More on secret corporate cash

Ed Stein's commentary:

The import of the Supreme Court’s drastic over-reach in the Citizens United case is coming painfully clear. Tens of millions of dollars in anonymous campaign contributions are pouring in to groups free to spend on this election with absolutely no accountability for where the money came from. Groups with innocuous names like The American Future Fund are bankrolling attack ads, mostly against Democrats. Who is behind the AFF? according to todays’ New York Times, the group was started with seed money from one Bruce Rastetter, chief exec of one of the country’s largest ethanol companies. The fund’s targets? Primarily politicians on legislative committees with interests in ethanol subsidies. There is no way of knowing how much Rastetter and his colleagues in the industry have contributed, since AFF doesn’t have to report its funding sources. And AFF is just one of dozens of groups active in this year’s election.

Before someone jumps in and names George Soros and unions on the Democratic side, let me point out two things. One, I’m talking about the anonymity of contributions; I don’t care who is putting up the money; the lack of transparency is an outrage. Second, by all accounts, the largest portion of the money being spent this year is from conservative groups with, we assume, ties to corporate entities with vested interests in the outcome. As of the first of this month, the amount spend on Republican candidates totaled $74.6 million, compared to $39.7 for Democrats–almost twice as much. The activist Roberts Court certainly anticipated this outcome when it brazenly decided that corporations possess the same free speech rights as people. The Court knew that the Republican party would be the big winner, and the money is flowing like oil from the Deep Water Horizon spill–with no relief well in sight. It’s not just the money inequality that should disturb us, although that alone should trouble us all; it’s that so much of it is secret. Congress attempted to address this issue with the Disclose Act, but it was filibustered to death by–you guessed it–Republicans. How can we possibly know what we are really voting for when we don’t know who is bankrolling candidates? This is, in my humble opinion, nothing short of a disaster for free and fair democratic elections in this country.

This is a followup to my last post. At least there are a few people objecting to this situation, if not actually able to accomplish anything. The money is bad enough. Do we really want to sell our political process to the highest bidder? But the anonymity is even worse, far worse.

When we have an organization bankrolled - in secret - by big ethanol companies, targeting politicians who set government subsidies for these companies, what is it but legal blackmail? (And note that it's only legal because our far-right Supreme Court overturned precedent.) When any politician knows he can get millions of dollars of support - in secret, no less - from big corporate interests if he does their bidding, and millions of dollars of opposition - pretending to be from ordinary citizens - if he doesn't, what do you expect to happen?

There's more. Why have Republicans turned away from science? The whole party has become anti-science. Partly, no doubt, this is because fundamentalist Christians have taken control of the GOP. But how much of it is also the influence of corporate dollars from interests like Big Oil?

You know, as the scientific evidence for global warming gets stronger and stronger, belief in the science among laymen continues to drop. According to this study, only 18% of Republicans accept the scientific consensus about global warming, and only 14% think it's a serious issue. How much of this is due to corporate money - not just issue advertising from Big Oil, but the effect of corporate money on politicians who really, really want to get elected?

We went through all this years ago with Big Tobacco. Tobacco industry lobbyists and pet scientists put up a smokescreen to make the scientific consensus about tobacco seem controversial and unproven, delaying action against a public health scourge. Why haven't we learned from that? Well, Big Oil has apparently learned from it, huh?

Here's Bill McKibben:

Conservative opinion has been steadily hardening—for decades Republicans were part of the coalition on almost every environmental issue, but now it’s positively weird to think that as late as 2004, McCain thought it would make sense for a GOP presidential candidate to position himself as a fighter for climate legislation. And all of that is troubling. Because we’re going to be dealing with climate change for a very long time, and if one of the great schools of political thought in this country has checked out completely, that process is going to be even harder. I don’t have any expectation that conservatives will mute their tune between now and November—but it is worth thinking in some depth about what lies beneath this newly overwhelming sentiment.

One crude answer is money. The fossilfuel industry has deep wells of it—no business in history has been as profitable as finding, refining, and combusting coal, oil, and gas. Six of the ten largest companies on earth are in the fossil-fuel business. Those companies have spent some small part of their wealth in recent years to underwrite climate change denialism: Jane Mayer’s excellent New Yorker piece on the Koch brothers is just the latest and best of a string of such exposés dating back to Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 book The Heat Is On.

McKibben thinks this is only part of the answer, and he might be right. But the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, which really opened the floodgates to corporate spending, is less than a year old. We're just starting to see the results from that. If things are this bad already, what can we expect in the future?

And things are bad, very bad. It's not just global warming, but all of science. Republicans think it's all some massive conspiracy by evil scientists and their Communist/Muslim overlords (ironically, right-wing Republicans see the world pretty much the same way fundamentalist Muslims do). And Republican leaders seem to be even worse than the rank and file.

Christine O'Donnell - a Republican nominee for the United States Senate, no less - thinks that scientists have cross-bred humans and mice to create mice with "fully functioning human brains." Funny? Yes. But scary, too. She also rejects evolution because she's not seeing monkeys evolving into human beings before her eyes. Now that is scientific ignorance!

But she's not alone, far from it. The entire Republican Party is anti-science. Unfortunately, scientists don't have massive amounts of money to throw at them. And the fat cats and corporations who do have that kind of money have a vested interest in keeping Americans ignorant - not just of science but of their own identities.

Well, for them, all this is just an investment. Those of us who give meager campaign donations sacrifice by doing so. But billionaires give millions in order to get tax cuts worth tens of millions. Corporations do it to evade regulation and also for the tax cuts that benefit upper management (who control the purse strings and who aren't above using corporate cash to help themselves).

Money is the motivation here, and money is the method. Vast sums of money pouring into our political process is bad enough. But now that it's secret money from unknown sources, it's far, far worse. Will we ever see principled Republicans standing up and objecting? Will we see independents coming to their senses and abandoning the GOP? Or will we only see Democrats trying to jump on the gravy train, too, in political self-preservation?

I'm not optimistic.