The Disturbing Results of Citizens United

[Hornius Emeritus 12420]

Pretty stunning:

 

Edited January 24, 2020 by Hornius Emeritus

[triplehorn 2664]

I'll never forget Sam Alito's reaction here, wincing and mouthing 'that's not true'. 

we got sold.

 

 

[TwiceHorn 31283]

It's interesting how pretty evenly divided the donations are between parties.

I honestly think lobbying and corporate/business group contributions are more toxic than SuperPACs.  But they are problematic.

[mchookem 16225]

it seems...ironic?? that 2 of the top 3 are running for dem candidacy. good grief. 

[staboner 4959]

should be the top story across the news

and people keep falling for the arguments their overlords give them to play with

and the beat marches on. nothing new unfortunately. 

[RPM 26230]

I thought evil Soros was supposed to be King of the donors. He's barely Top 10 and way out of the lead.

[hpslugga 4044]

11 hours ago, triplehorn said:

I'll never forget Sam Alito's reaction here, wincing and mouthing 'that's not true'. 

we got sold.

What else would you expect? Alito is a thug.

10 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

It's interesting how pretty evenly divided the donations are between parties.

Why is it interesting? One party is a haven for, as Bill Maher phrased it, "hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture, and the pharmaceutical lobby."

The other party is the Republicans.

[wildcat09 29260]

11 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

Pretty stunning:

 

I'd love to see a breakdown on what Steyer and Bloomberg's dollars have gone to support. It sure as shit isn't anything progressive.

[Francisco 2.0 32342]

10 hours ago, RPM said:

I thought evil Soros was supposed to be King of the donors. He's barely Top 10 and way out of the lead.

Kinda what I was thinking.  Adelson is a tremendous patriot who buys a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his wife, but Soros is controlling the  world.

 

[Judge Roybeanbag 11810]

11 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

 

 

[Brisketexan 104628]

12 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

Pretty stunning:

 

Jesus.  If you wanted to pour jet fuel on the fire that is anti-semitism, that list is a 50-gallon drum of it.  Joe anti-semite reads a list like that, and he won't be able to help himself.  I guarantee you that list is in hot circulation in all the nazi web circles.

And yes, I did note the irony in how the Trumpkins are getting completely played.  Soros is the evil mastermind behind, well, literally everything they hate.  It can all be pinned on Soros....but the guy who bankrolls the movement they are behind has donated 6.6 times what Soros has.  Every accusation is a confession, etc. etc.

Finally....fuck this crap.  Our election system is now incurably corrupt.  People don't count, only dollars do.  And if you don't have enough dollars, you ain't shit.  That's a big fucking problem.  Citizens United was wrongly decided.  But it ain't gonna be fixed.

[triplehorn 2664]

John Roberts comes face to face with the mess he made

 

Quote

There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.

The chief justice of the United States, as presiding officer, doesn’t speak often, and when he does the words are usually scripted and perfunctory:

“The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.”

“The chaplain will lead us in prayer.”

“The sergeant at arms will deliver the proclamation.”

“The majority leader is recognized.”

Otherwise, he sits and watches. He rests his chin in his hand. He stares straight ahead. He sits back and interlocks his fingers. He plays with his pen. He takes his reading glasses off and puts them on again. He starts to write something, then puts his pen back down. He roots around in his briefcase for something — anything? — to occupy him.

Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.

Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.

The consequences? Falling confidence in government, and a growing perception that Washington had become a “swamp” corrupted by political money, fueled Trump’s victory. The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates. The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans and extend the electoral power of Republicans in disproportion to the popular vote.

Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems, but its rulings have worsened the pathologies — uncompromising views, mindless partisanship and vitriol — visible in this impeachment trial. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), no doubt recognizing that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is helping to preserve his party’s Senate majority, has devoted much of his career to extending conservatives’ advantage in the judiciary.

He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy. And, expanding on earlier transgressions by Democrats, he blew up generations of Senate procedures and precedents requiring the body to operate by consensus so that he could confirm more Trump judicial appointees.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.

Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, wrote: “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the new campaign finance system would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”

Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.

 

 

[TwiceHorn 31283]

The real antidote to Citizens United is its very basis:  the First Amendment.

As Warren notes and as she is trying to "live" as a candidate, donations should be a topic of conversation regarding any and all candidates.

