A lobbying battle is raging largely behind the scenes over a seemingly obscure executive order that could — if signed by President Obama — make public the political spending that many corporations can now keep secret.
Under the proposed order, all companies bidding for federal contracts would be required to disclose money spent on political campaign efforts, including dollars forwarded through associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other private groups.
Election spending by such organizations soared to new heights in 2010, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, which allowed corporations and unions to make direct political expenditures. The majority opinion endorsed disclosure of the new political spending, but many groups have formed as nonprofits, which do not have to reveal their funding sources.
Since then, campaign finance reform advocates and their Democratic allies have sought to unmask the secret contributions fueling the groups, arguing that such spending allows wealthy individuals, corporations and other special interests to have an outsized influence on elections without voters knowing who is behind the effort. [Read more]
Oil baron David Koch has made it clear he is no fan of President Barack Obama, but Wednesday night he provided a fresh reason for his anti-Obama views: the president is frightening.
Obama is “a hardcore socialist,” Koch told the New York Magazine at a spring ball, “and he’s marvelous at pretending to be something other than that, but that is what I believe he truly is, a hardcore socialist. He’s scary to me.”
Koch and his brother Charles are owners of the energy company Koch Industries. The brothers were principle financiers of Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker and the tea party movement. They are also supporters of free market groups like Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Reason Foundation.
In addition to being a scary hardcore socialist, David Koch said that Obama deserved no credit for the operation that tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden.
“He just made the decision, it was obvious where the guy is,” he told the magazine. “He was one of the worst terrorists organizing attacks on the United States. I mean, no president in his right mind would not approve that decision to go eliminate him.”
WASHINGTON, April 26th — So much for détente.
After a brief truce of sorts between the White House and business leaders, the top lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce took aim at President Obama on Tuesday over an as-yet unannounced plan to force government contractors to disclose their political giving.
The lobbyist, R. Bruce Josten, said in an interview that the powerful business bloc “is not going to tolerate” what it saw as a “backdoor attempt” by the White House to silence private-sector opponents by disclosing their political spending.
“We will fight it through all available means,” Mr. Josten said. In a reference to the White House’s battle to depose Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, he said, “To quote what they say every day on Libya, all options are on the table.”
While no final decision has been announced, the White House has acknowledged that Mr. Obama is considering issuing an executive order requiring all would-be federal contractors to disclose direct and indirect political spending of more than $5,000.
The order could, for instance, force a military contractor or an energy company seeking federal work to report money it gave to the Chamber of Commerce or another advocacy group to help finance political ads and expenditures. [Read more]
But it’s not yet clear that the efforts could have a substantial effect on the 2012 election — or that Democrats won’t exceed Republicans in attracting undisclosed donations to their own newly formed organizations.
Even as Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and his pro-reform allies filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Federal Election Commission demanding donor disclosure, other Democrats were raising substantial contributions for 2012 campaign advertising. And two former White House aides have been talking of setting up their own independent group that could include a nonprofit arm to shield the identities of major donors.
The White House railed against independent campaign spending financed by secret donations in the 2008 and 2010 elections. President Obama has emphasized disclosed and limited donations of the sort he raised at events in San Francisco and Los Angeles this week.
But now there is a growing consensus that Democrats should begin their own efforts to collect large-dollar undisclosed donations, or risk defeat. [Read more]
This can be our moment. A new activism is emerging in the United States and abroad, where people, in unexpected places, are standing up to challenge the rich and powerful. From recent uprisings in Egypt, to young people and workers in Europe marching and striking against shortsighted austerity plans, to the battle of nurses, teachers, firefighters and community members in Wisconsin, and the sit-ins and occupations of banks starting around the country, a movement is starting to grow.
