By Kevin Zeese | Alternet
The 2012 presidential election year promises to be the most expensive ever and unless the Department of Justice does its job, it also promises to be have the most anonymous campaign donations in U.S. history. Unknown corporate interests will fund massive advertising campaigns against and for candidates but the voters will not know who they are or their real agenda. The Obama administration can prevent this further corruption of U.S. democracy by enforcing existing laws.
In the last mid-term elections we saw the evolution of a new form of campaign funding that avoided the disclosure requirements of the Federal Election campaign Law (FECA). The new approach was masterminded by Karl Rove and former Republican Party leaders through American Crossroads GPS. They created a non-profit organization under 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code — organizations that are not supposed to be primarily involved in elections — and used it to raise tens of millions in secret donations. In total, nearly $150 million was spent by these (c)(4) groups leaving voters in the dark as to the personal interests of the donors. We can expect that to more than double in 2012 if existing laws are not enforced. Indeed Rove has announced his group alone intends to raise $120 million for 2012.
A coalition of advocacy groups have come together as CampaignAccountabilityWatch.org, to fight back against Rove and others, such as the Chamber of Commerce and American Future Fund, to make sure that they do not violate campaign finance law in the upcoming election as they have done in the past. Our simple request to U.S. Attorneys, the Department of Justice and the Obama administration: enforce existing law. [Read more]
Talk about an idea whose time has come.
Today, the Fair Elections Now Act is being re-introduced. Actor Alec Baldwin, who was present at the bill’s introduction, told CNN it was a critical step toward “reducing the influence of corporate lobbyists and special interest money.”
Alec is right. The bill would help candidates remain free from corporate interests by providing public money for their campaigns if they raise a certain amount of small-dollar contributions from voters.
The grip that corporations have over our elections and our lawmakers is unprecedented, thanks in no small part to the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That’s the decision that gave corporations the green light to spend as much money as they want on elections.
What does that decision mean for you? It means that lawmakers are even more beholden to wealthy corporate interests — oil and coal companies, financial giants, agribusiness mega-companies and so forth — and even less likely to act in your interests. After all, those corporations are looking out for their bottom lines and have no problem rolling over citizens to boost profits. They want public policies that advance that goal. They give money to lawmakers so they can ask for favors later.
We saw the effect of the Citizens United decision on the midterm elections: spending by outside groups jumped to $294.2 million in the 2010 election cycle from just $68.9 million in the 2006 cycle. Nearly half of the money spent came from just 10 groups. Two groups formed by Republican strategist Karl Rove combined to spend $38.2 million, more than any single group. Next was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Today, Public Citizen sent a letter to Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), who introduced the measure. The letter said: [Read more]
The case: Citizens United. The decision: In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to limit in any way the amount of money corporations can spend on attack ads or other “electioneering communications” to sway a political race.
Before Citizens United, plenty of corporate money had found its way into political PACs and other avenues to influence elections. The court also did nothing to strike down the ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates or political parties.
But the decision opened a massive loophole in our country’s already-porous campaign finance system, giving corporations the green light to inject unlimited sums of cash into independent groups — 527s and 501c4s, references to their IRS tax status — that can intervene in elections.
After the January 2010 decision, many in the media reported that corporations may be skittish about fully exploiting Citizens United’s political windfall, but that proved premature. Millions of dollars began flooding into existing electioneering like Americans for Prosperity, backed by benefactors like the Koch brothers and North Carolina retail magnate Art Pope. New groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads andAmerican Crossroads GPS were quickly erected to funnel tens of millions of dollars into key congressional races. (READ MORE) [Read more]
The newly created independent political groups known as super PACs, which raised and spent millions of dollars on last month’s elections, drew much of their funding from private-equity partners and others in the financial industry, according to new financial disclosure reports.
The 72 super PACs, all formed this year, together spent $83.7 million on the election. The figures provide the best indication yet of the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions that opened the door for wealthy individuals and corporations to give unlimited contributions.