[HenryJames 65890]

[triplehorn 2664]

Congress can re-legislate to scuttle citizens united and to reform campaign finance.  That's the common denominator of where we are today.  Vote accordingly.

[RDCanecutter 26284]

On 1/24/2020 at 12:08 AM, RPM said:

I thought evil Soros was supposed to be King of the donors. He's barely Top 10 and way out of the lead.

That's cuz he's usin code names.

Y'all hear that? Soros is usin CODE NAMES.

[triplehorn 2664]

seems significant:

mass volume online credit card using hacked identities to effect micro-donations while avoiding reporting requirements 

It involved two Muller investigation related individuals

"...In early 2016, Khawaja wanted to create an online shopping mall for the Middle East, an Arab Amazon. He needed investors. Enter George Nader. Like Khawaja, Nader is Lebanese-American. His name might be familiar because he was a witness in the Mueller inquiry. In January 2017, Nader set up a meeting in the Seychelles that he apparently hoped would establish a back channel between the Trump administration and the Kremlin. He’s now awaiting sentence in the US, a convicted pedophile.

In 2016, Nader was working for Mohammed bin Zayed (‘MbZ’) the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Khawaja says Nader told him he’d found an investor for the online mall, another member of the Emirati royal family. Khawaja told this sheikh he would need half a billion dollars to build the Arab Amazon. Just send us the details, the sheikh said, and we’ll invest the whole $500 million.

[...]

Khawaja says that in September 2016, Nader told him why he needed the payment engine. Abu Dhabi wanted help making ‘online micropayments’ in bulk to the Trump campaign and the RNC. He describes Nader asking for help to make it work: ‘How can we generate electronic payouts to the online donation websites? I would like you to show us how we would be able to do that.’

Khawaja wasn’t taking notes or recording these conversations. These are his recollections of what Nader said, and we have only his word. He remembers Nader explaining why they wanted to fund the Trump campaign. According to Khawaja, Nader said: ‘I’ve been meeting with the Trump campaign people…we have a deal with Trump: my boss, His Highness, made a deal that if we help Trump get elected, he’s going to be harsh on Iran, he’s going to take out the nuclear deal that the Obama administration made. That will cripple the Iranian economy and will sanction Iran from selling oil again. It will make it very difficult for them to compete in the oil market. That’s worth a hundred billion dollars to us. That’s the reason we cannot allow Hillary to win at any cost. She must lose.’

Khawaja says he asked: ‘But you really think he’s going to win? I mean, this is crazy.’ And he says that Nader replied: ‘His Highness is not stupid, he will never bet on a losing horse.’ The money would come from the Saudis. The Emiratis would run the operation, using data bought from the Chinese. Khawaja says that Nader told him: ‘We have all the data already, we have 10 million US consumers’ data. And we have endless money.’ The Russians were ‘on board’ too: ‘He said, “Yes, I have met with Putin already and we have a green light from him. Because Putin is on the same page with us. He wants Hillary to lose.”

cont.

[Tuco 5076]

On 1/25/2020 at 12:09 PM, triplehorn said:

Congress can re-legislate to scuttle citizens united and to reform campaign finance.  That's the common denominator of where we are today.  Vote accordingly.

You can nibble around the edges and hope the Court, in its current configuration, won't apply the same logic more broadly. 

Or you can do a Constitution Amendment. I think the latter would obviously be more effective, but more difficult to get passed. 

I was thinking keep it simple:

Quote

28th Amendment: Money is not speech.  Corporations are not people. 

Assuming that would be sufficient to kill the ruling and the logic behind it, it would empower Congress to argue about the reform itself would look like. I think it would also be difficult politically to oppose such a simple statement that seems to match common sense.  

[FondrenRoad 4378]

On 1/24/2020 at 1:08 AM, RPM said:

I thought evil Soros was supposed to be King of the donors. He's barely Top 10 and way out of the lead.

You forget that he also funnels money through Steyer and Bloomberg as well as the other Dems on the list.  He's really the only one there.  In fact, Soros founded Bloomberg LP as well as Amazon.  Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos were just two homeless guys that Soros installed as puppets.  Steyer is a real business owner, but he was just running a single Piggly Wiggly franchise when Soros discovered him.

[FondrenRoad 4378]

On 1/24/2020 at 12:24 AM, mchookem said:

it seems...ironic?? that 2 of the top 3 are running for dem candidacy. good grief. 

