I don’t recall liberals wanting to restrict the first amendment but let’s leave that tangent behind.
What is it that the Kochs stand for, other than reducing their tax burden and rolling back regulations to the 1880s?
Wow, I had no idea your opinion of liberals was so positive; usually you come across quite differently.
To conclude: In contrast to liberals, conservatives tend to be results-hating. They rarely need anything done, and they never actually get anything done. They are the party of stasis and stagnation.
It’s not a tangent. It’s an integral part of any discussion on the Koch Bros election activities.
Saying that liberals don’t want to restrict the 1st amendment only makes sense if you’re already assuming a very narrow view of the 1st amendment in the first place. Since liberals oppose current 1st amendment jurisprudence as it pertains to political speech, and they opposed that jurisprudence even before Citizens United, and because they want a constitutional amendment that goes WAY beyond just undoing Citizens United, it’s accurate to say that they want to restrict the 1st amendment.
To be fair, liberals don’t want to restrict the First Amendment for everybody - just for conservatives. Hence this thread - nobody cares about George Soros making money by going short against collapsing currencies and donating tens of millions to liberals. If Soros donates to 527 organizations to get around McCain-Feingold, somehow that gets overlooked. But the Koch brothers spending money on conservative or libertarian causes are cause for hysterics.
:shrugs:
Twas ever thus. “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”
Regards,
Shodan
I only think that’s partly true. They do support “fair” laws that restrict a certain type of political advocacy that just HAPPENS to hurt conservative advocacy more than liberal advocacy. But at least on paper it would restrict Soros and Steyer as much as the Kochs and Adelson.
only 900 million?
This. The thread and the NY Times piece are scare tactics. Democrats receive just as much “big money” as Republicans if not more. However, its always convenient to demonise the Kochs. It’s all part of the Democrats own fundraising campaign. I wonder how many Democrat fundraising calls are being put out right now using this “threat” as bait?
What they would ultimately want, at least in the case of the more excitable ones, is to figure out some way to pass a law that says “no one shall advocate for any Bad Cause if it has any chance of affecting an election”. Since it is an article of faith that anything conservative or libertarian is a Bad Cause, that means that Soros and unions and reliably liberal groups get a pass, Republicans and libertarians are prevented from their eeeevil schemes, and we can let the Nazis march in Skokie and pat ourselves on the back for liberalism (since they have no chance of achieving anything except some martyrs who get arrested for counter-protesting).
Most of the rest is selective attention - Soros and Steyer pass under the radar, and the Koch brothers trigger outrage by doing it more and better. Because Koch donations could affect the elections.
Let’s hope so, at least.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes it is.
Hooray for the Koch brothers.
I guess Obama could hit up the Hollyweird elite for a few more hundred million in donations?
This goes both ways with either side of the spectrum or party, I’d agree with **adaher ** but it describes some liberals/conservatives, both yours and his description.
A consumption tax is a tax on consumption spending. Examples include state sales taxes and European VATs. Progressive means the marginal rate is higher at higher levels of consumption. You listed complaints about wasteful spending given very large amounts of spending, and then you waxed hopeful for some re-distribution that would lessen things like bunga-bunga parties and mega yachts. This kind of tax applies to exactly the kind of wasteful consumption spending you were talking about. It’s literally the most direct way to do it.
This spending is not any different. If I buy a megaphone for a demonstration, I will pay a sales tax (a consumption tax) on that purchase. The political speech isn’t being taxed but the consumption purchase is. I don’t see the point in any exception for people with big-ass megaphones.
I wouldn’t want to target one kind of consumption spending over any other. But if people want to consume nearly a billion dollars worth of resources in one go, then it’d be sensible to have higher rates when consumption becomes that extravagant. This is a race to the bottom. Everyone could spend a quarter as much with identical results, but since there’s a marginal gain from a relative advantage of spending, the numbers climb upward. Even the more conventional consumption spending of the wealthy is much like this, where the real status advantage is relative rather than absolute size. This is exactly the sort of waste we know how to mitigate.
Obama has held multiple fundraisers at the home of a Wall Street billionaire named “Rich Richman”. You can’t say he’s not trying to bring in vast amounts of money from rich people.
I’d like to see all of that money subtracted from the equation, no matter which side benefits from it.
Still, 900 million from a single source is an astounding figure.
As I pointed out a few years back, this has become the last big gravy train for the old media and it is becoming also the one for the new one.
The biggest beneficiaries of Citizens United are the ones that will concentrate on making this a horse race (it is very important that both sides are seen as having a good chance to win) so as to get a good chunk of all that money.
The media that will take most of that money can be counted also on the ongoing efforts efforts to sanitize what the Koch companies and the politicians in their pockets are doing.
PastTense’s title for this thread, “Koch Brothers to Spend $900 Million on 2016 Elections”, is not true. The political organization they work with is planning to spend that amount, but it comes from a great many donors, not just the two of them.
Ugh, at least some of this garbage has already been corrected.
For one, the Kochs are not spending $900m on the 2016 elections. Their organization is (as ITR champion points out), and their organization genuinely has a ton of like minded donors. It’s not a scenario where $450m or $500m is coming from the Kochs and the rest from the donors, but rather the Kochs are giving a smallish sum of the whole (in context of the whole it’s still millions.)