After being battered and on the defensive, we have an opportunity in the United States to go on the offensive to transform the economy and politics of our country and create shared prosperity for all. Corporations have $1.6 trillion in cash reserves and are making record profits. The CEOs of Wall Street and the big banks paid themselves record compensation and bonuses of $135 billion in 2010 ($7 billion more than in 2009). After trillions in bailouts, they are even bigger and more dominant than before the economic crash. Now can be our moment to build a movement that both captures the popular imagination and has a strategy to engage millions of people to improve their lives by harnessing:
To do this, we need to understand how our country and our economy got in the mess they are in, the opportunities we have missed over the last two years and the critical role we can all start playing to fix it. [Read more]
Last night President Obama and congressional negotiators cut a deal to keep the government running, cutting “$38.5 billion under current funding levels, per Republican demands,” and $78 billion below what Obama called for in his initial 2011 budget.
Yet as Republicans and Democrats continue to battle over the deficit within a political framing that includes taking aim at Pell Grants for low-income students — which Obama preemptively proposed to cut, calling summer grants “too expensive,” while Republicans want far deeper cuts than that — Head Start funding, and other programs from Main Street Americans, there is one group of Americans that seems to be getting away without having any sacrifices demanded of them: the very richest.
As this chart from from Wealth for the Common Good shows, the top 400 taxpayers — who have more wealth than half of all Americans combined — are paying lower taxes than they have in a generation, as their tax responsibilities have slowly collapsed since the New Deal era as working families have been asked to pay more and more:
[Read more]
When the current economic crisis hit, the Obama campaign blew away Bush and McCain by promising hope, change and a solution that would overcome this crisis and prevent future crises. Likewise, some governments in Europe came to power based on public fear reacting to the global meltdown. Ongoing crisis, mass economic pain and deepening public anger keep shifting political winds.
Within six months of Barrack Obama’s election, those winds had changed again. His liberal campaign rhetoric had hit a wall. What humbled Obama was the determination of business interests to shift onto others the costs of the crisis and of the government’s response, namely its hugely expensive bailout of major corporations especially in finance. We watched and learned who was really in charge of how this economic crisis would be “managed”.
There would not be a 2011 rise in the federal income tax rate from 35 to 39% for the richest Americans (even though it had been 91% in the 1960s). There would be no legal or other requirement that corporate beneficiaries use their bailout billions in economically and socially useful ways (rather than only for their private profits). There would be no federal employment programme, no matter how high the US unemployment rate went, nor how long workers remained unemployed. There would be no real programme to lift wages or otherwise offset millions of homeowners’ inability to make mortgage payments even if that omission meant that the housing market would tank again – the double dip downward in that crucial industry is now under way. [Read more]
In lengthy interviews with a conservative magazine, the billionaire Koch brothers mounted an aggressive defense of their business and political interests, describing their liberal critics as “very, very extreme” and “very dangerous” and President Barack Obama as a “radical” with “Marxist” ideas whose success is owed largely to his “silver tongue.”
Obama is “the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation … and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we’ve ever had,” David Koch is quoted saying in a story posted late Friday on the website of the Weekly Standard.
In a grudging reference to Obama’s rhetorical skills, he added: “It just shows you what a person with a silver tongue can achieve.”
David’s brother Charles Koch said of Obama: “I’m not saying he’s a Marxist, but he’s internalized some Marxist models — that is, that business tends to be successful by exploiting its customers and workers.”
The Weekly Standard story comes after months of intensifying scrutiny of the Kochs’ funding of conservative causes, including the fights to limit carbon emissions and block last year’s Democratic healthcare overhaul, as well as this year’s showdown with public employee unions in Wisconsin. [Read more]
For the first time, the Democratic National Convention will not accept donations from corporations, PACs or federal lobbyists in 2012.
Individual contributions also will be capped — another first — at $100,000, according to the contract governing the convention.
Democrats say the policy is in keeping with the fundraising focus that powered President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
“From the very beginning, President Obama has placed a high priority on increasing the influence of grass-roots and individual donors, and this convention will go further in that direction than any convention ever,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse said.