Russia spends $1.25 million a month on Facebook ads per Mueller.  That's on top of whatever they spend on Wikileaks or infiltrating the NRA and other groups.  The Dems can hardly match the efforts of nation states plus the Adelsons.

[bernorange 8348]

On 1/24/2020 at 12:08 AM, RPM said:

I thought evil Soros was supposed to be King of the donors. He's barely Top 10 and way out of the lead.

The graph is only counting donations to super PACS.  It doesn't account for the money he spends on his "open society" lobbying/propaganda foundations.

[WBT 20422]

Quote

Bob Perry

 

[Satchel 6908]

This may turn out to be the most consequential result of Citizens United to date:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/republican-dark-money.html

WASHINGTON — A new conservative nonprofit group scored a $1.6 billion windfall last year via a little-known donor — an extraordinary sum that could give Republicans and their causes a huge financial boost ahead of the midterms, and for years to come.

The source of the money was Barre Seid, an electronics manufacturing mogul, and the donation is among the largest — if not the largest — single contributions ever made to a politically focused nonprofit. The beneficiary is a new political group controlled by Leonard A. Leo, an activist who has used his connections to Republican donors and politicians to help engineer the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court and to finance battles over abortion rights, voting rules and climate change policy.

This windfall will help cement Mr. Leo’s status as a kingmaker in conservative big money politics. It could also give conservatives an advantage in a type of difficult-to-trace spending that shapes elections and political fights

[bernorange 8348]

* bump *

Quote

As the U.S. continues to look polarized politically, a growing number of S&P 500 companies have made the effort to earn the highest scores from a watchdog organization that’s focused on transparency in corporate political spending.

That’s according to the latest study co-authored by that organization, the Center for Political Accountability in Washington, D.C., and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

The study found a record number of S&P 500 components achieved scores of 90% in the CPA-Zicklin Index of Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability. There were 100 such companies, dubbed “Trendsetters,” up from 89 last year.

“The big jump this year from 89 to 100 reflects that companies see the political climate as hyper-polarized, as presenting real challenges,” said Bruce Freed, CPA’s president. “Having robust transparency and accountability scores helps them in terms of their public image, but it also helps them internally because now they’re putting in place policies that govern how they’ll engage in spending and how they will be able to manage the risk.”

It’s recognized that political spending today with corporate funds poses serious risks to companies, Freed said. The troubles can include boycotts by customers at either end of the political spectrum, protests by employees, allegations of corrupt spending and reputational damage.
...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/exclusive-in-our-hyper-polarized-political-climate-20-of-the-s-p-500-is-now-doing-this-7c907d3f?rss=1&siteid=rss

Quote

...  the Center for Political Accountability’s recently released Guide to Corporate Political Spending. Written in collaboration with senior executives at companies that are among CPA-Zicklin Index Trendsetters, the Guide was requested by several leading companies to assist management in dealing with the challenges they face when making political spending decisions.
...
The heart of the Guide is a pragmatic checklist for management to use in making and evaluating spending decisions. Here are the key elements:

• Recognize the heightened risks that a company faces from contributions to third-party groups, specifically 501(c)(4) organizations engaged in political spending, trade associations, super PACs and 527 committees. The company needs to know where its money ultimately ends up, what causes and candidates it advances and what risks it is assuming.
• Understand that public companies can no longer publicly claim to support some aspects of a candidate’s platform while disavowing others. The challenge facing a company is that when it supports a candidate, all of the candidate’s actions and positions will be associated with the company.
• Align the company’s political spending with its core values, policies and positions.
• Avoid siloed decision-making. Political spending should fairly reflect the views and interests of the company’s various stakeholders. Companies benefit from active and dynamic engagement among public affairs, government relations and other internal actors responsible for promoting the company’s values, policies and positions and those making political spending decisions.
• Direct corporate contributions to politicians who refrain from punitively targeting companies for their policy decisions, personnel practices, public statements, or other values important to company’s success and integrity.
• Protect the democratic institutions and rule of law that companies depend upon to operate, compete, and thrive.

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2023/10/25/cpas-guide-to-corporate-political-spending-a-practical-checklist-for-management/

2022 Index can be found here:

https://www.politicalaccountability.net/cpa-zicklin-index/