There are websites that show spending on elections, and I’ve actually pointed out that election spending is the wrong boogeyman to go after the Kochs about. I don’t believe they were even in the top ten of private spenders on elections in 2012, Sheldon Adelson was by far number one. The Kochs spend a lot of money to influence politics, but they spread it around to a lot of different type of organizations, and certainly not just to campaign related organizations. In fact of the big spenders on conservative causes the Kochs aren’t in the top five who spend on campaign related stuff.
Further, that NY Times article is full of inaccuracies (like the $400m in Koch spending on 2012 elections) that suggest it shouldn’t be taken seriously. OpenSecrets.org lists out PAC spending for 2012, no PAC spent $400m. What does the New York Times mean by the Koch “network?” It also lists out donations by individuals to candidates, parties, PACs, 527 and Carey committees. The Koch’s total donations to these groups is so low that on OpenSecrets.org they do not even appear in the “Biggest Spenders” table which lists the top 100 (of both sides) individual spenders in 2012. Number 100 was Robert Parsons of GoDaddy.com who gave $1,050,000 to conservative causes. Again, this covers candidate donations, party donations, donations to PACs, 527 and Carety commitees. The Kochs are spending money, but I think the New York Times are trying to link all Koch advocacy and political spending to campaign spending–something that frankly is illegitimate and untrue. OpenSecrets.org is not at all a right leaning site, and it reasonably links actual campaign spending to campaigns, it wisely doesn’t restrict itself just to party/candidate donations/spending since that would ignore soft money and all other kinds of outside spending, but only through a ludicrously broad interpretation that is outright lying could the New York Times come up with its figures.
Citizens United precisely shows the problem with trying to control spending and the threat that it represents to free speech. That case was about a Hillary documentary that was judged to have come out "too close to an election"by flawed and unconstitutional Federal election law. Citizens United was a great democratizing decision. The Democrats hate it because the old regime catered to two special interests–corporations and unions, because both were capable of controlling a large flow of money. After Citizens United the importance of individuals grew immensely, and the Democrats hate that because their policies are hated by individual rich people at a high rate. In a corporation versus labor battle the Democrats were comfortable enough with their performance, but when you give individual citizens an ability to go around these pass through special interests and directly impact the political process you have entrenched Democratic union slaves spreading lies all over the Internet that of course the SDBM is super happy to lick up like a dog licking up gravy off the floor.
Money isn’t speech, but organizing is. Money isn’t speech, but making documentaries is. Money isn’t speech, but direct mailing is. Money isn’t speech, but rallies and ground events are. Money isn’t speech, but newspaper advertisements are.
You cannot ignorantly claim money isn’t speech and then use that mantra to infringe on speech across a huge range of mediums, which is what the ignorant donation limits do. I’m honestly not even in favor of the limits on candidate contributions, but I can at least see how those are acceptable–direct donations to a candidate or a party are not speech and while I disagree with them being regulated, I accept its constitutional validity. But banning private citizens from spending money on organizations that come together to advocate for the political outcomes they want is anathema to a free state.
You’ll note that each of those types of speech I listed have something in common, in that by and large one person using those mediums for speech doesn’t deny anyone else the same medium. The only one that sort of does is the newspaper, as there is some theoretical limit to how many advertisements a newspaper can carry, but given the huge number of newspapers and even the relatively easy way of creating your own newsletter or blog or whatever I’m not concerned with spending on news advertisements. What I didn’t mention was radio or television advertisements. Advertising on those certainly is speech. However, due to the realities of the broadcast spectrum there is genuinely only so much of it to go around. Spectrum is a public resource, regulated by the government. Spending on television advertisements is typically the single biggest line item in a campaign’s expenditure and the largest driver of increased campaign spending cycle to cycle. While I’m strongly opposed to limiting free spending on organizing activities and limiting the forms of speech those organizations engage in, the one type of speech that is truly a limited resource–television and radio broadcasts, is fundamentally different.
Unlike frankly unconstitutional prohibitions on the free behavior of private organizations during an election, a very constitutional and appropriate action would be for the government to simply require an allotment of time (sold at fair market rates) to each candidate on the airwaves. It would be capped at a very low amount, and neither side could get more time than the other by spending money. This copies a model found in Britain that works quite well, money isn’t unimportant in British politics but because political advertising on the airwaves is extremely limited by law, and because neither side can spend to get more of it than the other side, Britain avoids a tremendous amount of trouble.
That’s the sort of campaign reform I’d be happy to see in the United States. But instead liberals just want to advocate for policies that will help their side and hurt the other, they do not care about free speech or they wouldn’t trample on the first amendment by limiting how free citizens organize, advocate, and spend for things like the making of documentaries (which in no way monopolize limited resources like the public airwaves.)
So, yeah, huh, those liberals are bad. And such and such. Good point.
The democrats are evil slaves bought and paid for by the unions, but the Koch organization’s massive largesse is nothing but beautiful, sweet and pure democracy in action. What a sick joke.
It was all they could dig out of the sofa cushions, OK?
Why did you put his name in quotes? Do you “think” it’s not “really” his “name”? Why do you think that, “ITR champion”? :dubious: