The Money Chase

The Money Chase

by digby

I guess this was inevitabl but it still makes me queasy:

Democrats with ties to the Obama White House on Friday are launching a two-pronged fundraising effort aimed at countering deep-pocketed GOP groups in 2012 — and adopting some of the same policies on unlimited, secret donations that President Barack Obama himself has long opposed, the organizers tell POLITICO.

The two groups, Priorities USA and Priorities USA Action, aim to raise $100 million to defend Obama’s reelection bid from an expected onslaught of attack ads from similar Republican outside money organizations activated in the 2010 midterms, organizers say.
The Priorities companion committees will have one that discloses donors — and one that doesn’t, a practice Obama hammered during last year’s election cycle as undermining the democratic process.

The Priorities group also is jettisoning an Obama rule aimed at limiting the influence of special interests by welcoming unlimited contributions from lobbyists, labor unions, corporations and political action committees — sources that are still banned from giving to the president’s reelection campaign, organizers said.

“While we agree that fundamental campaign finance reforms are needed, Karl Rove and the Koch brothers cannot live by one set of rules as our values and our candidates are overrun with their hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Bill Burton, a former White House spokesman and co-founder of the organization.

“We will follow the rules as the Supreme Court has laid them out, but the days of a double standard are over,” he added.

Great. I don’t have an answer for this. The Republicans are marginally worse than the Democrats what with all the lunatic racism, sexism, homophobia and theocracy, so you have to be practical and not want them to gain power, particularly when they are intent upon totally dismantling our entire social contract as quickly as possible. But God help us, this is mutually assured destruction and this money race is going to make it all so much worse.

The time to have changed this trajectory was when the Democrats held the power to deny the wingnuts their preferred Supreme Court plutocrats and to ram through some serious campaign finance laws. You can be sure that if the Republicans were in their position they would have done that. But this is about money — and both sides are slavering to get their hands on it. Corruption knows no Party. In any case, the Party which represents labor, consumers and those who are dependent upon government services is never going to be the preferred Party of the Big Money Boyz, although they’ll spread enough money around to keep them trying. Democrats playing this just raises the ante. Until somebody figures out how to stop it our democracy is going to continue to be more of a pageant than a reality. Perhaps our money would be better spent on a monarchy, after all. At least they have gilt carriages and pretty palaces to show for it.

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