Sure they could.
You don’t think “manipulate” isn’t judgmental? “Influence” or simply “get their message out” would have been more neutral choices.
“Lack of accountability” presumes that they owe anyone “accountability” in the first place.
The funny part of this is that people like you accuse the Kochs of doing the same thing.
How curious all this is. Did you forget that you already tried responding to this whole post once before, and it didn’t go well? So now you’re giving it a second shot? 
Anyway, the first time you took a crack at responding to this you called it “nonsense”, but as I pointed out in my response, it was your own comment that was bullshit, since the Kochs are absolutely engaged in infiltrating colleges and universities with programs to promote their ideology exactly as I described. So now you’re merely declaring that you’re “not sure” that this larger agenda is what the Kochs want. I guess that’s progress. But as cited here, it is indeed exactly what they want.
Good, because I’m not out to stifle anybody’s speech. But understand this. Campaign finance laws in the US go back well over a century, and they were a response to the corruption and scandals of much of the 19th century. Today every modern democracy in the world including the US places some limitations on political spending. The idea that “money is speech” is an audacious fiction fabricated by the Gang of Three hardline SCOTUS conservatives spearheaded by Scalia for the express purpose of systematically dismantling those laws.
And this audacious fiction leads to precisely the kinds of things we’re seeing, with the Koch’s AFP effectively appropriating control of the Republican Party. It’s right back to the political wild west of the 19th century that 100 years of reform tried to curtail. With the demise of Scalia hopefully the unraveling has ended and the madness at SCOTUS will be mitigated by a saner appointee.
I realize from prior conversations that trying to engage with you on the topic of political spending is futile so I’m no longer going to waste my time trying to do so. My parting comment is to suggest that you read the Mayer book, which I know you will never do, because it’s never comfortable having a hardcore ideology shaken up by facts.
The description is about as “judgmental” as a dictionary. I’m terribly sorry that the description of the process of hiding the source of donations so they can be used to secretly influence public policy ends up sounding like it might be a bad thing. But that’s what dark money is, by definition. Deal with it.
Yes, those Elders and their Protocols certainly are nefarious, aren’t they? I’m sure glad the [del]Okhrana[/del] Completely Unbiased Free Press blew the lid off that one.
We can’t really seriously begin to heal the damage while Roberts lives.
So many heated opinions and no one bothered to read the text. We live today in this soup of opinionated morons who are militantly unread, and thoroughly & proudly ignorant.
Could someone here kindly READ THE BOOK.
“hack job” really you are just pathetic, juvenile, brainless.
You are absolutely 100% wrong about the meaning of the title “Dark money.”
There is NOT a single sentence, phrase, word, suggestion or hint in the entire 600 pps of your incredibly foolish interpretation of the phrase. It DOES NOT suggest anything illigit or illegal.
Would some one here please actually read the damn book.
I guess the “dope” in the site title stands for more than I ever imagined it might.
Dear Iamnotivan,
I realize that last comment #46 was directed to Brian, but in this one you seemed for some reason to be disparaging everyone who posted in this thread.
From the book in question, Chapter 9, “Money is Speech: The Long Road to Citizens United”:
… as critics had warned, more and more of the money flooding into elections was spent by secretive nonprofit organizations that claimed the right to conceal their donors’ identities. Rich activists such as Scaife and the Kochs had already paved the way to weaponize philanthropy. Now they and other allied donors gave what came to be called dark money to nonprofit “social welfare” groups that claimed the right to spend on elections without disclosing their donors. As a result, the American political system became awash in unlimited, untraceable cash.
In striking down the existing campaign-finance laws, the courts eviscerated a century of reform. After a series of campaign scandals involving secret donations from the newly rich industrial barons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, progressives had passed laws limiting spending in order to protect the democratic process from corruption …
You will note that this corresponds exactly with how I defined dark money and some of the comments I made about campaign finance reform.
Best regards,
Someone who has read the damn book
Except there is no evidence that big money primarily promotes right-wing causes. The evidence is that the big donors primarily promote the Democratic Party and liberal causes.
I assume from this that you haven’t read the cites in #5, the quotes in #27, the cites in #32, the quotes in #33, my comments in #35, the quote in #47, or the book that this whole damn thread is about.
[Quote=wolfpup]
“Over-criminalization: Removing Legal Barriers to Opportunity” is slightly more complicated. The Kochs have long realized that they have a PR problem that is discouraging new donors to their many political initiatives, and they’ve also been repeatedly blasted by senior government officials like Harry Reid. So in part, they do have a criminal justice initiative that is a cynical PR effort like those of the elder Rockefeller and the other robber barons to superficially redeem themselves with an image makeover. But this nifty euphemism can also refer to their longstanding desire to stop the government from regulating businesses and criminalizing things like safety and environmental violations. Koch Industries is one of the most egregious violators of environmental regulations and has been subject to record fines for repeated violations. Either way, does anyone seriously believe that the Kochs are suddenly and genuinely concerned about the prison population?
[/quote]
Yes, I believe it. Is there any factual reason that I shouldn’t? You call their efforts to fight against overcriminalization and mass imprisonment “a cynical PR effort”. What proof can you offer that that’s true?
The leaders of the major parties have been passing laws for decades that make more and more things illegal, lengthen prison terms, and reduce chances for parole. This scarcely needs a cite; Bill Clinton’s defence of the crime bill he signed has been all over the news. The USA has the largest prison population in the world.
The Koch brothers have been supporting organizations that work to fight against mass imprisonment and overcriminalization. The most logical and obvious conclusion would be that they believe America’s prison system is immoral and harmful, and that they want to reduce the human suffering it causes, unlike Bill Clinton and his ilk.
