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From Salon 16 September 2016:
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The Guardian this week published 1,500 previously unreleased emails and financial documents leaked from a now-halted investigation into alleged campaign finance violations by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his allies. ...The leaked documents confirm campaign finance reformers’ worst suspicions about political “dark money” and the legal rulings that unleashed it into our elections. And they prove the assumptions underlying the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision were incredibly naïve.
That 2010 decision allowed corporate entities to spend unlimited amounts on elections, helping to unleash a tide of “dark money” — election spending by groups that don’t publicly disclose their donors.
In Citizens United, the justices predicted that unlimited corporate spending wouldn’t “corrupt” politicians because it would be totally independent of candidates. But the Wisconsin documents show how many “independent” expenditures are actually controlled behind-the-scenes by candidates’ campaigns.
And, although the court in Citizens United said campaign finance disclosure laws would provide citizens with all the information necessary to “see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests,” these documents demonstrate that citizens are routinely left in the dark about who is bankrolling their representatives, thanks to corporations and wealthy donors secretly funneling their contributions through phony “social welfare” groups which disguise the identities of their funders.
Most importantly these documents show “dark money” is really only “dark” when it comes to the public’s knowledge. The politicians who benefit from undisclosed election spending know exactly where their financial support is coming from.
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The Guardian this week published 1,500 previously unreleased emails and financial documents leaked from a now-halted investigation into alleged campaign finance violations by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his allies. ...The leaked documents confirm campaign finance reformers’ worst suspicions about political “dark money” and the legal rulings that unleashed it into our elections. And they prove the assumptions underlying the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision were incredibly naïve.
That 2010 decision allowed corporate entities to spend unlimited amounts on elections, helping to unleash a tide of “dark money” — election spending by groups that don’t publicly disclose their donors.
In Citizens United, the justices predicted that unlimited corporate spending wouldn’t “corrupt” politicians because it would be totally independent of candidates. But the Wisconsin documents show how many “independent” expenditures are actually controlled behind-the-scenes by candidates’ campaigns.
And, although the court in Citizens United said campaign finance disclosure laws would provide citizens with all the information necessary to “see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests,” these documents demonstrate that citizens are routinely left in the dark about who is bankrolling their representatives, thanks to corporations and wealthy donors secretly funneling their contributions through phony “social welfare” groups which disguise the identities of their funders.
Most importantly these documents show “dark money” is really only “dark” when it comes to the public’s knowledge. The politicians who benefit from undisclosed election spending know exactly where their financial support is coming from.
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