Tumgik
#campaign finance
afloweroutofstone · 5 months
Text
The results of last night's elections were good overall, but this is a disappointment
Maine residents on Tuesday voted down an initiative that would have replaced that state’s largest power companies with a nonprofit, consumer-owned utility, The Associated Press projected. The measure — Question 3 — was the highest profile of eight referendum questions on the November ballot, with owners of Maine’s two largest utilities, Central Maine Power and Versant Power, spending more than $37 million to defeat the public takeover. That amount dwarfed the $1.1 million that the project’s main proponent spent, the Kennebec Journal reported... Question 3 ultimately failed, despite Maine’s utilities consistently ranking at or near the bottom among utilities nationwide for customer satisfaction. CMP and Versant are subsidiaries of multinational energy corporations Avangrid and ENMAX, respectively, and account for 97% of Maine’s electricity distribution.
114 notes · View notes
odinsblog · 11 months
Text
These recent revelations about billionaires buying favorable outcomes from SCOTUS, and now this, should convince people that out political system is for sale to the highest billionaire bidder, and that America is an oligarchy.
The disastrous Citizens United ruling helped clear the way for this.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
When Herschel Walker emailed a representative for billionaire industrialist and longtime family friend Dennis Washington in March 2022, he seemed to be engaging in normal behavior for a political candidate: He was asking for money.
But unbeknownst to Washington and the billionaire’s staff, Walker’s request was far more out of the ordinary. It was something campaign finance experts are calling “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping.” Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.
Emails obtained by The Daily Beast—and verified as authentic by a person with knowledge of the exchanges—show that Walker asked Washington to wire $535,200 directly to that undisclosed company, HR Talent, LLC.
And the emails reveal that not only did Washington complete Walker’s wire requests, he was under the impression that these were, in fact, political contributions.
👉🏿 https://www.thedailybeast.com/emails-reveal-jaw-dropping-herschel-walker-money-scandal
👉🏿 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/nyregion/george-santos-donors-fund-raising.html
138 notes · View notes
racefortheironthrone · 2 months
Note
is lobbying just basically legalized bribing, or is there any other difference?
The difficulty is that lobbying is simultaneously "legalized bribery" and "influence peddling," and the core of the First Amendment's guarantee of "the right of the people...to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Whether it's done by an environmental group trying to preserve endangered species or a deeply corrupt corporation that wants to strip-mine public lands for pennies on the dollar while poisoning the planet, or by a civil rights group trying to achieve equal rights or a hate group trying to legalize oppression of minorities, it's all lobbying.
Now, professionalized lobbying is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. Back in the 19th century, wealthy elites simply just bought elected officials or entire branches of government outright, but during the Progressive Era this was uncovered by muck-raking journalists and led to a lot of people going to jail, so something had to take its place - and that was lobbying.
Tumblr media
Even as late as 1945, there were barely 400 lobbying groups in the U.S compared to 17,000 today. The cause of the explosion of lobbying as an industry was a combination of the post-war expansion of the U.S government and changes to campaign finance law in the wake of Watergate. The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) sought to regulate campaign spending and campaign finance in response to perceived corruption in Federal elections, and was further strengthened by major amendments in 1974 that set hard limits on contributions and spending and created the Federal Elections Commission to enforce FECA.
The Supreme Court, which had begun its slide to the right thanks to LBJ massively fumbling the ball with his Supreme Court nominations and letting Nixon get a bunch of Justices on the Court, struck down a lot of those limits in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 - which started us down the road to Citizens United. Corporate lobbies very quickly realized that they could expand their influence enormously by acting as the middle-men between corporate cash and elected officials, which now meant that they could wield enormous carrots and sticks to get elected officials to comply with their wishes.
Tumblr media
Now, I think there will always be problems with lobbying that come down to the issue of concentrated vs. diffuse interests. There are all kinds of political issues where the majority of the people are on one side of a debate, but where they aren't particularly aware of or engaged with that debate, and even though they have a stake in the outcome, it's rather vague and abstract not something they care about very much. But a lobbying group for a particular "special interest" that is on the other side of that debate and is very aware and engaged and cares about the outcome very much because they stand to gain or lose a lot of money from the outcome. So that lobbying group, which represents a minority position and should lose in the democratic process, will invest the necessary resources in order to win.
