A friend of mine lobbied for campaign finance reform in Missouri for more than a dozen  years. He finally gave up in  2000, when after all those years of trying, he and a coalition of progressive organizations managed to get a proposition on the statewide ballot that would have enabled publicly financed elections in Missouri, only to watch it go down to defeat by  a margin of 65% to 35%. A previous measure, which would have placed limits on campaign contributions, actually passed by an even bigger margin in 1994. But it didn’t stick.  Most recently, in 2008, the Missouri legislature passed a bill repealing contribution limits. So, currently, Missouri is the only state the allows lawmakers to accept both unlimited gifts from lobbyists and unlimited campaign donations.

Fortunately, good ideas like campaign finance reform don’t die, and my friend can take hope from a new group of Democratic legislators who want to push for change: A Missouri Democratic state representative is  pre-filing a bill in the 2013 Missouri legislature that would–hallelujah–reform campaign finance. It’s an uphill battle, to be sure, and, although I haven’t spoken to my friend about this, I wouldn’t be surprised if he expressed cynicism about the bill’s chances in an overwhelmingly conservative-dominated Missouri legislature. And it’s definitely not publicly financed elections. But before we give up before we even start, let’s take a look at what this go-round offers.

The big news is that, under the proposed law, no donor could give a candidate for the state legislature or statewide office more than $5,000 per election, and a $1,ooo annual cap would be placed on gifts from lobbyists to individual legislators. That provision, alone, would at minimum pull Missouri back from its extreme–and sole–position among the rest of the states.

Also, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the proposed law would change Missouri campaign finance and ethics rules in several other ways:

“Sham nonprofits” set up to funnel money to campaigns would be required to disclose their donors.

Legislators could not work as paid political consultants while in office and would have to wait two years after leaving office to become lobbyists.

Candidates could invest their campaign treasuries only in interest-bearing checking or savings accounts, a move aimed at former Republican House Speaker Steve Tilley’s use of campaign funds to purchase shares in a bank.

The Missouri Ethics Commission’s powers to initiate investigations would be strengthened.

Missouri Republican leaders have been consistently opposed to caps on contributions, claiming that unlimited contributions are more transparent. That point deserves debate. But the make-up of the Missouri legislature will make it difficult for this bill to even get a hearing, let alone a vote on the floor. Republican House Speaker Steve Tilley has already stated that campaign-finance reform is not among his top priorities. Surprise! [And, by the way, just since I started writing this post, we’ve learned that Missouri’s Republican legislative leaders are countering with a campaign/ethics reform bill of their own–one that doesn’t even mention contribution limits, it should be noted.]

The contribution-limit bill’s Democratic sponsors say that, if put to a vote of the people today, their ideas would receive overwhelming popular support. They’re even suggesting that, should the legislature turn down their bill, they’d like to turn it into a statewide ballot initiative. Try. Try again. Repeat.

In light of  the bad press and negative  reception among voters given to the excessive spending of the 2012 election–on all levels–these guys may be onto something. Maybe campaign finance reform is an idea whose time has come–again. [I know, we all said that in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, and even in the 1990s, too. Sigh.] But it’s heartening to see a new generation [sure, call them cockeyed idealists if you must] want to keep this issue alive and try to make some progress. A lot of the biggest issues we’ve faced have taken generations to resolve.

I move for a round of applause.

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Under Citizens United, Super PAC donors’ identities are shrouded in secrecy, but The Caucus, a New York Times blog, has begun a savvy effort to lift the curtain. After 2011 campaign finance reports were filed on Jan. 31, The Caucus went to work.  Because some Super PAC contributions came in via limited liability companies—some of which appear to exist only on paper—New York Times reporters have been working their way through corporate records and the list of mystery donors, attempting to match them and name them, one by one.  Among the findings:

A $50,000 donation to the pro-Romney Super PAC, Restore our Future, from “Sareli Investments? It is tied to Mark S. Siegel, chairman of the board of Patterson-UTI, an oil and natural gas drilling firm.

A $10,000 check from “JHJM Nevada I, LLC” made out to the Democratic-aligned Majority PAC? Connected to Stephen J. Cloobeck, chief executive officer of Diamond Resorts International.

But the source of one large donation–$250,000 to the Romney Super PAC—remains elusive. So, the Caucus launched a crowd-sourcing experiment, asking readers to help by using their own sleuthing skills and personal connections to expand on reporters’ efforts.

Checking different kinds of business records – like certificates of incorporation, articles of organization, or annual reports — filed with secretary of state’s offices in different states has been key in resolving other donors’ identities. Searching campaign finance records by employers, which can be done with the Center for Responsive Politics’ donor lookup tool, has been helpful is providing clues as well.