The committee aims to raise $36 million for the convention to be held in Charlotte, N.C., the week of Sept. 3, 2012. [Read more]
The Census Bureau, which has expanded its definition of poverty, has calculated that 15.7% of Americans, many of them elderly, are poor and struggling because of rising medical costs and other expenses.
In 2009, the bureau reported, there were 47.8 million people living in poverty. [Read more]
A small network of hedge fund executives pumped at least $10 million into Republican campaign committees and allied groups before November’s elections, helping bankroll GOP victories that this week will change the balance of power in Washington, according to a review of campaign records and interviews with industry insiders by the Center for Public Integrity and NBC News.
Bitterly opposed to President Barack Obama’s economic and regulatory policies — including proposals to increase taxes on some of their profits — top Wall Street hedge fund moguls were unusually energized during last year’s election. They held multiple fundraisers and coordinated strategy to direct what appear to be unprecedented sums into the coffers of GOP and allied political committees, according to industry and GOP fundraising sources.
Many substantial donations from the hedge fund executives escaped public notice either because they were made late in the campaign (and therefore weren’t reported until after the election) or were funneled through third-party groups, obscure “joint fundraising committees” and newly created political nonprofits that are not required to disclose donors.
The net effect has been to give the hedge funds important new allies at a time they are fending off regulations mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and an aggressive Justice Department investigation into insider trading. [Read more]
NEW YORK – Most Americans think the United States should raise taxes for the rich to balance the budget, according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll released on Monday.
President Barack Obama last month signed into law a two-year extension of for millions of Americans, including the wealthiest, in a compromise with Republicans.
Republicans, who this week take control of the House of Representatives, want to extend all Bush-era tax cuts “permanently” for the middle class and wealthier Americans. They are also demanding to curb the $1.3 trillion deficit.
Sixty-one percent of Americans polled would rather see taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to tackling the deficit, the poll showed. [Read more]
This morning’s Politico features another piece (“Obama and Wall St.: Still Venus and Mars“) in a continuing series that present Wall Street people whining about all those times White House higher-ups have ever-so-mildly allowed certain language to slip from their larynxes that makes the financial industry out to be some kind of villain for that time its over-leveraged, incompetent speculation led to the near-collapse of the entire economy and required taxpayers to shovel untold billions of dollars at too-big-to-fail banks so that they could survive. They are sad, you see, and the record-setting profits they have made are no comfort to them, because hey, maybe The Huffington Post will say something really mean! That is literally a thing that appeared in a newspaper, today! [Read more]
There’s the guy who became a billionaire selling dog food, a couple of sports-team owners and the developer of an international spy museum.
That’s not to mention the convicted felon, the business leader who was the main financier of Bob Ney’s defense fund before the former Heath congressman went to federal prison, or the cowboy-hat-wearing industrialist who supports a mysterious out-of-state entity now delinquent in paying a record $5.2 million election fine in Ohio.
They are among an esoteric baker’s dozen of individuals and families who have led the way in bankrolling Ohio political campaigns during the past decade. Together, those 13 deep-pocketed donors poured more than $25 million into state races since 2000.
Despite limits placed on campaign contributions in the mid-1990s, Ohioans just witnessed the most expensive gubernatorial campaign in state history. In fact, every statewide nonjudicial race this year broke spending records, some of which had stood for 20 years.
When he signed legislation capping donations to candidates, parties and political-action committees in May 1995, Gov. George V. Voinovich said, “I’m confident there’ll be a substantial reduction in the amount of money spent on campaigns.” Others readily agreed.
Instead, the price tag for statewide campaigns in the past decade leaped almost 73 percent from the total for the 1990s, most of which had no limits on political contributions, according to a Dispatch computer analysis of more than 4.3 million state campaign-finance records involving more than $1.7 billion in transactions.
[Read more]
WASHINGTON – The 2010 census report coming out Tuesday will include a boatload of good political news for Republicans and grim data for Democrats hoping to re-elect President Barack Obama and rebound from last month’s devastating elections.