The financial disclosure reports also underscore the extent to which the flow of corporate money will be tied to political goals. Private-equity partners and hedge fund managers, for example, have a substantial stake in several issues before Congress, primarily the taxes they pay on their earnings. [Read more]
Barely a week after Democrats’ trouncing in the 2010 midterms, due in part to a massive influx of shadowy political spending, the left is gearing up to fight fire with fire. David Brock, the former investigative journalist who founded the watchdog Media Matters for America, is trying to form a 527 political advocacy group, according to Greg Sargent at the Washington Post. In theory, the group would be akin to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads outfit, but with a liberal bent.
The revelations about Brock’s potential 527 come days after a top White House adviser, David Axelrod, opened the door for lefty groups to push back against the wave of secretive GOP cash. In an interview with Politico, Axelrod wouldn’t rule out the need for Democratic outside groups in 2012 to push back against conservative forces like American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS, the US Chamber of Commerce, and many more. While outside groups of all ideologies spent more than $400 million in the 2010 midterms, the White House anticipates the Chamber and its right-leaning ilk spending upwards of $500 million on their own to defeat President Obama. [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]
Karl Rove was served with a subpoena Sunday, Oct. 24th, 2010, as he arrived at CBS studios to appear on “Face the Nation.” The subpoena was to compel Rove to provide a deposition in a lawsuit that stems from the 2004 election in Ohio. Despite the fact that news crews from CBS and CNN taped Rove being served, neither have reported it or aired the footage.
I sat down with the attorneys who issued the subpoena, Clifford Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis, who explained how their suit reached this point and what Mr. Rove’s legal obligations are, considering his aversion to appearing under oath.
On Sunday, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele took to the airwaves with his party’s twin messages of corporate pandering and denial.
It was a remarkable performance.
Asked by Meet the Press host David Gregory if he was worried about the unprecedented amount of undisclosed special interest money being spent in this election, Steele answered, “I don’t know what they’re talking about. No one’s produced one shred of evidence that any of that is happening.”
Steele then proceeded to explain that he doesn’t have any evidence of secretive corporate spending in elections because organizations doing such spending aren’t required to disclose their donors: [Read more]
The Supreme Court sent a wave of corporate and union money flooding into campaign ads this year, but it did so with the promise that the public would know — almost instantly — who was paying for them.
“With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in January. “This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”
But Kennedy and the high court majority were wrong. Because of loopholes in tax laws and a weak enforcement policy at the Federal Election Commission, corporations and wealthy donors have been able to spend huge sums on campaign ads, confident the public will not know who they are, election law experts say.
Corporate donors have been able to hide their contributions despite the opposition of shareholders and customers — the very groups cited by Kennedy. [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]
If the Republicans take back the House and Senate on Nov. 2, America’s richest brothers will be partly to thank. Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch‘s tremendous spending power and reach–what the media has dubbed the ‘Kochtopus‘–is unrivaled. The conservative nonprofit David founded, Americans for Prosperity, has said it plans to spend $45 million this election cycle, more than three times the $13 million the Democratic Governors Association has on hand as of mid-October. There’s no way of knowing how much the Kochs have given to the AFP or any other group; new Senate legislation allows tax exempt nonprofits to raise unlimited funds without disclosure. Publicly, only about $3.9 million can be traced to the brothers, including a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association from David, a former vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party.
President Obama has come out swinging against the Koch brothers, referring to AFP in an August speech as part of “a corporate takeover of our democracy.” The Kochs are no fans of Obama’s either, and they’re already strategizing beyond this election. Charles Koch recently sent a letter inviting potential donors to a four-day retreat in Palm Springs in January. He cited the attendees from his last meeting, which reads like a Who’s Who of Forbes 400 power players: Phil Anschutz, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, Amway’s Rich DeVos, Citadel’s Ken Griffin, and Ken Langone, Home Depot’s original investment banker. In his letter, Koch makes it clear that the retreat won’t be “fun in the sun,” it’ll be formulating the next plan of attack.