The only way to fight this, sadly, is for social movements to be just as organized as lobbyists. For the longest time, it was the labor movement that acted as the "countervailing power" in American politics, because they had the manpower and the money to effectively lobby the Federal government not just on behalf of unions but also on behalf of low-wage workers or racial minorities or consumers and so forth. The problem is that the labor movement doesn't really have that manpower and money any more, but nothing has really replaced it in American politics, in no small part because the left is not immune to America's instinctive hatred of politics and institutions.
And yes, the other major thing that we could do to fight "legalized bribery" is to break up the nexus between campaign finance and lobbying, but in order to do that, we'd have to overrule about fifty years of Supreme Court precedents, and that's not going to happen without the Democratic Party successfully taking back control of the Supreme Court.
50 notes · View notes
gwydionmisha · 26 days
Text
26 notes · View notes
ophilosoraptoro · 9 months
Text
BlackRock Recruiter Who ‘Decides People’s Fate’ Says ‘War is Good for Business' Undercover Footage
youtube
56 notes · View notes
nodynasty4us · 10 months
Quote
It is worth noting that candidates almost never drop out because they see they can't win. Their egos are all too big for that. They drop out because the money has dried up and to run a campaign you need money to pay staff, run ads, fly hither and yon, and operate offices. Most of the candidates can't self fund, but if some big donor keeps them afloat, they will just continue and the anti-Trump vote will be split.
Electoral-vote.com
28 notes · View notes
gettothestabbing · 3 months
Text
DeWine vetoed House Bill 68 on Friday, which would have prohibited doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors and banned boys from competing in girls’ sports, just hours before the deadline. A review of donations from 2018 to 2023 found that the governor received $40,300 from the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association (OCHA), Cincinnati Children’s, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and ProMedica Children’s Hospital, all of whom support transgender medical care. OCHA donated $10,000 to the Mike DeWine and Jon Husted Transition Fund on Dec. 28, 2018, and another $10,000 on Dec. 7, 2022, according to the report. A transition fund allows candidates to spend donations for “transition activities and inaugural celebrations,” according to Ohio’s campaign finance handbook. Cincinnati Children’s, an affiliate of OCHA, donated $300 on Dec. 15, 2022, to the fund and ProMedica, another affiliate of OCHA, also donated $10,000 in December 2018, according to the reports. Nationwide Children’s, a third affiliate with OCHA, donated $5,000 in December 2018 and another $5,000 in January 2023 to the transition fund. The governor’s office referred the Daily Caller News Foundation back to DeWine’s comments on the bill and his veto. DeWine said last week that he was visiting hospitals that provide transgender procedures to hear families out on both sides of the issue but did not elaborate on which hospitals he went to. Nick Lashutka, president of the OHCA, testified against House Bill 68, arguing that the bill “strips away” the rights of parents and their transgender children, according to The Guardian.
Cincinnati Children’s has a Transgender Health Center that works with patients from five to 24 years old, according to the hospital’s website. The center’s frequently asked questions section explains that patients can get puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones with family consent and does not list an age limit.
3 notes · View notes
demgraphics · 1 month
Text
Want to know how much money the NRA or big oil is giving your member of Congress? Look no further. This is a very useful and impartial resource for following the money.
2 notes · View notes
worldofwardcraft · 1 month
Text
Worst SCOTUS decision ever.
Tumblr media
February 15, 2024
Over the years our Supreme Court has delivered up many an egregiously poor decision — from Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) to Bush v. Gore (2000) to the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling two years ago. And these are only a sampling. But the one SCOTUS decision that has arguably had the most ruinous effect on our nation was in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Without delving into the facts of the case, it involved the ability of wealthy donors, corporations and special interest groups (in this instance a conservative nonprofit called Citizens United) to spend money in elections. Reversing more than a century of campaign finance restrictions, a 5-4 majority ruled that such groups could legally shell out as much as they want.
