Really?
Pretty much every news report on the precedent-shattering SCOTUS decision last week goes out of its way to point out that it isn’t just corporate cash that could be unleashed.
Union cash could be unleashed too!
Here are a couple examples from supposedly left-leaning or "balanced" news sources.
From an NPR story last week:
"Thursday's landmark decision, approved by a 5-4 margin, could unleash a torrent of corporate and union cash into the political realm and transform how campaigns for president and Congress are fought in the coming years."
Quoth the New York Times
"The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences...Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business."
Well, how much corporate and union cash are we talking? Let's consider, below.
Let’s start with corporations.
Corporate profits were down last year, but profits for the Fortune 500 in 2006 and 2007 averaged about $720 billion. (Note: this is just the Fortune 500)
Under the old campaign finance regime, corporate execs did a lot of individual fundraising for elections – for example, several pharma execs were Bush "Pioneers" – but the corporations themselves were much more limited in their direct giving opportunities.
(Instead, corporations have pretty much owned most of Congress mainly through the $3 billion a year they spend on lobbying – often critically accompanied with jobs for spouses or kids, and promises of future employment for lawmakers, themselves. Corporate interests get some juice, as well, from their share of 527 spending. According to Open Secrets, 527 groups spent about $500 million in the last cycle. There are probably other ways they dump money into the process, too (contributions to party committees?) – I’m no expert on campaign finance. I’m mainly trying to illustrate a point about how easy it is to spin media hacks.)
If you were to assume that Fortune 500 Corporations used this new license to dump, say, 3% of 2010 earnings into the elections this fall – an amount they could easily get away with, given current levels of shareholder scrutiny and empowerment – they might collectively and collusively have an incremental ~ $21 billion they could use this year.
That’s money that would otherwise be pretty much off the table for use in politics. That would be more than a 10-fold increase in resources applied directly to elections. You could count that as a torrent.
Note: Whether that funding goes to Democrats or Republicans, it is destructive to the process by drowning out the voices – and interests – of average voters. In fact, for progressives, contributions to Dems are probably more problematic than contributions to Republicans.
Now let’s look at unions.
I remember from an ancient analysis I did with a friend more than a decade ago that the average union dues across industries were something like $55 per member per month. Given about 15,300,000 union members (according to BLS in 2008 – and that’s surely gone down with things like the collapse of the auto industry) that would be about $10 billion a year in total union dues.
Most of that pays for operating expenses - things like representation (e.g., support for collective bargaining and grievances), training, organizing, etc.
How much goes to politics? Currently, the most ridiculous high-end estimates of how much unions spend on politics are around 10-15% of dues. For purposes of this exercise, let’s take the ridiculous extremes.
That would mean unions currently spend about $1 - $1.5 billion on politics across all races and activities (including large investments in things like voter mobilization).
That is a lot of money. Clearly it doesn’t buy you nearly as much as $3 billion in lobbying and a revolving door can.
Which brings us to the question:
Where exactly would this "torrent" of new union cash come from?
Unions already spend about as much as they can on politics. Even after the SCOTUS ruling, unions will continue to face an intimidating gauntlet of other regulations limiting what they can do with dues money.
And since they tend to make pretty crappy advertisements (sorry – still gagging on some of the ads made "in support" of Coakley), one would hope that unions don’t let the SCOTUS decision shift their mix of spending too much.
So let’s recap.
Corporations Unions
Current expenditures: ~$3.5 billion ~$1.5 billion
Potential new "torrent": ~$21 billion $0
So if the prospect of a torrent of new union cash into politics as a result of the SCOTUS decision is clearly rank bullshit, why does every reporter and press account add this ridiculous clause to their reporting on the story?
Well the answer is obvious. If you listen more closely to the radio guys - lean close to the radio now - you can actually hear them quaking in fear – just as they complete the first halves of their sentences and urgently reach to get to the mandatory "unions too!" disclaimer.
You can hear them quaking in fear that some rightwing ass-hat crank will accuse them of not being "fair and balanced" if they don’t bring up unions reflexively every time they talk about the obscenely corrupting influence of corporate spending on politics – even if the claim is patently ridiculous, as it is in this case.
Of course, Republicans and teabaggers are trained to reflexively hate unions, so including that mandatory disclaimer is really important to the Republicans who have worked tirelessly to engineer this decision.
It helps diffuse the immediate anger of their constituency – anger that immediately wells up in the throat of any remotely patriotic citizen when they hear about the decision.
And because its good for Republicans - even though it isn’t remotely true - and because they will complain loudly if cowardly reporters do not say it, we will continue to hear it.
Just watch.