by 1930s blues legend Robert Johnson. It was later adapted into the song "Crossroads" by Eric Clapton’s Cream and a movie of the same name, starring the serially pre-pubescent Ralph Macchio. The song and movie were infamously about going down to a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta, to sell your soul to the Devil.

Today, meeting Mephistopheles is much simpler: You can simply turn over barrels of cash in unmarked bills to American Crossroads or Crossroads GPS, the two appropriately named groups formed by one of the most wretched, sebum-stained forces of evil at the current American political crossroads: Karl Rove.

Yes, Karl Rove, that American everyman—if everyday Americans were an almost perfect mixture of Lucky Luciano and Sloth from The Goonies. Apparently, Rove wasn’t satisfied with only helping fabricate evidence to pave America’s way into a war in Iraq, outing an undercover CIA agent, and "advising" the most dollar-drenched, demagogic, and incompetent executive office since Cleon of Athens. So he’s returned to active involvement in our political process from his perch as a pundit, for a coda to his democracy corruption, because someone has to protect the rights of voiceless, persecuted tobacco and healthcare conglomerates among us so they can make themselves heard over the din of daily discussions on the American unemployment line.

To be clear, we are not talking about a few pretty pennies here or there. Rove’s groups are expected to spend between $50m and $75m by election day, "educating" the public about candidates and issues, in much the same way you become educated by watching Jackass 3D or Christine O’Donnell talk about stuff. And this has all been made possible thanks to a Supreme Court majority made up of far-right mutants who decided that 100 years of established law trying to limit the flow of corporate money into our system just had it all wrong.

In this Supreme Court majority’s adorably antiquated view, corporations—or "people" as they’re now known—should be able to give unlimited funds to groups that are dirtier than a test tube of Russell Brand’s blood, and these organizations are not required to disclose from whence their slush funding came. Because, really, what’s healthier for democracy than wealthy elites secretively giving gobs of cash to those who will vote on legislation that effects their bottom line?

Of course, Rove’s groups weren’t the only ones to benefit from this mockery of a decision, as the Chamber of Commerce, according to some fantastic reporting by the Center for American Progress blog Think Progress, has become a way station for any foreign group or individual from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to BP to Fidel Castro, who wishes to unduly influence our political system. Hell, even wives of Supreme Court Justices have gotten in on the good times, as none other than Ginni Thomas, Clarence’s wife, can thank her husband and his black-robed buds for allowing her hastily formed local Tea-Party Mob—Liberty Central—to collect cash from any crank with a dollar and a dream.

This is the same Ginni Thomas who recently called Anita Hill—a law professor who Clarence Thomas spent the 80s sexual harassing when Hill worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (no, that is not a joke)—at 7am on a Saturday morning at her office at Brandeis University. Why? To ask Hill for an apology for being sexually harassed by her husband and telling us about it back in 1991, when Thomas tragically had his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court confirmed with the fewest votes by the US Senate in the history of the country.

Somewhere, upon reading this, OJ Simpson is probably calling the Brown and Goldman families to ask for an apology at this very moment.

So to sum up, the awkwardly unstable Ginni Thomas and her goofy Liberty Central Tea-Party group, because of a decision at least partially placed into law by her husband, in between viewings of Long Dong Silver, can now collect millions in secret corporate contributions to enrich her family while trying to elect others whose political philosophies also predate penicillin. Isn’t that special?

In Federalist #10, author and eventual American President James Madison sternly warned of the danger posed by "factions" to a democracy, by which he meant the ability of private interests to overwhelm the public good. There could be no better example of this danger than that posed by large caches of money spent in secret by oil company billionaires, foreign entities and large corporations to influence our politics.

Full disclosure is obviously a necessity that needs to be addressed. Outside tampering in American elections must be prevented. And there has to be some way to make it illegal for Ginny Thomas to use a telephone.

For, if sanity does indeed once again prevail, limits on the flow of money from these factions will have to again be enacted. In the meantime, sadly, we’ll all be forced to endure as Karl Rove and his ilk attempt to take American democracy hostage to their very perverted form of 19th Century politics.

.

[saz]

Senate Democrats again fail to pass campaign disclosure law

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/23/AR2010092304578.html) Staff Writer
Thursday, September 23, 2010; 11:10 PM


Senate Democrats failed again Thursday in their attempt to require corporations, unions and other interest groups to provide more details about their political spending.

The measure, known as the Disclose Act, fell one vote short of the 60 needed to break a GOP filibuster in the divided Senate, with Republicans uniformly opposed to the bill. The legislation had also been blocked by Senate Republicans during an earlier vote in July.

The 59-39 vote marks a bitter defeat for Democratic leaders and President Obama, who has repeatedly urged Congress to pass the bill in response to a Supreme Court ruling lifting restrictions on corporate and union political spending.

The outcome represents a major victory for Republicans and major business groups, which lobbied hard against a proposal that they said was an attempt by Democrats to silence GOP-leaning business groups.

Sen. John Cornyn ((R-Tex.) called the proposal a "cynical, partisan bill designed to silence the free speech of Congress's critics and to protect Democrat incumbents."

Proponents argued that voters deserve to know the identities of donors bankrolling outside advertising that has played an increasingly pivotal role in U.S. elections. Under the bill defeated Thursday, corporations and most interest groups would have been subject to stricter financial disclosure requirements.

The measure also would have broadened restrictions on foreign-controlled companies and required heads of companies and interest groups to appear on camera during their political spots.

Democratic leaders expressed frustration Thursday at the unwillingness of GOP moderates, such as Maine Sens. Susan Collins (R) or Olympia Snowe (R), to allow the measure to move forward. Democratic leaders had signaled a willingness to debate changes to the legislation, including delaying its implementation until January.

"Republicans continue to block the Senate from even debating common-sense oversight to bring transparency to our campaign finance laws," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a statement. "The outcome of today's vote shows the difference between Democrats who believe voters should be in control of our elections and Republicans who want to allow big corporations to buy their outcomes behind closed doors."

Interest groups and political parties have reported $87 million in independent spending so far in this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Democratic aides had acknowledged even before Thursday's vote that they were unlikely to get any Republicans to break ranks with their party. But several aides said they were hopeful the defeat would provide benefits by allowing Democrats to tie the GOP to corporate interests ahead of the midterm elections.

The legislation, which passed the House in a different form earlier this year, was drafted as a response to the 5 to 4 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The court found that corporations had the same rights as individuals to engage in political speech and could therefore spend as much as they wanted for or against specific candidates.

Obama pointedly criticized the ruling during his State of the Union address, prompting an unusual public objection weeks later by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. The president and other White House aides have continued to focus on the decision as opening the door to abuses by corporations and had made passage of the Disclose Act a top legislative priority.

In his weekly radio address last Saturday, for example, Obama blasted Republicans for opposing the bill. "A partisan minority in Congress is hoping their defense of these special interests and the status quo will be rewarded with a flood of negative ads against their opponents," Obama said. "It's a power grab, pure and simple."

Despite the Disclose Act defeat, activists in favor of changing campaign finance rules celebrated a small victory in the House on Thursday: The Committee on House Administration passed the Fair Elections Now Act, which would allow candidates to receive 4-to-1 matching funds culled from broadcasting license fees by agreeing to limit themselves to donations of $100 or less. The fate of the bill remains unclear, however.


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