Rackets Science: The Influence Peddlers Protection Act of 2015 (H.R. 2029)
Plu-toc-ra-cy
1 Government by the wealthy.
2 A country or society governed in this way.
Christmastime for Plutocrats
Political scientists need a new sub-specialty to describe the end of
year extravaganzas that influence peddlers and special interests have
made a Capital Christmas tradition: the
racket of wholesale plundering of government. Paraphrasing Willie Sutton, that’s where (the tax-farmed and public-debt) money is.
On Friday, December 18, 2015, Obama and Congress
processed
the plutocracy’s 2015 Christmas gift order at lightening speed. These
rented politicians jump right to attention when the owners are being
served. Who said government doesn’t work? Under Obama it purrs right
along smoothly, for plutocrats.
If there are Americans in need of more evidence that they live in a
plutocracy, where governing is just another racket run by what Bernie
Sanders calls “the billionaire class,” then the Influence Peddlers
Protection
Act of 2015 should provide. Technically known as the
Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, this law almost seems like piling on after last year’s similar year-end Bonanza for Plutocrats
Act of 2014 (known as CRomnibus”). All on the same day, the House and Senate approved H.R. 2029, Obama signed it into
law, and still had time left over for
propaganda
to make it sound like something that could plausibly be supported by
one holding the middle class values that he likes to speak about.
My
extensive piece last year
on this subject described how Obama and a majority of Senate Democrats
similarly connived to bypass ordinary legislative procedures to expedite
the 2014 appropriations bill. The 2014 “CRomnibus Act” could rank as
one of the most corrupt laws in United Sstates history. It increased the
amount of money that plutocrats can legally give to political parties
by a factor of ten. (It thereby enables plutocrats to finance, while
their
propaganda machine supports, the
DNC “finger on the scale”
effort to stop Bernie Sanders).
These large kickbacks to political parties were exchanged for the
favor of making taxpayers insure casino capitalists who are poised to
loose trillions in the next, inevitable, too-big-to-fail banking crisis.
I
wrote then: “The CRomnibus repeal of this ‘
swaps push-out rule‘
to withdraw federal insurance from this particular gambling table is
the most blatant of second Gilded Age economic recklessness, exceeding
even such Clinton era corruption as the repeal of Glass-Steagall.” As
described in that article, Obama lobbied for and signed the 2014 Act
when he could have obtained a clean appropriations bill by using his
veto power, as House Democrats wanted him to do. An Appropriations
Committee member
summed up the
quid pro quo
purpose of Obama’s 2014 handiwork: “’This bill is a one-two punch at
middle-class voters. It weakens financial regulation on big banks and
rewards Congress for doing so by increasing campaign donation limits of
big donors.”
Matt Taibbi,
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (2014)
70, describes Congress as “enabling the transformation of the world’s
biggest banks into bona fide organized crime operations” where no target
large enough to be worth their trouble, such as last year’s middle
class bank deposits, or this year’s government treasury, is exempt from
the political corruption racket. Congress’ repeal of the swaps push-out
rule, so as to give casino capitalist gamblers federal deposit insurance
and other federal benefits for banks guaranteed the eventual bankruptcy
of the essential New Deal reform for protecting ordinary bank
depositors.
Last year’s Christmas gift for plutocrats required some slight
financial understanding to foresee the threat of bail-in theft of middle
class bank deposits as a result of allowing the FDIC to be used as a
guarantor for Wall Street’s table stakes in the swaps markets.
But the racketeers got away clean last year without much comment. So
they came back for a repeat performance in broad daylight this year.
They only needed Obama’s continued support to succeed. The “
mascot
of the Wall Street oligarchs” did what he is paid to do, and artfully
obliged. He upped his game this year by promoting his handiwork for
plutocrats as a good thing, rather than just disguising his role.
Without going over the same ground again in the same detail as last
year to describe what the plutocrats are up to, and how their caper
works when Congress unbreaks itself momentarily for their bipartisan
felony fiesta, the rules of the game for this per se illegitimate form
of legislation can can be briefly stated.
Obama cuts the deal directly with the few party leaders who control
the flow of money and other benefits within the party. The process is
rigged to skip all the ordinary legislative steps. It is totalitarian in
its nature in that it issues a virtual decree without advance notice,
committee hearings, or much time for deliberation by legislators
responsible to the people, let alone knowledge by the people themselves.
