The Nation magazine has the definitive article about the impact of Citizens United on US elections – including the gusher flow of Middle East oil money through trade groups green-lighted by the Supreme Court’s political decision. The article is by Lee Fang, the writer who broke the story about the cabal of millionaires recruited to [...]
The Center for Public Integrity has a useful new report about the role of outside money in the North Carolina governor’s contest. It picks up on a theme raised by Democracy North Carolina in a formal complaint to the State Board of Elections in 2008 – namely, that national Republican and Democratic groups were pumping [...]
Despite the flood of self-serving money swamping the 2012 elections, better souls are not giving up: They're taking the long view, looking for an alternative to elections as auctions among billionaires. One component of any long-term strategy involves creating new streams of clean money for campaign financing. Even if a constitutional amendment reversed the worst of [...]
Mother Jones magazine has boiled the history of political money deals in the United States into a clever annotated timeline and a highly readable article, starring a host of shady characters in “a dramatic battle between the forces of reform and influence that goes back more than 250 years before the birth of the super-PAC."
Here’s another report about the tiny number of über-fat cats bankrolling the Super PACs. The Washington Post reports: “Just 47 people account for more than half (57.1 percent) of the $230 million raised by super PACs from individual donors, according to the study by U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) and Demos, two liberal research and [...]
Students at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication have created an interactive flow chart of the money in NC political campaigns with annotated descriptions of key terms. Visualize rivers of money. They’ve also just posted a series of articles about NC campaign finances on their WhichWayNC website and blog. Did you know that [...]
A new bill in the US Senate to increase disclosure of campaign money again uses the title DISCLOSE Act, but Democratic sponsors have watered it down from last year’s version in the hopes of winning enough Republican support for passage. One report says the Senate bill, S. 3369 “does not prohibit campaign spending by foreign [...]
The Citizens United decision allowed corporations to use money from their treasuries for candidate advocacy, not direct donations to candidates. Some argue the decision has not released a torrent of political spending by corporations, thinking narrowly of the Fortune 500. But they overlook the new use of corporate nonprofits (particularly secretive c-4s) as front groups [...]
There’s lots in the daily news of the doings and undoings in the General Assembly and elsewhere, but you may have missed coverage about this new electioneering operation sponsored by the Ayn Rand-wing of the North Carolina business establishment. The mainstream press hasn't noticed yet. Public-interest investigator Greg Flynn reports that these White-Men-With-Too-Much-Money have hired [...]
US Supreme Court decisions hit home today in two ways (not counting the Court-blessed, corporate-funded slug fest now going on between surrogates of North Carolina’s Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates). A lower court today ruled that the rescue funds provision of NC’s public campaign financing programs are illegal, because of the US Supreme Court’s decision [...]