AB 83, the Get Foreign Money Out of California Elections Act did not get a floor vote in the California Assembly last month!
It’s not only a disappointing result. It’s a shameful result.
It had 38 firm votes, but it needed 54. (To find out which legislators were on Team America, keep reading.)
How is it not a priority for every California legislator to correct an obvious error of jurisprudence from one of the most reviled Supreme Court decisions of all time, Citizens United v FEC, which was foisted on our democracy by a SCOTUS that is now, as it was in 2010, obviously corrupt?
Not only do far too many California Assembly Members feel no urgency to rid us of this SCOTUS driven avalanche of foreign money that’s in our elections! They also lack a basic understanding of what this foreign money in our elections is doing to undermine democracy or perhaps it’s a failure of imagination from within California’s blue bubble.
Maybe that’s our fault? Maybe we should have lit our hair on fire? Maybe?
Okay. How about this:
Foreign money is like an asteroid that’s coming to hit us, except that it’s already here!
No need to look up. Just look around.
Let me explain.
We begin with the SCOTUS that opened the foreign money loophole via Citizens United.
I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that it took John Oliver to put Clarence Thomas’ colossally insane levels of overt corruption back into the national consciousness. For a day.
Why doesn’t this story stick? And since when is it okay to have brazenly corrupt Justices on the Supreme Court??? — and it is Justices, for while we know Clarence’s cartoonish corruption could only be believable in a farce, we also know that he’s not the only who is corrupt and/or compromised.
It wasn’t so long ago that public corruption was a deal breaker with the American public. Not any more. What changed?
In a word, media.
There are other factors, like a corrupt court, stacked with ideologues (it’s worth noting that “media” buttressed the elevation of those ideologues in significant ways), but media, and particularly Big Media, abetted those assaults on American democracy in pursuit of eyeballs and profits and control of the conversation.
Big Media is largely owned by billionaires, and billionaires like Citizens United just fine.
There used to be strict regulations on limits to media consolidation, limits to the number of markets one corporation could be in and how many distribution platforms a corporation could control in a single market. There was also a Fairness Doctrine which made it pretty difficult to outright lie to the American people.
Most of that is gone, but here’s what remains: “... section 310 of the Communications Act prohibits a foreign government, corporation organized under foreign law, non-US citizen or representative of a foreign government or non-US citizen from directly holding a broadcast license.”
But guess what the SCOTUS did? In Citizens United they decreed that a US corporation could contribute unlimited monies from their corporate treasuries because US corporations were “associations of citizens”.
You may remember that AB 83, and the model legislation it derives from seeks to clarify what constitutes an “indirect” contribution of foreign money, which is prohibited under US Election law. The threshold it sets for a corporation to qualify as “foreign influenced” is if 5% or more shares are held by foreign investors living outside the US.
What’s below are the top 10 US media corporations ownership percentages. All data was taken from the CNBC website on Monday, February 19, 2024. (An odd thing to note in this data is that the Ownership Maps you’ll find if you follow the links, makes no distinction between the US and Canada, but groups them together as “North America” so the real percentage of US ownership is unknown.)
Regardless of CNBC quirks, what’s not in dispute here is that there is a lot of foreign investment in US Big Media, and it’s a fair bet Saudi Arabia and China and Russia are not rooting for a robust American democracy.
It’s also a fair bet that talking about Clarence Thomas’ unfitness for the High Court and the absurdity of him not recusing from cases in which his wife might reasonably be considered an interested party, would not be something to write or talk about if upending American democracy was on your “to do list”, as it is on Rupert Murdoch’s.
All of these media corporations are free to spend whatever amounts they like in US and California elections, all while shaping public opinion and curating billionaire friendly news. Can’t we at least prohibit the foreign influenced media corporations from spending money in our elections?