The population continues to shift from Democratic-leaning Rust Belt states to Republican-leaning Sun Belt states, a trend the Census Bureau will detail in its once-a-decade report to the president. Political clout shifts, too, because the nation must reapportion the 435 to make them roughly equal in population, based on the latest census figures.
The biggest gainer will be Texas, a GOP-dominated state expected to gain up to four new House seats, for a total of 36. The chief losers — New York and Ohio, each projected by nongovernment analysts to lose two seats — were carried by Obama in 2008 and are typical of states in the Northeast and Midwest that are declining in political influence.
Democrats’ problems don’t end there.
November’s elections put Republicans in control of dozens of and governorships, just as states prepare to redraw their congressional and legislative district maps. It’s often a brutally partisan process, and Republicans’ control in those states will enable them to create new districts to their liking. [Read more]
Following the first election since the Supreme Court has struck down limits on election-related advertising, a new poll finds that 9 in 10 voters said that in the 2010 election they encountered information they believed was misleading or false, with 56% saying this occurred frequently. Fifty-four percent said that it had been more frequent than usual, while just three percent said it was less frequent than usual, according to the poll conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, based at the University of Maryland, and Knowledge Networks.
Equally significant, the poll found strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the key issues of the campaign. Such misinformation was correlated with how people voted and their exposure to various news sources.
Voters’ misinformation included beliefs at odds with the conclusions of government agencies, generally regarded as non-partisan, consisting of professional economists and scientists. [Read more]
One result of the 2010 campaign is clear before any ballots are counted: Democracy is in danger.
That sounds hyperbolic. But whatever remains of the quaint notion—call it a myth—that in a democracy citizens are more or less equal is in the process of being shredded, due to the rise this year of super PACs and secretive political nonprofits. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision and other rulings, a small number of well-heeled individuals (or corporations or unions) can now amass a tremendous amount of political influence by throwing an unlimited amount of money into efforts to elect their preferred candidates. And certain political nonprofits, such as Crossroads GPS—the outfit set up this year by GOP strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie (which with an affiliated group is spending about $50 million)—can pour tens of millions of dollars into the elections without revealing the source of their campaign cash. [Read more]
WASHINGTON — Democratic Rep. Dina Titus has outraised her Republican challenger, Nevada physician Joe Heck, by more than $1 million.
But the millions collected by the candidates in their battle to represent Las Vegas still fall well short of the nearly $6.8 million that special-interest groups and political parties have pumped into the race, making it one of the House contests attracting the most outside spending. Much of the money is flowing into negative advertising. [Read more]
WASHINGTON – A year ago, two top Republican strategists sat down for lunch at the venerable Mayflower Hotel, five blocks from the White House, calculating how to exploit the voter anger they had seen erupt at Democratic town hall meetings that summer.
Today, the money-raising success of the GOP-allied attack led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Karl Rove-inspired American Crossroads has stunned opponents and even its own architects. It’s one big slice of the estimated $3.5 billion expected to be spent on this year’s campaigning, a record for a midterm election.
Financed to a great degree by undisclosed donors — and helped by a new Supreme Court ruling — the deep-pocketed groups have become a dominant part of this election’s narrative. They have reversed past pre-eminence by Democratic outside groups. And they have become a prototype for elections to come.
Their effort has been a major factor in the $264 million in spending so far in this election by outside groups — organizations separate from the political parties and candidates. [Read more]
Democrats have targeted their longtime nemesis Karl Rove as the mastermind behind the tens of millions of dollars of ads from independent groups attacking their candidates this fall, but maybe they should have listened more carefully when Rove recently told the audience of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show about “one of the smartest people in politics you’ve never heard of.”
In fact, Carl Forti, the low-key career Republican operative Rove was talking about, may be the figure most intricately involved in the outside groups transforming the 2010 election season with a deluge of hard-hitting ads.
[Read more]