Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists
set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal,
leading to the
first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you
been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you
can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat
those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and
above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in
this country.
Today, politics is a rich man’s game. Look no further than the 2012
elections and that season’s biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul
Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first
giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested
more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to
block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to
bankroll the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged
their own campaigns mostly to helpRepublican candidates for Congress).
All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle —
nearly four times
the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that’s only the money we know about. When you add in
so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at
closer to $150 million.
It was not one of Adelson’s better bets. Romney went down in flames;
the Republicans failed to retake the Senate and conceded seats in the
House; and
the majority of candidates backed by Adelson-funded groups lost, too. But Adelson, who oozes chutzpah as only a gambling tycoon
worth $26.5 billion could, is undeterred. Politics, he
told the Wall
Street Journal in his first post-election interview, is like poker: “I
don’t cry when I lose. There’s always a new hand coming up.” He said he
could double his 2012 giving in future elections. “I’ll spend that much
and more,” he said. “Let’s cut any ambiguity.”
But simply tallying Adelson’s wins and losses — or the Koch
brothers’, or George Soros’s, or any other mega-donors’ — misses the
bigger point. What matters is that these wealthy funders were able to
give so much money in the first place.
With the advent of super PACs and a growing reliance on secretly
funded nonprofits, the very wealthy can pour their money into the
political system with an ease that didn’t exist as recently as this
moment in Barack Obama’s first term in office. For now at least, Sheldon
Adelson is an extreme example, but he portends a future in which
1-percenters can flood the system with money in ways beyond the dreams
of ordinary Americans. In the meantime, the traditional political
parties, barred from taking all that limitless cash,
seem to be sliding toward
irrelevance. They are losing their grip on the political process,
political observers say, leaving motivated millionaires and billionaires
to handpick the candidates and the issues. ”It’ll be wealthy people
getting together and picking horses and riding those horses through a
primary process and maybe upending the consensus of the party,” a
Democratic strategist recently told me. “We’re in a whole new world.”
The Rise of the Super PAC
She needed something sexy, memorable. In all fairness, anything was
an improvement on “independent expenditure-only political action
committee.”
Eliza Newlin Carney,
one of D.C.’s trustiest scribes on the campaign money beat, didn’t want
to type out that clunker day after day. She knew this was big news —
the name mattered. Then it
came to her:
This article originally appeared on :
AlterNet
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