“The Kleptocrats Are At It Again”: Congressional Radicals Anxious To Stop Disclosure Of Corporate Money In Elections
Perhaps I’ve been too harsh on congressional Republicans.
I had assumed that their vitriolic attacks on even the meekest of proposals to restrict the tsunami of secret corporate cash slamming into our elections stemmed from a hallucinogenic mix of partisan self-interest and Koch-induced plutocratic ideology. But I’ve since learned that they might simply need medical help.
Take Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who recently came unglued at a public hearing before the House Financial Services Committee. Mary Jo White, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been summoned by GOP inquisitors to answer to a modest, straightforward proposal involving the disclosure of corporate political donations. Actually, it is not her proposal, but a citizen petition — signed by a record half-million Americans — asking the SEC to require that corporate executives reveal to shareholders how their money is being spent in elections.
That’s entirely reasonable — unless, like Garrett, you’ve got the political temperament of a live grenade. He exploded on White, demanding in a bullying manner that she “refuse to be bullied by these outside radical groups” who submitted the petition. He insisted that she declare, then and there, that the agency would not even consider the citizens’ proposal.
Yes, Garrett is a corporate toady, but that can’t explain his foam-at-the-mouth hissy fit. Then I learned about a new medical study that offers a clue about the source of such behavior. It seems that conflicts at work cause some people’s brains to release hormones that prompt them to fly into a rage and even threaten others. The researchers found out that corrosive hormones can make blood platelets stickier, causing the brain to go “boom,” creating angry outbursts of stupidity.
So maybe Scott’s problem is not merely toadyism, but the terrible tragedy of sticky platelets syndrome.
Still, one wonders: What did Rep. Garrett mean when he squawked about “outside radical groups” daring to submit that disclosure petition to the SEC? How radical is it to seek restraints on corporate chieftains who are pouring unlimited (and untold) amounts of their shareholders’ money into our elections?
The great majority of Americans — including rank-and-file Republicans — agree that, at the very least, the shareholders who own the corporation have a right to be told how much of their money is being spent on behalf of which candidates. This explains why more than 500,000 citizens have petitioned the SEC to require disclosure.
Who, you might wonder, exactly are these scary citizens, considered such a threat to corporate power that a congresscritter is tarring them publicly as radical outsiders? They’re professors from leading law schools, state and national elected officials, pension fund directors, public interest advocates and corporate shareholders. Not exactly outsiders, much less radicals.
And that’s what makes them so dangerous to the autocratic elites who run corporations as their own fiefdoms. Top executives want no accountability for the hundreds of millions of shareholder dollars they’re spending to elect corporate lickspittles like Garrett, so they feel it necessary to demonize the citizenry itself. Don’t question us, they demand, just trust us.
Uh … no. Far from earning trust, they’ve already wrecked our economy and betrayed our nation’s egalitarian ideals — while feathering their own plutocratic nests. Now they want free rein to pervert America’s democratic process with clandestine election campaigns secretly financed with other people’s money.
NO! These kleptocrats are the real radicals. It’s time to stop them, not only by disclosing their thievery, but ultimately by outlawing it — and retuning elections to the people. To join the effort, contact Public Citizen at http://www.citizen.org.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, May 29, 2013
“SCOTUS Naive On Super PACs”: Insulated From The Machinations Of Political Campaigns And Campaign Finance Realities
When the Supreme Court paved the way for unlimited independent spending in elections with its Citizens United decision, the justices assumed a key protection to prevent corruption: The expenditures would be truly independent, so it would make it impossible for a candidate and a donor to engage in a quid pro quo. In theory, this makes sense. If there’s no coordination between the independent groups like super PACs and candidates — and coordination remains technically illegal — then donors will fund independent expenditures purely out of their own political beliefs and not in the expectation of getting anything in return.
In practice, however, this distinction completely breaks down because groups are often established to fund a single candidate, as opposed to a broad cause, and there are plenty of ways to communicate intentions or expectations without violating narrow coordination laws.
A new report from Public Citizens shows just how absurd it is to assume that outside groups are truly independent. Of all the major super PACs and 501(c) nonprofit groups that engaged in the 2012 election, about half backed a single candidate exclusively, effectively making themselves auxiliary organs of the candidate’s campaign, the report found. Generally, these groups were “founded, funded or managed by friends, family members, or recent campaign aides of the candidate they supported,” the report adds.
The most obvious examples are Priorities USA, the Obama super PAC founded by a former White House aide, and Restore Our Future, the Romney super PAC founded by the general counsel of Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. These groups allowed wealthy donors who had already maxed out their donations to either candidate’s official committee to give unlimited additional funds to the auxiliary super PAC to support their candidates.
Meanwhile, another 30 percent of spending came from groups designed specifically to aid the parties. For instance, the Democratic-affiliated House Majority PAC acted as an auxiliary to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. All of this is aboveboard.
In total, candidate-specific and party-allied groups accounted for more than 65 percent of all spending by outside groups in the 2012 elections, including seven of the top eight groups, according to the report. Among super PACs alone, that percentage climbs to 74.4 percent.
“The emergence of entities using unlimited contributions to aid candidates and parties with which they have close relationships threatens to gut the anticorruption policy underlying campaign finance laws, which the court claimed it did not intend to weaken,” Taylor Lincoln, the research director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, and his co-authors wrote.
In its Citizens United decision, the Court approvingly quoted from an earlier decision, Buckley v. Valeo, observing that in independent expenditures, “The absence of prearrangement and coordination of an expenditure with the candidate or his agent not only undermines the value of the expenditure to the candidate, but also alleviates the danger that expenditures will be given.”
Clearly, if independent expenditures de facto operate as direct contributions, the distinction is meaningless and the supposed protection of independence is destroyed. This was obvious to almost everyone before the decision — except for the justices, apparently. They are insulated from the machinations of political campaigns and campaign finance realities, which is usually a good thing, but it allowed them to base a major overhaul of the nation’s campaign finance laws on a flawed and naive understanding of the world.
None of this is particularly surprising to anyone even vaguely aware of the campaign finance dynamics of the 2012 cycle, but the report adds critical numbers and details.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, March 5, 2013
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