Is big money in politics a problem today? Well, this statistic just sums it up nicely: in the 2012 election, the top 0.04 percent of donors gave about as much as the bottom 68 percent. Yikes. In this book, Kenneth Vogel shows us just how huge this problem is. And then came the Citizen’s United decision by SCOTUS. This just blew the lid off the can. Just three months later, we see the ruling of a lower federal court with SpeechNow.org vs. Federal Election Commission that paved the way for a new breed of political committee. The new groups came to be known as super PACs.
Just two and a half years later, we see how Karl Rove began positioning himself to take advantage. We see the beginning of Freedom Watch, which provided a model for “Crossroads and everything that came later.” To give you an idea of the money involved in these endeavors, Koch’s Americans for Prosperity’s budget soared from around $2 million in 2004 (when it was created) to $40 million in 2010. My head is spinning now. Some donors wanted anonymity. No problem. In the case of Crossroads, they just created a spin off group under a different name and registered it as a nonprofit under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code which allowed it to accept anonymous donations. Now the money trail has gone dark – fabulous.
On the Democratic side we see the development, in 2005, of an organization called Democracy Alliance to solicit big donors for the left wing causes. Other groups are formed, such as the nonprofit American Votes, Priorities USA and a private company called Catalist that assembled a massive voter database. The build-up on the right became so overwhelming, however, that even President Obama had to concede to using big donor organizations because the political reality made it impossible not to.
The author spends some time discussing the use of big money particularly in the Mitt Romney campaign. It was during his campaigning that the Citizen’s United case was decided by the Supreme Court greatly facilitating the use of big money in politics. Later on, we learn about the formation of some key organizations that facilitated the inflow of big money such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, both offshoots of Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy. The author delves into the 2012 election to show us just how much money was spent electing candidates and pushing propaganda. For example, if you count all the traceable money spent by all candidates, parties, and outside groups, you get a figure hovering around $7 billion. Wow! And this spending was having consequences – remember the government shutdown? Can you imagine the difficulty of a candidate running without the support of big money anymore?
Big money will continue to shape politics in the near future. The interesting question is: how will it all play out, and for whose benefit?
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Big Money is investigative reporting at its best. Vogel pulls together data and interviews that richly ...
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