Special interest lobbyists with their Christmas wish lists all show
up to the party at the end of the year, a week before Christmas, the
very end of the work week. Their wish list gifts all get attached to an
appropriations bill necessary to fund the government just prior to the
date it would otherwise shut down. The whole package becomes law before
the public has any opportunity to sort out the provisions on a variety
of different subjects.
Congress and Obama’s now annual Influence Peddlers Protection Acts
deliver their bipartisan Christmas goodies to plutocrats as if from a
down-the-chimney black-box form Santa’s special gift bag for special
interests, bypassing the normal legislative process where laws are
supposed to use the front door.
Here’s the tick-tock: The same
process used in 2014 was used again for the 2015 caper,
stripping an unrelated bill
of its content to use as a vehicle to be sent back over to the House
for substituting, this time, two interdependent amendments: Amendment #1
titled the
Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016 and Amendment #2 titled the
Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015,
which contained tax break “extenders.” The two amendments represented
the two halves of the basic extortion deal. One contained the tax
expenditures and the other appropriations for the government to stay
open. They were separate, since each amendment had different supporters.
But they were joined into one bill when sent back to the Senate and on
to Obama. This way Obama would have to accept both or neither, giving
him the excuse again that the Republicans made him swallow the large
amount of bad to get the little good in the bill. A veto would have
killed both amendments.
Amending an empty bill with respect to another much lesser matter
(H.R. 2029) that had already gone through whole the legislative process
short of final enactment, avoided the messy journey of taking the new
amendments for financing the whole government and for tax breaks through
the same subcommittee and committee vetting, mark-ups and hearing
process that the gutted bill took the better part of a year undergoing.
Debate could be limited to
2 hours in the House, the
total debate
allowed for this main legislative output of Congress for the whole
year. This process shuts down all discussion, debate, opposition, and
public input. Lobbyists, rather an open legislative process, produce
such a bill.
House Democrats
voted unanimously against the
resolution
to adopt this summary procedure. This was a deal between Obama, the
Speaker, and the Senate leaders, and eventually the House leaders, that
could not be stopped by dissenters in either party. On December 18,
2015, the House sent its two amendments of the Senate’s stuffed bill
back to the Senate for rubber stamping. There Bernie Sanders and a mixed
group of only 6 Democrats and 26 Republicans
voted against HR 2029.
Among the 37 Democratic votes that provided a filibuster-proof majority
for this bill to protect dark money by a margin of seven, were at least
seven Democrats who complain about “
unaccountable” money in politics, like Hillary Clinton does.
Thus plutocrats have turned the once-boring budget process for
funding the federal government into a swift act of larceny from the
taxpayers, while changing out the locks to make future larceny even
easier. Lobbyists get to stuff all the presents for special interests
they can pay for under their omnibus Yule tree called the Consolidated
Appropriations Act, while politicians get to receive secret payments for
these gifts and many more to come.
After
signing the Act, President Obama conducted one of his
rare press conferences
to soft sell it to the public. He sought to make it all sound normal,
“Just keep moving, nothing to see here.” Legislative circumvention which
last year the
Washington Post protested as
a “caricature of the deliberative process by which Congress is supposed
to approve appropriations” this year becomes, in Obama’s alternate
version of reality, “typical of American democracy.”
Not content with just signing the law under his usual pretense that
the Republicans made him do it – a dodge which seems to be wearing thin —
this year, according to
CNN,
“Obama called Ryan after the vote to thank him ‘for helping government
work,'” although even the Speaker was complaining about the process:
“Ryan repeatedly stressed he doesn’t like rolling up all the spending
bills, along with a myriad of policy provisions, into one measure.”
NYT
confirms he told reporters, “You know I don’t like this process,
right?” Short-cutting democratic process is Obama’s preference, designed
by him to instruct the leaders what Republican policies he will not
veto in order to serve Wall Street as discreetly as possible. This
approach makes it easier to defraud his supporters. Obama can almost
make Paul Ryan look good.
