Fighting Big Money

It is very difficult to find good news about the Koch brothers these days.  Their depredations - you would think - are well-known.  But apparently they are not well known enough; Huffington Post reports that half the country doesn’t know who they are. A possible bright spot is that the half that does know the Koch brothers doesn’t like them.

It’s hard to fight the ability of millions and millions of dollars (a billion by the Koch brothers at last count): to buy candidates, to buy elections, to stifle free speech and employee rights, to compromise academic free inquiry, to undermine science, to undermine public schools, or to profit from pollution and a burgeoning prison population.  The best news is mostly those glimmers of protest that are not snuffed out by the machine.

Amy Dean reaches some useful conclusions in her thoughtful and focused March 25 article.  (She appears on the Al-Jazeerah America website, if such a disclaimer is necessary.)  Money can be extremely difficult to counter unless you have more money.  Unions don’t have enough but they do have organized people power which is demonstrably and consistently effective:  “This kind of in-person voter outreach has been shown to be far more effective than the TV ads most big money political campaigns churn out.”  Small wonder that union busting is a burning focus of the Koch brothers. Amy provides a number of encouraging examples where this is borne out.

Citizens United vs FEC, a Supreme Court case,  since 2010 is the constitutional basis for granting personal first amendment rights to corporations, including off course non-profit super PACs, but also for-profit corporations and labor unions.  Freedom of speech was primarily cited by corporate entities but recent  claims based on the freedom of religion are starting to appear.  The debut of the Super PACs and their ability to sway elections relative to the size of their pile of cash, arguably, comprise a grave and insidious threat to a democratic, civil society.  Access to political debate and policymaking is now comparable to the status quo of any banana republic, entrenched plutocracy or corrupt dictatorship that we or anyone has ever had the pleasure of propping up. Welcome to Havana before July of 1953.

Off course - in a democracy - anyone can have a super PAC.  All it takes is money.  There are liberal Super PACs, too.   A comparison of who has the biggest pile might be useful except for the problem of Dark Money:

Dark money is a term for funds given to politically active nonprofits that can receive unlimited donations from corporations, individuals, and unions but are not required to disclose their donors.[1][2] Funds can be spent on behalf of a candidate running in an election, or to influence voting on a ballot question. Following the 2014 elections, CBS News reported on the rise of the phenomenon.[3] The New York Times editorial board opined that the 2014 federal mid-term elections were influenced by "greatest wave of secret, special-interest money ever raised in a congressional election."[4]

Dark Money is big, possibly dwarfing the amounts that must be reported by super PACs.  In sum, we really don’t know how much money is being spent to swing elections.

Gosh.  What to do?  Well, what about those wealthy progressives?  Tom Steyer is one and he has a Super PAC.  One disadvantage of fighting a Super PAC with a Super PAC is the difficulty of laying claim to the moral high-road.  For example,  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said

“[W]hat is un-American is when shadowy billionaires pour unlimited money into our democracy to rig the system to benefit themselves and the wealthiest 1 percent”

In response, Republicans have pounced on Steyer for relying on the same laws and court rulings that allow the Kochs to use their wealth to have a massive influence on elections. And they gleefully note that Reid and other Democrats attended a recent fundraiser at Steyer’s San Francisco home.

Another liberal Super Pac is American Bridge:

(David) Brock announced in 2010 that he was forming a super-PAC, American Bridge, to help elect liberal Democrats, starting with the 2012 election cycle. In describing Brock's intentions for the super-PAC, The New York Times referred to Brock as a "prominent Democratic political operative" (mirrored by The Washington Post's characterization of him as a "former journalist-turned-political operative") and New York Magazine referred to Brock's "hyperpartisanship."

In a 2011 interview with Politico, Brock vowed to wage "guerrilla warfare and sabotage" against Fox News.

For most of us, throwing money is not an option - at least not as an individual.  But loyally paying your union dues and sending in $50 to your favorite cause does definitely matter - possibly decisively;  as does that “kind of in-person voter outreach” that unions do.  That is also - potentially - decisively important.  

The money wouldn’t matter at all if we could rely on ourselves to think critically and act in our informed self-interest.  But that’s a platitude or at the very least, it's unhelpful.  Everybody that can, has to be a teacher.  And one-on-one is still the best counter there is to propaganda hosed at the masses.