Moyers' latest, from last night...
Who’s Buying our Midterm Elections?
BillMoyers.com
March 21, 2014
In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to issue another big decision on campaign finance, one that could further open the floodgates to unfettered and anonymous contributions, just as the Citizens United case did four years ago.
This week Bill speaks with investigative journalists Kim Barker and Andy Kroll about the role of dark money — and the wealthy donors behind it — in this year’s midterm elections.
Already, three times as much money has been raised for this year’s elections as four years ago, when the Citizens United decision was announced. “This is the era of the empowered ‘one percenter’. They’re taking action and they’re becoming the new, headline players in this political system,” Kroll tells Moyers. Kim Barker adds, “People want influence. It’s a question of whether we’re going to allow it to happen, especially if we’re going to allow it to happen and nobody even knows who the influencers are.”
Barker is an investigative reporter with the independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica and Andy Kroll is a journalist in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones magazine.
Here's the link to the show's content on "Dark Money," and the folks over at Moyers' website have excerpted that aspect of the show, as a standalone video, too:
What You Need to Know About Dark Money
BillMoyers.com
by Karin Kamp
March 21, 2014
If you look up “dark money” in Merriam-Webster, you won’t find a definition, but as of this week, their online unabridged dictionary includes a word that tells a big part of its story — “super PAC.” It’s defined in part as “an independent PAC [political action committee] that can accept unlimited contributions from individuals and organizations (such as corporations and labor unions) and spend unlimited amounts in support of a candidate.” It’s a fitting reminder that four years after Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates of campaign cash, dark money may be here to stay.
In this three-minute video, investigative reporters Kim Barker and Andy Kroll tell Bill how dark money contributes to Washington’s gridlock and why it keeps politicians from acting in the best interest of their constituents.
Watch:
Barker tells Bill, “I would argue that if you’re wondering why your government is so broke and you can’t really get anything passed through Congress, campaign finance has a lot to do with that.”
Kroll adds this analogy on super PAC dark money from a conversation that he had with an unnamed senator.
I had a conversation with a progressive senator who is not a fan of super PACs and at the time did not have his own sort of individual super PAC… And I said, ‘What is this like when you’re going to go up against an opponent who does have a super PAC and does have a motivated one percenter in his corner?’ And he said, ‘It’s like going into a boxing ring. I’m wearing boxing gloves. And the other guy has an Uzi.
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As reiterated in the video, and as I like to explain it in one sentence to others: "In Washington D.C., it's not about the red versus the blue, it's all about 'the green.'"
Regrettably here, the full truth about big money in politics would "harsh the Democratic Party's buzz" on the subject, since corporate Dems are willfully drinking from this trough of corruption almost as much as Republicans. And, even many progressives have adopted the, "If-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em-mentality."
Granted, the sheer amount of funds poured into political campaigns by the neocon/Tea Party right--the details about which we're dutifully reminded in countless posts within this community on a daily basis--is massive, even in comparison to the Democratic Party's willful wallowing in the same, corrupt sewer of corporate campaign cash.
Getting real about this, as UMass/Boston Poli-Sci professor Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues have been statistically demonstrating for quite some time, the truth is both major parties are wildly corrupted, as noted in a couple of my posts here regarding their work: "Ferguson: 'The Hidden Corporate Cash Behind America’s Out-of-Control National Surveillance State.'" (10/28/13); and, ""Revealed: Why the Pundits Are Wrong About Big Money and the 2012 Elections," Thomas Ferguson, et al" (12/22/12).
Updating (the paraphrasing of) Barney Frank's prescient statement in 2010, "'Things could be worse,' is not a winning campaign slogan," the truth is, "'Democrats are a little less corrupt than Republicans, so vote for us," doesn't exactly hit it out of the park, either.
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