This year’s theft is more raw and comprehensible. In a nutshell the
basic deal was that to support a federal budget of $1.1 trillion,
Congress and Obama have awarded
tax-breaks mostly for special interests in an amount that will put the government another
$622 billion deeper in debt, not including the CBO-projected increase in spending over ten years of over
$57 billion. The cuts primarily benefit plutocrats though there was some window dressing – like
the “small-but-symbolic tax deduction” for teachers mentioned by
NYT – in order to reward some union, poverty and environmental
”non-profit industrial complex” constituencies, which they and Obama could talk up. “Just keep moving, please.”
Made simple, what Obama failed to mention is that plutocrats took
more than half the amount of the whole federal budget as their price,
payable in future
tax expenditures,
for allowing the government that they own to continue functioning. What
Bernie Sanders calls the “billionaire class” has taken over a formerly
public bridge by force of bribery and is now charging tolls worth half
its value to keep the non-military level of it functioning for civilians
another year. An open question is whether the federal government even
functions for the public as usefully as does a privatized bridge since
it is now used mainly to facilitate plundering expeditions against the
citizenry by its corrupt new owners.
Unlike last year, not only the company town
Washington Post rushed out reportage on these last minute shenanigans. This year others also have
covered this “orgy of predatory, omnivorous bipartisanship” in some detail. One piece exposed “
the truth of
inadequate government spending and conservative sabotage” reflected in
the levels of appropriations so diminished as to undermine government
missions. The general flavor of priorities was reflected in the proud
report of a
Republican supporter
who praised the law because it: 1) “Cuts EPA funding by $452 million
below the President’s budget request, holding the agency’s budget at 21%
below FY10 levels;” 2) contains “funding for the DOE’s Office of
Nuclear Energy at $986 million, an increase of $73 million above fiscal
year 2015 and $79 million above the President’s request.” and 3) “Denies
the administration’s request to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt II” which
had been requested by the Air Force
on cost grounds.
Steve Horn wrote an
excellent piece on a major global warming provision “
to end
the 40-year export ban” on US petroleum, which serves the twin public
policy goals of increasing the price at the pump for future American
consumers with the added bonus of increasing the global temperature too.
And then, barely worth remarking in the permanent war state, there is a declaration of war
hidden in there somewhere, according to Harvard expert on such things,
Jack Goldsmith.
“Congress is not calling its funding an authorization for the use of
force against ISIL, much less debating the authorization. But make no
mistake: The funding to continue the war against ISIL is an
authorization of force against ISIL, albeit a quiet one, designed not to
attract attention.
Who knows what else is in there seeking to avoid the disinfection effect of sunlight.”
In exchange for such favors for plutocrats in various sectors,
Congress has also included some gifts for themselves while they were in
the holiday mood. Like last year’s Christmastime for Wall Street
exercise, politicians captured a percentage rake by the house on the
gifts to plutocrats by prohibiting the forced disclosure of corporate
and others’ “dark money” political investments. More dark money will
produce more money for the incumbents’ who just voted for the tax
giveaways and other breaks.
Michael Hiltzik
described
in the LA Times how, “Two provisions buried in the 2,009-page bill …
emasculate efforts by the Internal Revenue Service and Securities and
Exchange Commission to force public disclosure of donations by
individuals and corporations.” They were so buried that Hiltzik missed a
third provision, equally important, that prevents the president from
using disclosure requirements for enforcing federal procurement law.
The procurement law should be used to ban independent political
investments in politicians by government contractors in accordance with
international best practice. Since government contractors are among the
largest racketeers this alone could solve much of the problem. The
long-existing
FECA provision, titled “
Contributions by government contractors,” prohibits contractors “directly or indirectly to make any contribution …to any person for any political purpose or use.”
52 U.S. Code § 30119(a)(1). “Dark money” independent expenditures enabled by
Citizens United
are mostly indirect contributions made in violation of this law. Obama
has not only refused to enforce this law against these largest of
corporations used by plutocrats for making political investments. “See
no evil” Obama has refused to even take the most modest step of
requiring such contractors to simply disclose their
Citizens United
expenditures as a condition of doing business with the government. This
would be a “necessary and proper” enforcement tool for a law designed
to foster effective governance.
There has been much agitation for Obama to use this power. Under
existing law such a disclosure mandate should not violate even the
Supreme Court’s most bizarre interpretations of the First Amendment to
legalize influence peddling. The efficient conduct of government
functions has been generally exempted from such First Amendment rulings,
which would otherwise raise separation of power concerns. E.g.