Actually I have read most of them, and haven’t found any evidence backing your claim that “big money primarily promotes right-wing causes”. Instead I’ve found evidence that proves your claim wrong. In #32 there’s a link to an article with a graph comparing total amounts of money for Republican and Democratic groups, and the Democratic groups have more. This agrees with the list I linked to in my first post. So we have two cites documenting that the majority of big-money organizations prefer Democrats, none that say otherwise.
This is what makes the whole “fear the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil Koch brothers” schtick so ridiculous. The Koch brothers are conservative billionaires who donate to causes that support their ideas. Apparently the New York Times thinks that I should be so afraid of this that I pee in my pants. But there are also liberal billionaires who donate to causes that support their ideas. Plenty of them. If I should tremble in fear of any rich person who promotes a cause, I should be very afraid of the left.
If that’s what you got out of that article, then you need to go back and read what it actually says. It might help to remove your partisan blinders and set them aside for a rest, and just read English words for their actual and intended meaning.
What the article shows, as I plainly summarized over here, is that Democratic funding is going to the party institutions, whereas more and more Republican funding is being redirected to private and extremist causes like the Kochs’ AFP organization, pulling the GOP even further to the right than even the McConnells and the Ryans would ever be comfortable with. And then the other evidence builds the case for the vast network of other initiatives this dark money is engaged in, everything from climate change denial to the business of establishing a “talent pipeline” of higher-ed programs to turn out a procession of libertarian drones formed in the Koch image and steeped in their values.
Seriously, make a small investment and read the damn book.
Do you know what the article doesn’t show? It doesn’t show that billionaires as a whole give more money to conservative than liberal causes.
You appear to agree that in direct contributions to political parties and candidates, a large majority of the biggest spenders support the Democrats. You then say that the Koch brothers give money not directly to the Republican Party, but to their private foundation, think tanks, education programs, and so forth.
Do you think there aren’t liberal foundations and liberal think tanks and liberal education programs, all funded by liberal millionaires and billionaires? Are you familiar with the Ford Foundation, the Link Foundation, and more than 100 others? What is the budget of the Ford Foundation? How does it compare to the budgets of the Koch Foundations?
Forceful argumentation is permitted in this forum.
Personal insults are not.
This is a Warning that your posts, here, and in the following,
are violations of the rule. Do not do this again.
[ /Moderating ]
You’re either missing the point or being disingenuous about it.
It’s very much analogous to the situation with university funding, where some feel that it’s OK that the Kochs are funding all these far-right libertarian programs since it offsets what many perceive as the “liberalism” of universities. But whatever intrinsic political leanings may be perceived in academia, they have developed naturally and largely independent of outside forces, merely the result of an analytical discourse about ideas, supported by foundational principles of academic freedom like tenure. What the Kochs are doing is inserting ideologically directed propagandizing into this environment with specific and explicitly stated outcomes in terms of long-term social and policy change. It’s the equivalent of one classroom teaching an academic subject like physics or chemistry and another classroom across the hall being a very long ongoing series of infomercials about the glories of libertarianism.
So you can argue til you’re blue in the face that the total money that governments and alumni are giving to universities greatly exceeds what the Kochs are giving, but the former money is going to universities to do what they do: teach academic classes, fund laboratories, pay their staff, and heat their buildings. The latter money is going to universities to direct ideology and train Koch ideologues. Do you see the difference? No, I don’t imagine you do.
And so it is with political funding. It’s not the number of dollars, it’s how the dollars are earmarked. Proof, you say? The proof is that the Democratic Party remains the Democratic Party, while the GOP is being torn asunder by a violent pull to the right by the very forces I’m describing. And while the violent lurch to the right is fairly recent, the gradual shifting to the right has been going on for decades.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Seriously, while the political goals of the Kochs are wrong, their use of private funding to leverage those goals is not.
You’re confused. I didn’t say they aren’t. I’m saying it’s bullshit to say that any instance of using money for speech is wrong. I don’t care about anything else.
So you are out to stifle speech - any speech that involves spending money.
It is futile, because your argument is shit. You look at some speech, see that it has money behind it, declare that it’s not “fair” and want to limit it. You can pretend it’s not really about the speech all you want, but of course it is. There’s no logical way you can claim it isn’t. You don’t like the amount of speech someone has.
You may not limit spending on speech. Deal with it.
Your assigned reading is Alabama v. NAACP.
And you need to tell us your real name and address, “wolfpup.”
Then try to answer this question, honestly: Suppose you are organizing a prostest against dark money - a march on Washington. You form a group and recruit members who make donations to help. You spend money on fliers, internet ads etc. to put out notices. You spend money on buses and portapotties for the march. You spend money on a PA system, megaphones, signs, banners, buttons, etc. for the marchers. But before the march, the government passes a law banning all those expenditures, since money isn’t speech.
Are you okay with that? Yes or no? If not, why not? How is it different from your position on this issue?
That depends entirely on whether you believe in democracy or not, as opposed to rule by monarchy or plutocracy (same thing).
Democracy means even the plutocrats are allowed to promote their views. And in a democracy, we counter those views in the marketplace of ideas. Only authoritarians need to restrict their opponents’ influences by force of law.
Mayer’s book is an excellent example on how we can win while retaining our democratic ideals. If only it can be considered on its merits, instead of being used as a mud-slinging device.
The American political parties are too entrenched. Outside money is the most effective instrument to overturn party leadership. I think even Kochs’ will have difficulty exerting control over whatever the Republicans transform* into. And I’m guessing many Democrats are happy about the outsider influence being asserted in their nomination process.
*insert Cthulhu joke here.