5/11/2011 - After Citizens United, big donors have poured money into a growing number of nonprofit Section 501(c)(4) organizations to finance political attack ads while remaining anonymous (e.g., Karl Rove’s Crossroads conduit). Now comes this irony: The anti-tax, anti-government donors may eventually get hit with a tax bill, courtesy of the IRS applying its gift [...]
Here are two insightful columns related to the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision in January 2010. One by Nick Nyhart and Tova Wang points out that the decision became a green light for a beefed-up assault on democratic values, particularly the right to self-organize, the right to vote, and the right to [...]
The Sunlight Foundation provides a valuable overview of President Obama's draft executive order that would require federal contractors to disclose their direct and indirect political spending. Indirect means donations made to other groups (like 527 committees, trade groups or c-4 organizations) with “the intention or reasonable expectation” that the money would be used for independent [...]
The Center for Public Integrity has just released an in-depth investigative report on the sprawling, worldwide business operations of the Koch family, patrons of far-right groups descending from the John Birch Society. Ironically, brothers David and Charles Koch are happy to take government subsidies and spend millions to lobby for special tax breaks and protection [...]
Noted constitutional law professor Richard Hazen (host of Election Law Blog) has written an essay for Slate that probes the rationale behind US Supreme Court rulings on cases involving political spending and contributions. The Court should protect the First Amendment “free speech” rights of individuals to support candidates, but it also must protect a free [...]
Here’s a sobering essay from Forbes magazine (“the capitalist tool”) about a two-pronged plan by the super-rich in the U.S. to gain even more political clout and wealth at the expense of the middle and working classes. Business publications (like Business Week and Fortune) are so much more straightforward in explaining how capitalism works than [...]
The evidence of inappropriate behavior is mounting: Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas not only attended an expense-paid strategy retreat with the Koch brothers and their corporate friends before the Citizens United ruling; it turns out that back in 1991 Citizens United spent $100,000 to support Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court. As [...]
Here’s a nifty video that makes sense of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision – and explains the need for a Constitutional amendment to clarify that corporations don’t have “free speech” rights as “people” to spend unlimited money buying elections. There are a number of other links from the site for Free Speech for People, [...]
How much did Art Pope and his co-conspirators spend to flip the General Assembly? The pro-business NC FreeEnterprise Foundation has crunched more numbers and concludes, “The total amount spent by 11 outside groups vying to influence the outcome of elections for the State Legislature was $2,635,297.86, with nearly 92 percent of those funds being used [...]
With the blessing of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the US Chamber of Commerce has become even more aggressive in spending corporate money on political ads to tilt elections in its favor. Now it turns out the Chamber hired a group of reconnaissance experts to develop a plan to spy on and disrupt its [...]