Wagner v. FEC (
D.C. Cir. 2014) (unanimous
en banc decision) (upholding constitutionality of the contractor contribution prohibition).
Citizens United,
558 U.S. at 359, itself acknowledged this exception in order to
accommodate the public’s “interest in allowing governmental entities to
perform their functions” while it, and
McCutcheon
(2014), also more generally approved disclosure rules. It is just good
government practice that contractors should not be funding the campaigns
of politicians who both create the projects and appropriate the funds
to pay the contractors.
Obama disagrees, of course. By conniving with Congress to pass a
law that makes it illegal to use any of the three tools available for
him to require such disclosures, he is no longer theoretically
impeachable for his failure to see that federal procurement law was
faithfully executed after
Citizens United. He can blame on
Congress his refusal to enforce existing law by requiring disclosure of
independent political investments of government contractors. His
defense is that Congress has withdrawn his power to do that, or to
require disclosure of political investments by SEC-regulated
corporations (i.e., most contractors), or by plutocrats who launder
their political investments, corporate or otherwise, through 501(c)(4)’s
in order to keep them secret. Now, without disclosures of the dark
money, Obama can see no evil that would be subject to the law he is not
enforcing.
All three of these provisions blocking such disclosures are extending the perverse reach of
Citizens United by
a law that was approved by an overwhelming majority of Democratic
Senators, and negotiated, approved, signed, and propagandized by Obama,
all of whom have chanted the refrain of wanting a futile “constitutional
amendment to overturn Citizens United.” These provisions, constituting a
“Dark Money Promotion Act” are reproduced from
the bill below.
Obama calls these provisions “American democracy” at work. When Obama
goes to the trouble of personally taking his propaganda game to the
public, it can be expected that the truth will be the
opposite of whatever he says.
Telling the truth is not what he is paid for. These provisions are in
fact clear sign posts that democracy is dead in the United States where
elected officials are able to get away with passing laws mandating that
their formerly illegal bribe-taking and influence-peddling – now
legalized by a plutocratic majority of judicial supremacists on the
Supreme Court that these same officials have failed to restrain within
their proper judicial powers – can now be conducted by law in secret.
Ari Fleischer’s
comment,
“Bush’s 4th term continues” applies to more than just Guantanamo,
secret renditions, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, permanent
war.
Is the United States more corrupt that it was eight years ago?
The Supreme Court has constructed its “money is speech” jurisprudence since
Buckley v Valeo (1976) and as recently as
McCutcheon
(2014) on the premise that disclosure is available as a sure remedy for
corruption. This theory both demonstrated the total theoretical
ignorance of the Court and was also proven wrong in lived experience as
the country succumbed to systemic corruption in a disclosure regime
after
Buckley. Disclosure works in a system where corruption is illegal and regularly prosecuted, but
has no useful function after corruption is legal or tolerated and therefore systemic as it has been after
Buckley v Valeo (1976) bizarrely legalized it as “speech.”
Now that Obama and Congress have foreclosed disclosure of unlimited
independent expenditures by law, not just refused to mandate it by law
or administrative regulation, the whole rotten edifice of the Supreme
Court’s money is speech jurisprudence now collapses around it with
nothing to support it but shell game logic that somewhere in the four
words “the freedom of speech” is to be found the meaning “the freedom to
corrupt.”.
Self Help
An ironic note can be found in The Influence Peddlers Protection
Act.
This same law in which Congress paid off plutocrats with enormous tax
expenditures and other profit opportunities, and which further tightened
the firm grip of plutocracy by prohibiting SEC, IRS or government
procurement regulations from interfering with plutocrats’ right to keep
their corrupt “dark money” political investments in politicians secret
from the public (though not from the politicians who are expected to
reciprocate), also happens to contain a provision that the
segregationist, propagandist, warmongering Woodrow Wilson would like.
Wilson diverted attention from the lack of democracy in the Jim Crow
United States by making war, he said, for democracy abroad.
It is ludicrous to think that the systemically corrupt United States,
which has struggled to live up to its democratic traditions and
Constitutions,could be capable, in its current second Gilded Age, of
spreading democracy elsewhere in the world. But under this guise a group
of beltway bandits do run businesses as contractors of USAID to do just
that. These operators are as capable of recycling kickbacks to
politicians who appropriate the money for these programs with the best
of the military industrial complex. Actually, some of them are the MIC.
