The Movement to Get Money Out of Politics

Wall Street's Worst Nightmare

How Iceland Weathered the Financial Crisis

Citizens United 2.0: It Gets Worse

From the New Yorker:  

That’s where the new case comes in. Current federal law allows individual donors to give up to two thousand six hundred dollars to any one candidate during a single election. In addition, they can give only an aggregate hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars to candidates, political action committees, and parties over a two-year period. Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama Republican, wants to give more money to the candidates he supports, so he has sued to invalidate the rules limiting the over-all amounts he can give. (Indeed, the patriotically minded McCutcheon wanted to give “$1,776” to enough candidates to exceed the current limits on direct contributions.) The Supreme Court will hear his case in the fall, and he has a good chance of winning.

To see why McCutcheon may win, one must examine the strange reasoning that governs the Supreme Court’s decisions on campaign finance. In his brief to the Justices, McCutcheon makes an argument that is breathtaking for its candor. He says that when Congress first upheld limits on contributions, in the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, the limits on aggregate giving served a useful purpose. Without the ceiling, the Court explained, a person could legally “contribute massive amounts of money to a particular candidate through the use of unearmarked contributions to political committees likely to contribute to that candidate, or [make] huge contributions to the candidate’s political party.”

But that, McCutcheon points out, was before the days of Citizens United. Now, he implies, Citizens United has undermined so many of the old rules that they are kind of irrelevant at this point. Indeed, the lower-court judge who considered the McCutcheon case upheld the existing rules but raised the “possibility that Citizens United undermined the entire contribution limits scheme.” 

Speaker John Boehner Under FEC Investigation

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The Federal Election Commission is examining whether dozens of political action committees and individuals contributed more than the legally allowed amount to House Speaker John Boehner during last year’s election cycle.

Letters the Federal Election Committee sent Monday to Friends of John Boehner indicated that donors including coal, energy, and gambling interests, exceeded contribution limits to Boehner’s committee by more than $150,000.

Among the groups that were allegedly overgenerous to Boehner were Coalpac and Minepac, which represent the mining industry, as well as political committees representing the Exelon, Constellation and Luminant power companies, and the Ceasars and Penn National gambling enterprises.

“Although the commission may take further legal action concerning the acceptance of excessive contributions, your prompt action to refund the excessive amount will be taken into consideration,” the letters say.

Rick 'Holier Than Thou" Santorum Faces FEC Charges

From Huffington Post:

Former 2012 Republican presidential candidate and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) broke campaign finance rules by directing a $1 million check from a donor to a super PAC backing his candidacy, according to a complaint filed on Wednesday by government watchdog groups.

The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 filed a joint complaint with the FEC against Santorum for allegedly directing a $1 million contribution from energy executive Bill Doré to Red White And Blue Fund, a super PAC run by former Santorum staffers. While a candidate like Santorum can ask a donor to give money to a super PAC, it is a violation of campaign finance laws to direct or solicit a contribution above the legal limit of $5,000.

Red White And Blue Fund was instrumental to Santorum's unexpected success in the Republican presidential primaries. Santorum's campaign was short on money for most of the primary season, but the super PAC -- powered by contributions from Doré and Wyoming investor Foster Friess -- was able to spend enough money to help Santorum eke out a win in the Iowa caucuses and to push him into position as eventual Republican nominee Mitt Romney's chief competition.

How to Get Republicans to Cooperate

FBI (And Many Others) Investigate Michele Bachmann

Someone this crazy should have been investigated ages ago.

The Problem With Our Republic

Making Progress On Getting Money Out of Politics

GOP Taking on Big Banks? Think Again...

Maddow Schools Conservative Dick Morris

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Money In Politics

Overturning Citizens United

My Decision 2012: Corporate Personhood

Corporatocracy & Corporate Personhood

To most people, there is an obvious difference between a corporation and a person. A corporation is a business whose primary goal is to turn a profit. A person is a flesh and blood, sentient being like you and I. As Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) put it at the DNC Convention, “People have hearts, they have kids, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die, and that matters.” Very few people will confuse one for the other. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, does NOT see the difference. In the midst of the GOP primaries, he went on-record during a rally saying to an attendee, “Corporations are people my friend.” I don’t want a president who is so unintelligent that he does not know the difference between a corporation and a person.

Luckily, President Obama does see the difference between the two. In fact, during the State of the Union address that followed the Supreme Court’s affirmation of corporate personhood (via the Citizens United decision), President Obama rebuked those Supreme Court justices (the five that supported corporate personhood) to their faces, in front of Congress, and in front of a watching nation. Undoing corporate personhood is very important because of the consequences that can ensue. Some of those consequences have already shown themselves.

Sheldon Adelson

The problem with corporate personhood and the Citizens United decision is that they allow corporations to give excessive amounts of money towards political aims. In essence, it allows corporations to buy elections. We are already seeing the consequences of this today, a mere few years after Citizens United. We have seen billionaires, most notably the infamous Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, pledging hundreds of millions of dollars towards a single election cycle. Adelson recently pledged $500,000 to a single House candidate.

With that kind of money going into political campaigns from a select few donors, especially given that much of it will go towards negative ads and misinformation on either side, how can one call our system of government a democracy? The amount of money put forth by the few will drown out the voices of the many. The road to getting rid of this corrupt system of campaign finance will be a long and uncertain one. One thing is crystal clear, that road will not and can not begin with a Romney presidency.

My friends, corporations are NOT people. Romney does not understand that simple fact, but President Obama does.

Romney: Corporations Are People, Teachers Are Not

From the Washington Post:

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Tuesday that he thinks teachers unions should be banned from making political contributions because union leaders often negotiate contracts with Democratic politicians they’ve helped elect, a situation he called “an extraordinary conflict of interest.”

He said it is “a mistake” to allow unions to make such donations, which he argued represent “an extraordinary conflict of interest.”

“I think we’ve got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns,” he said. “It’s the wrong way for us to go. We have got to separate that.”

Romney contended that “the largest contributors to the Democratic Party are the teachers unions.” But a tally by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign contributions, shows that the education industry is the third-largest contributor to President Obama’s reelection campaign, behind retirees and those in the legal field.

This is a completely unprincipled position but this is Mitt Romney we are talking about so that is no surprise. He has hundreds of millions of dollars coming at him from Super PACs funded by super rich corporate interests. Not just Romney, but the majority of politicians (especially Republicans) as well? How is THAT not a conflict of interest? How is THAT not a steaming pile of hypocrisy on his part to say this? If corporations can give unfettered amounts of money to campaigns, why can't unions?

I personally am against all of this money in politics: whether we are talking about unions supporting Democrats or corporations supporting Republicans. This is the danger of corporate personhood: that rich monied interests will drown out the voices of the people to whom government should be beholden. With too much money in politics, the representatives of the people and the stewards of power will inevitably have skewed priorities.