Have you heard about Americas Elect, a group currently laying the infrastructure for an independent presidential ticket in 2012?
According to The Guardian, this non-profit that has not responded to a request for a list of donors, has raised already raised $20 million.
More beneath the entwined orange squirrels...
Chief operating officer of Americans Elect, Elliot Ackerman, says,"Fewer and fewer Americans are represented by the ideologies of the two major parties. Nature abhors a vacuum and there is a vacuum at the centre of American politics."
The original funding for the project has come from 50 or so wealthy individuals, including Ackerman's father, Peter Ackerman, the head of wealth management firm Rockport Capital. Other known backers, such as Kirk Rostron and Melvin Andrews, are often also from the world of finance, especially hedge funds. Another backer is Jim Holbrook, president of a trade association that lobbies for the marketing industry. Many other backers remain a secret due to the group having registered itself as a non-profit and thus having no obligation to reveal donors.
While there is certainly a vacuum on the right, the group's intention is obvious; run a fat cat against Obama.
According to their website they have collected 2,196,246 signatures. That's over half of what is needed to put Americas Elect ticket on the ballot nationwide.
Americas Elect claims to be a party for "The People" but as pointed out in an op-ed on Politico,
While it is providing voters a path to choose a presidential ticket through the democratizing force of the Internet, the process can, in fact, be overruled by a small board of directors, who organized the group. This board is to have unfettered discretion in picking a committee that can boot the presidential ticket chosen by voters if it is not sufficiently “centrist” and even dump the committee if it doesn’t like the direction it’s heading."
The Guardian claims that Howard Schultz, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Brokaw are all possibilities for the Americans Elect candidate.
This not what Democracy looks like.