Blurts & Spasms

From Quora response to "Why do so many Americans believe limiting corporate election financing violates freedom?"

To understand why so many Americans believe things that are actually counter to their own best interests, I recommend watching The Billionaires' Tea Party (2011) (this a link to the full film). Like so many corporate-driven agendas, this is really just another example of wealthy individuals deluging folks with carefully tailored propaganda that energizes tribal groupthink in favor of plutocracy. Here's the substance of the underlying challenge, to my mind: wealth, influence and cultural privilege have always tended to distort the democratic process. This is why, for example, wealthy white folks in the South used complicated voting requirements to discourage or entirely disable poor black folks from voting - they were simply afraid of losing their position of power, wealth and privilege in southern society. In very much the same way, rich white men today are trying to use the courts and the political process to protect their position in society, and the Koch brothers (see the film referenced above) are the poster kids for this ongoing manipulation.

More specifically regarding your question, however, I recommend researching how "corporate personhood" came into being, and how, really, it has no basis in the U.S. Constitution (see Corporate Personhood Challenged - Top 25 of 2004 for a concise summary). But the issue can be described even more simply than that. Let's say you and I are attending an auction. This auction, however, is about buying free speech. Various items are brought up to the auction block: 72 hours of primetime TV advertising is one; 82% of talk show host's on-air interviewing time is another; 4,000 inches of major newspaper op-eds is another; 65% of major network election news coverage is another; and so on. Each time you and I try to bid for the items, we are outbid by the corporations in attendance. We keep bidding for these essential elements of any election campaign, but we just can't match the multi-million-dollar bids from the corporate bidders with whom we, as individuals, are competing. And the thing is, these are "winner-take-all" situations; there is no sharing here, because whoever bids the highest gets ALL of these items, and therefore ALL of the tools to reach and persuade the public.

So this really isn't about "fair and equal" representation, it's about having any representation at all. For when corporate interests control the election process so completely that politicians feel they must represent those corporate interests instead of the electorate, democracy is essentially destroyed. What happens then is...well...things like ALEC - see Bill Moyers expose ALEC here:



So IMO this isn't about fairness or freedom in the abstract, it's about the fundamental functioning of democracy.

My 2 cents.

Comment from James Cribbs:

With regards to the Koch Brothers, you might want to see how they stack up against others.

2014 Top Donors to Outside Spending Groups

The funny thing here is that no one can even come close to Thomas Steyer, who supports liberals exclusively. The Koch brothers gave a total of $7,000,000 in the 2014 cycle. Steyer gave over $73,000,000.

The questions is, since you are willing to call out the Koch Brothers, are you also willing to call out Steyer and all the others on the list?

My Response:

You make a good point, James, as there are folks like Steyer, Bloomberg, Eychaner, etc. on the left who donate a LOT of money to political campaigns. They donated enough, in fact, to offset 17 of the top 25 donors in 2014 who were solidly Republican (see Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions) Here's the rub though: in 2014, some 71% of all spending was "dark money;" that is, the donors were undisclosed (thanks to Citizens United and other activist rulings.), see Undisclosed spending in elections threaten American democracy. A lot of this involves groups funded by both sides, but the vast majority are conservative, and that has been true for some time (88% of dark money in 2010 was from conservative orgs, 85% in 2012, and in 2014 it was about 2:1 in favor of conservative orgs, so the liberal orgs are slowly catching up). For more info see Ad Spending Tops $1 Billion; Dark Money Groups Buy Significant Share. And guess who was behind the lion's share of conservative organizations flooding these elections with dark money? The Koch brothers (see Record spending in 2014 midterm elections result of 'dark money' from unidentified donors). We're talking $400 Million here from the Koch orgs...which of course dwarfs Steyer's measly $73 Million. But James the real point IMO - and circling back on the main theme of my post - is that when you read through these articles, everyone is concerned about the same thing: too much big money in politics, whether undisclosed or not, and regardless of political leaning. And so yes, to directly answer your question: we need to curtail this trend in ALL political campaigns, and from ALL ends of the political spectrum. Otherwise this is effectively the end of a democracy that represents anyone but the plutocrats.

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