Here are the top 10 US media corporations’ ownership percentages (per CNBC) :
Comcast: 72% North American, 11.2% foreign, 26.8% not publicly available data
AT&T: 44.4% North American, 8% foreign, 48% not publicly available data
Meta (Facebook): 62% North American,, 10.4% foreign, 27.6% not publicly available data
Walt Disney Co: 49.4% North American, 10.8% foreign, 39.8% not publicly available data
Warner Bros, Discovery: 61.3% North American, 7.5% foreign, 31.2% not publicly available data
Netflix Inc:, 68.8% North American, 11.5% foreign, 19.7% not publicly available data
Paramount Global: Might not qualify as foreign influenced! 94.1% North American, 0.8% foreign, 5.1% not publicly available data
Fox News: 81.5% North American, 25% foreign (Yes, this adds up to over 100%. Maybe CNBC can explain how that’s possible.)
Hearst Communications: Privately held, No publicly available data.
News Corp: 82.8% North American, 18.4% foreign (Yes, this too adds up to over 100%, and again it’s a Murdoch family joint)
We’ll need to do a better job persuading legislators to prioritize Getting Foreign Money Out of California Elections when the bill is reintroduced in January 2025.
Organizing for that effort starts now, and we at MOVI, Money Out Voters In, hope you’ll want to be a part of the reeducation of the California Legislature.
If you would like to be part of this ongoing campaign CLICK HERE.
If you’d like to see the AB 83 language CLICK HERE.
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TEAM AMERICA
Here’s the list of Assembly Members who confirmed that they would vote "aye" on AB 83. These are the Democracy Defenders in the California Assembly.
If your Assembly Member is on this list, congratulations! You have Assembly representation that aligns with your values and priorities! Please thank them (call 916-319-20 + AD #) for their commitment to protecting California from a reckless Supreme Court mistake that has allowed foreign money in our elections - and ask them to co-author the legislation in 2025.
DEMOCRACY DEFENDERS
Arambula, Joaquin (AD31), Bains, Jasmeet Kaur (AD35), Bennett, Steve (AD38), Berman, Marc (AD23), Bonta, Mia (AD18), Bryan, Isaac G. (AD55), Carrillo, Wendy (AD52), Cervantes, Sabrina (AD58), Connolly, Damon (AD12), Fong, Mike (AD49), Friedman, Laura (AD44), Garcia, Eduardo (AD36), Haney, Matt (AD17), Hart, Gregg (AD37), Holden, Chris R. (AD41), Jackson, Corey A. (AD60), Jones-Sawyer, Sr., Reginald B. (AD57), Kalra, Ash (AD25) (co-author), Lee, Alex (AD24) (Author), Low, Evan (AD26), Maienschein, Brian (AD76), McCarty, Kevin (AD06), McKinnor, Tina S. (AD61), Muratsuchi, Al (AD66), Ortega, Liz (AD20), Pellerin, Gail (AD28), Rendon, Anthony (AD62 Speaker Emeritus), Reyes, Eloise Gómez (AD50), Rivas, Luz M. (AD43), Rivas, Robert (AD29, Speaker). Santiago, Miguel (AD54), Schiavo, Pilar (AD40, Ting, Philip Y. (AD19), Ward, Christopher M. (AD78), Weber, M.D., Akilah (AD79), Wicks, Buffy (AD14), Wood, Jim (AD02), Zbur, Rick Chavez (AD51)
If your Assembly Member is not on this list that means they either intended to vote "no" or they did not indicate to the bill's author, ASM Alex Lee, how they intended to vote on AB 83, and so they are part of the reason AB 83 did not get a vote on the Assembly floor.
(Not sure who your Assembly Member is? Click here to find out)
Earlier diaries on this topic:
More shenanigans from corporate players as AB 83 threatens Citizens United foreign money loot in CA
Rep Raskin tweets support as San Jose bans foreign influenced corps in elections. All CA next #AB83
California must exploit Citizens United’s devastating error, defend democracy, and pass #AB83
#CloseTheLoophole: Help California fix the foreign money mess Citizens United made
Money Out, Voters In! California can close the Citizens United Foreign Money Loophole with AB-83
Michele Sutter is President and Co-Founder of MOVI, Money Out Voters In, the California sponsors of AB 83 - The Get Foreign Money Out of California Elections Act.
