The 64 billion dollar question
by digby
I wrote about the billionaire donor problem for Salon today:
It seems as though every few months I come across another article trying to explain why the Citizens United ruling, while disturbing in many ways, is not the reason for the explosion of the Super PAC or the recent surge of wealthy billionaires involving themselves directly in political campaigns. The most recent comes from free speech advocate Wendy Kaminer in the Boston Globe, who writes:
Super PACs are not dependent on corporate funding. They’re primarily funded by super-rich individuals, whose right to devote unlimited amounts of their own money on independent expenditures (those not involving direct contributions to candidates) was confirmed by the Court in 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo. As the Brennan Center, a fierce critic of the Citizens United ruling, has acknowledged, “the singular focus on the decision’s empowerment of for-profit corporations to spend in (and perhaps dominate) our elections may be misplaced.”
I’m not suggesting that the great majority of Americans who agree that money has “too much influence” in elections should be relieved that a handful of multibillionaires instead of for-profit corporations exercise that influence. But I am saying the Citizens United decision is not the source of all campaign finance evils.
When Citizens United came down many people believed it would unleash a torrent of corporate money into politics and that hasn’t yet happened. Because of the disclosure rules, corporations that have tried to involve themselves in political campaigns have found that it can hurt the bottom line. This happened to the Minnesota-based Target back in 2010, when their board gave $150,000 to the Republican running for Governor and his anti-LGBT stances prompted a boycott threat. The corporation, which has generous LGBT policies, explained that it wasn’t done as a measure of support for the candidate’s position on social issues but for purely on an economic reasons — but it didn’t matter. The lesson was clear: Corporate support for political candidates could cost a company its customers. (One assumes they realized it was safer to simply pour that money into lobbying as they’ve always done before to get the same results.)
In her Boston Globe piece, Kaminer pretty much throws up her hands and says that there’s nothing new under the sun; the rich will always run the show one way or the other and that’s just the way it is.
She’s kind of right unfortunately. I go on to talk about various other theories about what’s caused the tsunami of money suddenly coming into elections from these billionaires and there aren’t any really good answers. My personal feeling is that these billionaires have just lost all sense of shame or dignity and are now openly demanding to run the world — they’re all a bunch of Auric Goldfingers