Countries where the United States has had the most influence in
fashioning a new government after it caused the old one to collapse,
Afghanistan and Iraq, are two of the most corrupt governments in the
world according to an accepted
global index.
The influence of the US is typically negative because those
ultimately in charge of such programs, like Hillary Clinton was as
Secretary of State, are as totally clueless about what it would take to
build a democratic foreign government that is not corrupt as she is
about what it would take to
reform the systemic corruption of the US government. A corrupt plutocracy is what such politicians in ‘
the Clinton school of economics” — who arose after
Buckley v Valeo (1976) legalized corruption,” actually mean when they use the word “democracy.”
As a first-hand witness of Hillary Clinton’s specific personal
responsibility for corruption in Afghanistan wrote: “If the obstacle
preventing more meaningful action against abusive corruption
wasn’t active U.S. complicity, it sure looked like it.” Sarah Chayes,
Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (2015) 147. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (
SIGAR), John
Sopko, has exposed
waste and corruption in Afghanistan notwithstanding the U.S. government’s
lack of commitment to preventing it. Sopko
emphasizes
that corruption and the closely related problem of narcotics are
“mission critical” factors jeopardizing all U.S. goals in Afghanistan.
Hillary Clinton’s clueless approach to anti-corruption work, which in
her own “memo entirely ignored the structured, vertically integrated
nature of the corruption networks that had taken over the Afghan
government,” according to Chayes, was responsible for the failed mission
in Afghanistan, as it was in Iraq and wherever“terrorist” insurgency is
a predictable response to systemic corruption, as Chayes observes and
tried to inform the Clinton State Department.
An authority on that part of the beltway bandit democracy business
that specializes in anti-corruption work captures this ignorance at the
top about this kind of systemic corruption when she writes that
“approaches of the anti-corruption industry diverge a full 180 degrees
from the realities of [systemic] corruption with its built-in
unaccountability.” Janine Weddell,
Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security (
2014)
87. Albeit for programs designed to fail, the money for the democracy
programs continues to flow. The money almost certainly does more harm
than good abroad, since it is directed in the opposite direction from
success, as Weddell describes.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 (H.R. 2029), Division K,
Title VII ” SEC. 7032. (a) FUNDING” provides “$2,308,517,000 shall be
made available for democracy programs.” It is unlikely that Congress
could point to a single country which has become an authentic democracy,
free of the undermining effect of corruption, as a result of these
annual appropriations of billions of dollars. But were this same money
spent strategically at home on reform of US corruption, the US could
possibly be the first country to actually benefit from this otherwise
wasted taxpayer’s largesse.
One of the insincere pieties of Obama’s
first Inaugural
Address was, “America has carried on … because we, the people, have
remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our
founding documents. So it has been; so it must be with this generation
of Americans…. Our security, emanates from the justness of our cause;
the force of our example.” The capacity for the United States to
demonstrate a functioning democracy that were not, as it is now,
systemically corrupt would unquestionably have a beneficial impact on
promoting democracy around the world, far moreso than these wasted
appropriations that are more likely part of the problem than part of the
solution.
Congress defines the purpose of its democracy programs abroad as
“development of democratic states, and institutions that are responsive
and accountable to citizens.” Id. Wouldn’t Americans like to have such a
state? Instead of the corrupt plutocracy that is unaccountable to
voters in all important matters. It could probably be provided here for
less than the price Congress spends to achieve counterproductive results
abroad.
Let us then rededicate these wasted billions to the need of the
United States to 1) create and robustly enforce an automated conflicts
of interest reporting system for political investors, and their
lobbyists and rented politicians, that would support enhanced
conflicts of interest recusal requirements
foreclosing all politicians from doing favors for those who pay for
them; 2) convert the Patriot Act and Homeland Security budget to focus
on defending against plutocracy – which has actually overthrown by means
of corruption the formerly democratic government described in the
Constitution – at least as robustly as it now focuses on those who would
attempt to overthrow it by the highly unlikely means of violence; 3)
develop a voting machine or apparatus, using publicly-owned intellectual
property rights, that cannot be programmed or rigged to steal elections
by deliberately miscounting the vote ; 4) host debates and other
campaigning on non-plutocratic, publicly controlled airwaves
(pdf),
thereby reducing the major cause for the inordinate cost of political
campaigns that now functions as a subsidy to a mass media propaganda
system; and 5) write and enact laws that would
strip jurisdiction
from the Supreme Court to continue basing unconstitutional rulings the
surreal proposition that “money is speech,” while restoring all the
state and federal laws the Court has overturned under that flight of
illogic, laws that would also create and fund the enforcement of new
comprehensive prohibitions against and the robust prosecution of
political corruption in all its forms.
