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Russ Feingold: Democrats Sold Out in 2012 and Need to Quit Big Money

by NielPostma231 Posted on January 10, 2013

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President Obama’s decision to let his 2013 inauguration committee accept corporate cash and million-dollar donations marks quite a reversal for the president: for his first inaugural in 2009, he capped individual donations at $50,000 and banned corporate money. The Associated Press calls the decision “part of a continuing erosion of Obama’s pledge to keep donors and special interests at arm’s length of his presidency.” But for former Sen. Russ Feingold, it’s yet another sell-out by his friends in the Democratic Party to the big-money forces so dominant in politics today.

No Democrat has so publicly ripped his own party for embracing super-PACs and dark-money nonprofits than Feingold. In a new article for the journal Democracy, Feingold, who co-wrote the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, the last major campaign finance restriction in the US, takes Democrats to the mat. He calls 2012 “a big step” back for Democratic-led efforts to get big money out of politics, and singles out Obama’s reversal on super-PACs. In February 2012, the president encouraged his donors to give to Priorities USA Action, the super-PAC backing him, while allowing his top deputies to appear at Priorities events. On the PBS NewsHour, top Obama strategist David Axelrod defended Obama by saying that the president hadn’t warned at all toward super-PACs but had to play by the rules of the game. You heard that a lot from Democrats in 2012. Yet with statements like that, Feingold says, Democrats were posing as a pro-reform party while tripping over themselves to “exploit any avenue to accept unlimited, corporate dollars to fund elections.”

Beltway Democrats, Feingold argues, aren’t going to reform big-money politics from the inside; they’re addicted and they just can’t quit. The task of fighting for real reforms to money in politics, of building what Feingold—who now runs his own pro-reform nonprofit, Progressives United—calls a “permanent majority” for reform, falls instead to liberal donors and activists outside of Washington.

Feingold says the most important thing big donors can do is stop giving—to super-PACs or any of the other Citizens United-enabled fixtures of our big-money politics. “Donors hold more leverage to create a movement for reform than almost any other actor in the political system,” he says. If donors ignore super-PACs and nonprofits, “Washington will notice.” And as for the liberal activists out there, they should redirect all the energy they’ve invested into passing a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and channel it into “achievable goals”—public financing of elections, disclosure of donors to dark-money nonprofits and shell corporations, overhauling the dysfunctional Federal Election Commission, the nation’s top elections cop.

The stakes are high, in Feingold’s view, for the Democrats. “Unless Democrats embrace election reform as a central tenet of our platform,” he writes, “we will face another era reminiscent of soft money—when the dominance of corporate interests meant that no matter what party held power, the influence of Big Money always won.”

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Russ Feingold: Democrats Sold Out in 2012 and Need to Quit Big Money

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SEC Could Require Corporations to Disclose Their Dark Money

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 8, 2013

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In August 2011, a group of 10 law professors submitted a petition (PDF) to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging the agency to consider requiring publicly held companies to fully disclose their political spending to their investors. After the proposal received more than 320,000 public comments, an unprecedented number, the SEC placed it on its 2013 agenda on the Friday before Christmas.

As it stands now, corporations must publicly disclose much of their political spending, but there is no way to know their total spending, partly because they can cloak their contributions by channeling them through outside-spending groups with lax disclosure requirements. For example, the insurance giant Aetna handed over more than $7 million to the American Action Network and Chamber of Commerce to quietly influence recent elections; those donations were only revealed inadvertently.

The Corporate Reform Coalition, a collection of campaign-finace reform groups led by Public Citizen, is applauding the SEC’s willingness to consider the new rules. “Investors have been clamoring for this information from the SEC for some time,” said Robert Jackson, a Columbia University law prof who cosponsored the SEC petition, during a conference call organized by the coalition this morning.

Some corporations already voluntarily disclose all of their political spending; others argue that mandatory disclosure would be too burdensome. Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), a member of a newly formed House task force on election reform that’s taking aim at Citizens United and one of 42 members of the House to publicly support the SEC proposal, has rejected that argument, calling for the agency to “mandate uniform disclosure of a minimum dataset” of political spending.

Corporate response to shareholders’ demands for political spending disclosure, based on figures from the Center for Political Accountability.

While proponents of the proposal expect strong opposition from corporate America, they are hopeful that the SEC, influenced by what Pennsylvania state treasurer Rob McCord called a “moderate, centrist, good-government impulse,” will implement the new rule this year. One of the SEC’s four commissioners, Luis Aguilar, is already an outspoken proponent of uniform disclosure requirements. Without them, he’s said, “it is impossible to have any corporate accountability or oversight.”

And for all the controversy surrounding Citizens United, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly upheld the constitutionality of disclosure requirements as part of its ruling. (Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.) The CU decision explicitly acknowledged the importance of shareholders’ “corporate democracy” in “determining whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits.”

Rep. Sarbanes has called the SEC’s willingness to consider the rule-change proposal “an incredibly important development.” On this morning’s conference call, he referred to outside spending groups as “money drones”: “You’re walking down the street running your campaign, next thing you know they come at you with a lot of money, and the people operating those drones are hidden because we don’t have proper disclosure.”

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SEC Could Require Corporations to Disclose Their Dark Money

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Powerful Tea Party Group’s Internal Docs Leak—Read Them Here

by biglermyrta910 Posted on January 4, 2013

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FreedomWorks, the national conservative group that helped launch the tea party movement, sells itself as a genuine grassroots operation, and for years, it has battled accusations of “astroturfing”—posing as a populist organization while doing the bidding of big-money donors. Yet internal documents obtained by Mother Jones show that FreedomWorks has indeed become dependent on wealthy individual donors to finance its growing operation.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Richard Stephenson, a reclusive millionaire banker and FreedomWorks board member, and members of his family in October funneled $12 million through two newly created Tennessee corporations to FreedomWorks’ super-PAC, which used these funds to support tea party candidates in November’s elections. The revelation that a corporate bigwig Stephenson, who founded the Cancer Treatment Centers of America and chairs its board, was responsible for more than half of the FreedomWorks super-PAC’s haul in 2012 undercuts the group’s grassroots image and hands ammunition to critics who say FreedomWorks does the bidding of rich conservative donors.

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Powerful Tea Party Group’s Internal Docs Leak—Read Them Here

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