Walks the talk. No PAC. No SuperPac.
Raw Story Debunking the big `Bernie Sanders has a SuperPAC’ lie.
For decades, a watch phrase for journalists and the public was, “Follow the money.” How quaint. It was never all that simple, but at least during the public financing phase of presidential elections and donation limits for federal candidates, it was possible to get a halfway decent sense of where the money came from. Now? Forget it.
As a primer, using a real candidate and real donors, on the twisted money trail paths, The Intercept has just published an excellent four-part article beginning with The Citizens United Playbook
Don’t worry HillFans — the subject candidate is a Republican; just not the one you loathe most today. So, you can read it for the content without fear of getting heart palpitations and/or any impulse to declare that it’s rightwing garbage (or propaganda that Putin created).
Democrats, at least at the ordinary citizen/voter level, don’t support the SCOTUS Citizen’s United decision. But, where were they/we when:
If Congress wanted to do something about foreign money in elections, it could have passed the DISCLOSE Act of 2010, which would have prohibited corporations with greater than 20 percent foreign ownership from putting money into the U.S. political process. But the act failed when first introduced, even with Democrats controlling the House and Senate. And this foreign ownership provision was stripped out of the most recent version of the bill.
The article goes on with: Donald Tobin, dean of the University of Maryland Law School, noted at a June 23 FEC event on the subject of foreign money in elections, that there were easy ways for foreigners to get around the Act. But that only reveals that the Act wasn’t as well drafted as it needs to be.
One component of the 2016 primary cycle that has infuriated Bernie supporters is the complacency, if not the total hypocrisy, of HRC supporters on this issue. Principles not acted on are just words with no value. Once tasted, just like drugs, it’s hard to quit anything that leads to pleasure, power, money, etc. Bernie’s no PAC position was more than symbolic. It reflected who he is and what his priorities would have been when in office.
Sunlight Foundation: David Brock’s PAC operations. (Brock is like Democratic/Clinton Rove on steriods.)
Public Integrity –Inside Hillary Clinton’s big-money cavalry
Clinton is going to squander political capital on a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizen’s United? Yeah, sure. Even if it got through Congress, how many state legislatures are going to ratify it? Would anyone be willing to stake their life on the fact that no foreign money has made its way into any HRC PAC? (Much easier to do and have it remain undetected then when they were busted on such funding in the past.) I wouldn’t wager that none has made its way into one of Trump’s PACs either.
The Brooklyn Nets is an LLC. Wouldn’t be difficult to shuttle money from there to any polical candidate. Not saying that has happened. Wouldn’t know to whom such money would be contributed. It’s just one of a huge number of entities that could. And if it did and the money went to Trump, the howls from the Clinton campaign would be deafening.