After adopting such reforms the US could stand as a role model
capable of again exporting lessons of democracy to the world. But then,
the real irony is that the US government would not qualify under its own
democracy program The same rules supposed to apply to Afghanistan , for
example, would prohibit funding the US to recover democracy. Division
K, Title VII, “SEC. 7044 (a) AFGHANISTAN … (2) (A)
Provid[es],
That such funds may not be obligated for any project or activity that—
(i) includes the participation of any … individual or organization …
involved in corrupt practices.” That rules out any government and its
corrupt hangers-on in the United States which is crawling with a
political class mired in “corrupt practices.”
Nor could the systemically corrupt US government be certified under
SEC. 7044(a)(2)(B) requiring “Prior to the initial obligation of funds
made available by this Act…the Secretary of State shall certify … (iv)
the Government of Afghanistan is reducing corruption ,,,.” Ashraf
Ghani’s government may well be “reducing corruption” in Afghanistan from
its extraordinary level under the Karzai family, especially now that
Americans are mostly gone from the country; but Barack Obama’s
government would be disqualified since it has increased corruption here
many fold.
As Obama
said
“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the
silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history.”
Perhaps a US democratic government in exile, on the right side of
history, could qualify for the US democracy program appropriations.
Addendum: “Dark Money Promotion Act” (selected provisions from
Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016) (H.R. 2029)
Division E, Title I, SEC. 107. None of the funds
made available under this Act may be used by the Internal Revenue
Service to target citizens of the United States for exercising any right
guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United
States.
[Translation: “right guaranteed under the First Amendment” is
influence paddlers’ and their Supreme Court patrons’ lingo used
euphemistically to both connote and provide protection for political
corruption]
Division E, Title I, SEC. 127. During fiscal year 2016—
(1) none of the funds made available in this or any other Act may be
used … to issue, revise, or finalize any regulation, revenue ruling, or
other guidance not limited to a particular taxpayer relating to the
standard which is used to determine whether an organization is operated
exclusively for the promotion of social welfare for purposes of section
501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
[NOTE: 501 (c)(4) nonprofit groups are allowed to spend on projects
for the “promotion of social welfare,” such as say supporting Ted Cruz
or Marco Rubio, with much less disclosure of their donors than is
required of a campaign or political action committee. They are the prime
vehicles for political “dark money.”]
Division E, Title VIII, SEC. 735. (a) None of the
funds made available in this or any other Act may be used to recommend
or require any entity submitting an offer for a Federal contract to
disclose any of the following information as a condition of submitting
the offer:
(1) Any payment consisting of a contribution, expenditure,
independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering
communication that is made by the entity… to a candidate for election
for Federal office or to a political committee, or that is otherwise
made with respect to any election for Federal office.
(2) Any disbursement of funds (other than a payment described in
paragraph (1)) made by the entity … to any person with the intent or the
reasonable expectation that the person will use the funds to make a
payment described in paragraph (1).
(b) In this section, each of the terms
‘‘contribution’’, ‘‘expenditure’’, ‘‘independent expenditure’’,
‘‘electioneering communication’’, ‘‘candidate’’, ‘‘election’’, and
‘‘Federal office’’ has the meaning given such term in the Federal
Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431 et seq.).
Division O, Title VII SEC. 707. LIMITATION ON SEC FUNDS.
None of the funds made available by any division of this Act shall be
used by the Securities and Exchange Commission to finalize, issue, or
implement any rule, regulation, or order regarding the disclosure of
political contributions, contributions to tax exempt organizations
[e.g., 501(c)(4)’s], or dues paid to trade associations.
Division K, Title VII SEC. 7032. (a) FUNDING.— …
$2,308,517,000 shall be made available for democracy programs [for]…
development of democratic states, and institutions that are responsive
and accountable to citizens.
http://docs.house.gov/floor/Default.aspx?date=2015-12-14
–
Dr. Ramzy Baroud