In the Court’s opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that limiting “independent political spending” from corporations and other groups violates their First Amendment right to free speech (since corporations are supposedly people). He also naively added that "independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."
Not only did that turn out to be emphatically wrong, but so also was the assumption that such unlimited campaign spending would be conducted independently. Almost immediately following the decision, super PACs sprang up to facilitate the funneling of dark money through shadowy nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors. And while it's illegal for these committees to coordinate election spending with candidates or political parties, many routinely do so because a toothless FEC can't stop them.
Unsurprisingly, we've seen record-breaking amounts of expenditure every election cycle. As the Campaign Legal Center reports:
Campaign spending by corporations and other outside groups increased by nearly 900% between 2008 and 2016. In 2020, total election spending was $14.4 billion, up from $5.7 billion in 2018, and more than $1 billion in dark money was spent.
To take just one example, in the election cycle following the Citizens United decision, ultra-rich real estate developer Harlan Crow's political contributions went from a little over $500,000 to nearly $4.5 million! Americans for Tax Fairness found that a small group of 465 (mostly right-wing) billionaires had pumped an eye-popping $881 million into the 2022 midterm elections by October. And by the time the cycle was over, it was around a billion dollars.
Nowadays, oligarchs like the Soroses, Kochs, Uihleins, Griffins and Thiels are able to manipulate elections, Congress, state governments, the courts, indeed, our entire political system. All because of one terrible, no good, very bad Supreme Court verdict.
2 notes · View notes
afloweroutofstone · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
Of the top 100 political donors in the 2022 elections, 67 live in just five states: California (25), New York (20), Florida (9), Illinois (8), and Massachusetts (5).
Every donor represented here spent at least $2.7 million to influence this year's elections. Overall, they gave $1.2 billion: $680 million for Republicans and $477 million for Democrats, the rest going elsewhere.
73 notes · View notes
odinsblog · 11 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Looks like Susan Collins is about to go through some things, and considering her pivotal role in getting Brett Kavanaugh seated on the Supreme Court, it couldn’t happen to a more culpable Republican
👉🏿 https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/02/10/hawaii-contractors-charged-contributions-collins/
41 notes · View notes
democracyawareness · 1 month
Text
Only a few weeks left to vote in the California Primary. I’m running this year for US Senate. I’ve tried voting for the least worst politicians and that hasn’t worked.
As a experiment I’m promoting Campaign Finance Reform with my campaign. I think the only people who count are the ones with the right to vote. Corporations aren’t people, they’re property.
Time for the We The People Amendment! Vote for John Rose and join with me for campaign finance reform.
Tumblr media
3 notes · View notes
gwydionmisha · 5 months
Text
32 notes · View notes
ms-cellanies · 2 years
Link
Of course EVERY CHRISTOFASCIST REPUBLIKKKAN SENATOR VOTED NO.
We, the voters, MUST VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS & give the U.S. Senate a large enough majority to get the bills that are MOST IMPORTANT TO AMERICANS passed & made into law.  One of the most important actions must be to overturn CITIZENS UNITED which is what threw the doors open wide to inject LOADS OF DARK MONEY INTO THE COFFERS OF THE CHRISTOFASCIST REPUBLIKKKANS.  
GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY, THE CHRISTOFASCIST REPUBLIKKKANS WILL ONLY MAKE THE LIVES OF THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS WORSE.  If you don’t want a CHRISTOFASCIST AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT THEN YOU MUST VOTE BLUE - VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS IN EVERY RACE ON THE BALLOT.
30 notes · View notes
nodynasty4us · 1 year
Link
The lawmakers allege that Santos — who was sworn into Congress early Saturday morning — violated the Ethics in Government Act for not filing accurate and complete financial disclosure reports on time.
24 notes · View notes
sneezewizard · 2 years
Text
what's everyone's niche area of expertise that almost never comes up in fanfic, but when it does, boy howdy do you have opinions
22 notes · View notes