Other right-wing groups are following AFP’s lead: Karl Rove’s American Crossroads has become the scourge of the left, publicly raising millions from billionaires including Public Storage tycoon B. Wayne Hughes, Texas investor Harold Simmons, TV mogul Jerry Perenchio and oil heir Robert Rowling. The group announced on Wednesday that Donald Trump has chipped in too. American Crossroads’ sister group Crossroads GPS is also raising unprecedented amounts of money toward anti-Democrat attack ads, but it’s not required to disclose its funding. Outraged liberal groups and Democratic politicians have asked the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the IRS to investigate. [Read more]
Pity the campaign finance reform activist. For years he’s fought to wring big money out of politics and shine a spotlight on who’s funding campaigns. But less than a decade after that shining moment for the campaign finance reform movement, the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (known as McCain-Feingold after its two chief Senate sponsors, John McCain and Russ Feingold), its successes are unraveling and its prospects look dimmer by the day.
The 2010 elections will likely see more than $300 million spent by conservative independent groups who disclose little or nothing about their donors. (Pro-Democratic unions will spend perhaps half that, though their funds come from rank-and-file members, not outside donors.) That comes on the heels of a January 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which declared that corporations and unions are entitled to spend their money on direct electioneering — meaning to help or defeat candidates — as a function of their free speech. Campaign reformers say the Citizens United decision has effectively served as a green light for a new torrent of corporate cash that’s being funneled in the political system through intermediary groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which take advantage of legal loopholes to keep their donors anonymous. [Read more]
WASHINGTON – October 19 – With record amounts of secret money being funneled through nonprofit organizations to influence the upcoming elections, Public Citizen today unveiled an Internet database to track the activity.
The new Stealth PACs database is available at http://www.citizen.org/stealthpacs.
The project tracks 120 groups that are working to influence the elections with large contributions from corporations, unions or wealthy individuals in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. [Read more]
In 2006, Koch Industries owner Charles Koch to the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that he coordinates the funding of the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks, media outlets and other anti-government efforts through a twice annual meeting of wealthy right-wing donors. He also confided to Moore, who is funded through several of Koch’s ventures, that his true goal is to strengthen the “” by eliminating “90%” of all laws and government regulations. Although it is difficult to quantify the exact amount Koch alone has funneled to right-wing fronts, some studies have pointed toward $50 million he has given alone to anti-environmental groups. Recently, fronts funded by Charles and his brother David have received scrutiny because they have played a pivotal role in the organizing of the anti-Obama Tea Parties and the promotion of virulent far right lawmakers like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). (David Koch praised DeMint and gave him a “Washington Award” shortly after the senator promised to “break” Obama by making health reform his “Waterloo.”) [Read more]
First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.
The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.
Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they’re top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.
Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they’re doing it completely in secret. [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]
PAY 2 PLAY Blog
In the wake of recent revelations about foreign spending on U.S. elections, President Obama has called out the Chamber of Commerce for its anonymous donors toward campaign ads in a series of speeches over the weekend. Karl Rove has at once made uncharacteristically desperate efforts to deflect this from becoming an issue in the home stretch of the midterm elections. As Shakespeare observed in Hamlet, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
When Obama took to the campaign trail for the long weekend last Thursday, the news had spread from Think Progress’ report on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce receiving money from foreign donors. Obama intoned to a crowd in Chicago“Right here in Illinois, in this Senate race, two groups funded and advised by Karl Rove have outspent the Democratic Party two-to-one in an attempt to beat Alexi — two-to-one. Funded and advised by Karl Rove.”
Karl Rove went to the last refuge of the scoundrel, Politico, and was quick to change the subject with a non-denial bringing up talking points about the stimulus and healthcare reform. [Read more]