Indeed, more than half the funds raised by Republican candidates through June came from just 130 families.
.. By a very wide margin, ordinary Americans want to see Social Security expanded. But by an even wider margin, Americans in the top 1 percent want to see it cut. And guess whose preferences are prevailing among Republican candidates.
.. You often see political analyses pointing out, rightly, that voting in actual primaries is preceded by an “invisible primary” in which candidates compete for the support of crucial elites.
Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons
“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”
Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”
Scott Walker’s Wisconsin and the End of Campaign-Finance Law
To understand how the Wisconsin court came to this decision, Gableman is the ideal justice to focus on. As an undistinguished county trial judge, he was recruited by business organizations to run against Louis Butler, a liberal and the court’s only black member, in the 2008 election. He narrowly won, giving the conservatives a majority, in a campaign so ugly that the Wisconsin Judicial Commission brought charges against Gableman for “reckless disregard for the truth.” He had run TV ads that gave the false impression that Butler had tried “to put criminals on the street.” (In two reviews of the charges, Gableman was not sanctioned for reasons better explained by politics than logic.)
.. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, a liberal watchdog group in Wisconsin, Gableman would not have been elected without the support of Wisconsin Club for Growth, the state arm of the national Club for Growth, and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state chapter of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These two groups spent a total of $2.75 million on so-called issue ads during the campaign, more than five times what the Gableman campaign spent. They are, as the center noted, the “same groups that allegedly coordinated with Walker and brought the challenge to these coordination rules.”
.. A September 7, 2011, e-mail from Doner to Walker, Johnson, Rindfleisch, and Keith Gilkes, who ran Walker’s 2010 campaign to be governor, became the governor’s chief of staff, and was a senior adviser to the 2012 recall campaign, containing “quick thoughts on raising money for Walker’s possible recall efforts.” Doner suggested the following for Wisconsin Club for Growth: “Take Koch’s money.” “Get on a plane to Vegas and sit down with Sheldon Adelson. Ask for $1m now.” “Corporations. Go heavy after them to give.”
The Only Realistic Way to Fix Campaign Finance
. Under a plan by Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, contributions could be matched up to nine to one, for candidates who agree to accept only small donations.
.. But solving the crisis in our democracy will not be cheap or easy. We won’t end the corruption of a system beholden to the funders until we, the citizens, are the funders.