Does this report from Haaretz make anyone uncomfortable? I bet it will.
American billionaire Sheldon Adelson, close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and owner of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom, has given $5 million to an independent group backing Newt Gingrich’s presidential bid.
A person familiar with the situation said Adelson — founder and majority owner of Las Vegas-based company that owns Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem — made the contribution Friday to Winning Our Future, a pro-Gingrich super PAC. The person said Adelson would spend heavily to assist whichever candidate wins the Republican nomination.
In case you think the Gingrich Super PAC stole the president’s “Winning the Future” motto, it’s actually the other way around. The Super PAC cannot legally coordinate with the Gingrich campaign, but they also do not need to reveal their donors. In this case, Mr. Adelson wanted it known that he was financing Gingrich’s Super PAC.
I can tell you, as someone who has been personally responsible for getting thousands of unregistered voters on the voting rolls and then making sure most of them showed up at the polls, you don’t really change election outcomes by just showing up and casting your lonely vote. You change outcomes by mobilizing people. Back in 2004, I remember having the feelling that a single video tape release from Usama bin-Laden in the last week of the campaign had the effect of wiping out all my efforts. Yes, I produced thousands of votes for John Kerry in Pennsylvania, but one viral video moved the polls by quite a bit more than that. That’s the power of video imagery. That’s the power of political advertising. One individual with the money or influence to get their video on the air has the power to neutralize an army of community organizers. This was a problem before the Citizens United decision, but it’s completely demoralizing in the decision’s aftermath.
Gingrich felt the sting of this in Iowa, where Romney’s Super PAC bombarded him. Now his Super PAC is fighting back, mainly on the strength of one rabidly pro-Likud gambling magnate’s $5 million check.
The advertisements, a counterpunch to a campaign waged against Mr. Gingrich by a group backing Mr. Romney, will be built on excerpts from a scathing movie about Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney once ran. The movie, financed by a Republican operative opposed to Mr. Romney, includes emotional interviews with people who lost jobs at companies that Bain bought and later sold.
“We had to load up the U-Haul because we done lost our home,” one woman says.
I suppose it’s fair game for Gingrich to fight back, but we have to change this system. It’s absolutely corrosive. The principle of one person, one vote is completely undermined by this kind of campaign financing. It’s particularly troubling when the donor has such close ties and big investments in a foreign country and clearly wants to influence the election so that the U.S. will have a pro-Likud president. How would we feel if this was a Chinese-American businessman who was best friends with the Chinese premier?
This system stinks, and we need a Supreme Court that will overrule Citizens United or people or just going to give up on the political system and either become apathetic or take to the streets.
Campaign finance, K-street, GOP right-wingers,the middle east,climate change, the tea party,the Evangelicals, Wall Street,Faux News, and Corporate America all make me uncomfortable. But my bad back and getting old really make me uncomfortable. Guess there is a time for everything.
You may have felt that way, but you were wrong. Polls move that much all by themselves, no videos necessary.
The typical mistake is in assuming that polls are data and that they represent some sort of estimate of what would happen “if the election were held tomorrow”, but they don’t.
Polls are at best imperfect measurements of what people are thinking “right now”. And if “right now” doesn’t involve standing in front of an actual voting machine, people toy with the idea of voting for other candidates.
Bush did as well as he was predicted to do in 2004. He didn’t exceed the expectations of anyone who actually studies politics.
Yes, however, he was aided by the Swift Boaters. He was aided by a last-minute video from UBL. He didn’t win just because he had a team out there in the field. The images and messages people hear matter a tremendous amount. Community organizing is the way to balance that out, but the scales have tipped against us.
Swift Boaters were an explicit part of the campaign against John Kerry. They weren’t some out of the blue event that threw the election.
The UBL tapes were bin Laden’s way of letting the world know he was still alive. Only in some twisted Beltway view of the world would that have been good news for Bush. Any person who saw that tape and thought “I’m glad we have George Bush in the White House” was already going to vote for Bush. My guess is that there were at least as many voters thinking “Why the hell haven’t we caught this guy yet?”.
Now Kerry could have made a point of that in the campaign, but he didn’t. In any case, the UBL tapes didn’t help Bush’s re-election at all. His biggest asset was running against an opponent who had stupidly voted for the Iraq war before he voted against it.
We’re already seeing the damage, it’s just not registering quite the same way on us because so far it’s only been hurting Republicans. But one of the major reasons that Romney is such a strong favorite to win the nomination is that he’s gotten so much assistance from SuperPACs, keeping him afloat and driving up the negatives of all his opponents. But having a nominee nobody actually likes because his rich friends kept buying elections for him isn’t actually good for the Republicans.
Meanwhile, here’s the wiki on Israel HaYom.
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A must read as Israel demonstrates how politicians operate on the coat tails of corporate moguls.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
The US is respectfully not perfect and very close to a flawed democracy. BooMan we were reading the same newspaper … Adelson must go viral only by the thought:
Optimistic? Believe Obama’s Grand ME Bargain
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Citizens United means any foreign corporation can buy a US election – think China, Saudi, Iran. When you reduce people to corporations and free speech to money, what do you expect?
It does.
It hasn’t.
They have.
They have.
They have.
And this isn’t 2004. It’s a mistake to fight the last war or even the second to last war.
Supreme Court or no, something will arise eventually that delegitimizes the Wall Street Media and the carpet bombing of political ads. Is it this year? Who knows?
Don’t let the febrility of the flu terrify you. This year it more true than ever that “Action removes the doubt that theory cannot solve.”
The notion that, going forward, we are going to be BURIED in totally scurrilous negative ads produced by giant faceless corporations from distant locations should terrify everyone, R, D, or I.
In SD, in 2010, we had Steph Herseth-Sandlin (SHS) running against Kristi Noem (KN). I think that SHS was holding her own until about 3 weeks before the election. A CU-allowed PAC run by Norm Coleman out of MN began running TOTAL HITJOB ads on SHS, just as negative as possible. It really upped the negatives. The ads were horribly disgusting, and it was saturation carpet bombing.
Any money from any individual is simply overwhelmed by the corpobucks.
How can ANY person be happy with that situation?
And all for what? By the time the corp overlords finish with their remaking of America all the things that make it prosperous will be so degraded they will end up owning a broken shell.
Countries under the boot of our imperialism have asked this question for a long time:
BooMan,
You wrote, “[Y]ou don’t really change election outcomes by just showing up and casting your lonely vote.”
I couldn’t agree more.
And so I can’t and don’t vote in the expectation or even faint hope that I am thereby changing the outcome, nor can any sensible voter.
No doubt that’s why many people who actually have relevant and clear preferences don’t bother to vote.
Each of them controls only his or her own single vote and since it cannot actually make any difference to the outcome they just skip the trip to the polls.
If we want anything remotely approaching universal participation allowing election results to more plausibly measure and reflect the will of the people we need to both make voting easier and require it by law.