The result has been a significant influx of information. However, to date, that pesky $250,000 donor has yet to be identified. But the response to the crowd-sourcing request has been so positive that The Caucus is encouraging readers to look even further.

If readers have information that will help us fill out the biographies of any of the donors that we have identified in our ongoing interactive feature, please send them as well.

Have a tip on the donor’s actual identity? Or love poking around in public records and want to help? The Caucus will take all suggestions, morsels of information and leads. If you want to be credited, we will. If you want to remain anonymous, that is fine as well. We promise to protect your confidentiality.

Keep the tips coming to camfin@nytimes.com.

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March 31, June 30, September 30, and December 31 are the most important dates of the year to most candidates running for office, other than Election Day and possibly the day of a debate. If the dates are important, and if the candidates aspire to be public servants, then one might deduce that what makes the dates important is that they represent what the candidates as elected officials could do for their constituents.

Au contraire, it’s essentially the opposite. These “end of the calendar quarter” dates are all about what citizens (including citizen-corporations, which exist, according to the Supreme Court) can do for the politicians, not the other way around.

There was a time when the only numbers that really counted in an election were votes on Election Day. Things have changed dramatically in recent years, and now there’s a new game in town with competitive scoring ….. “Dialing for dollars.” The question is how much money can a candidate raise in a given period of time. The assumption is that if a candidate is able to raise a lot of money, (a) he or she is well-liked by the public, at least that portion of the public that is “of means.,” and (b) he or she is a viable candidate, because money is the mother’s milk of campaigns. No serious candidate would enter a contest without seeking the greatest amount of money.

The most recent quarter ended Dec. 31, 2011. Some people were planning big New Year’s Eve bashes. Others were nervous about the date they had with “someone special;” they didn’t want to let him or her down. Some were at home alone, perhaps sad because they didn’t have a social event. Others were home, which was exactly where they wanted to be, preferring a quiet evening of reading and perhaps television.

None of this kept politicians from continuing their onslaught of appeals for more money. They had to reach their goal for the quarter. They could only do it with “your help.”

I received nine requests on Dec. 31, no less than three from the President of the United States or one of his surrogates. I don’t know how I resisted giving. I’m supposed to feel the “fierce urgency of now” because, as things stand now, he’s going to enter the 2012 presidential race with merely one billion dollars.

My favorite request was the one directly from him with a subject line of “Hey,”

Friend —

About the deadline tonight: It matters.

If you can, please give $150:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Midnight

To 2012,

Barack

My political inbox for the last week of 2011 looked as follow.

Underneath the headings are content that range from desperate calls for action to heavy guilt trips to sweet requests from the candidates’ mothers. No matter how hard they try, there’s nothing subtle about what they’re doing. They’re shilling for money.

I recognize that candidates require financial resources in order to run campaigns. But this is serious business and many candidates have made a sport of it.

And what do they do with their winnings? Many of them take the cash and transfer them to the pockets of the makers of sleazy negative ads. The American public says that it abhors negative commercials, but people continue to donate money, which, in large part, is used for that purpose. What’s more, they often believe the messages in the negative ads, meaning that they are drawn to a candidate who has raised money to be just plain nasty.

The system is broken; it will not be fixed until we have public financing with clear limits on both how much candidates can spend and for what purposes. We’re a long way from that, particularly with today’s Supreme Court and Congress. So, like others who are interested in politics, I may well be donating to various campaigns. Let me suggest two criteria for donating:

1. The candidate really needs it; they are not swimming in money.

2. The money will not be used for negative ads or other forms of distortion.

My ideal contribution will go to a low-profile progressive who needs to inform the public of his or her candidacy. He or she will run a clean campaign, and hopefully the public will see the contrast between him or her and his or her likely opponent. For better or for worse, I probably won’t be giving much in the near future. When the end of each calendar quarter comes, I’ll be both frustrated and amused. I won’t be persuaded.

The post Four days that really make our political system ugly appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Famed progressive author, teacher and activist Howard Zinn died suddenly on January 27, 2010. To celebrate Zinn’s life and legacy, Boston University initiatied a new lecture series in his honor. On October 29, 2010, Bill Moyers gave the inaugural lecture of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series at Boston University. He spoke for 74 minutes and then took questions for almost another hour. This riveting “must view,” progressive lecture is available online, at Boston University’s website, and the full text can be read at Alternet.

Moyers warns that we are in denial about the loss of our democracy, which began with Ronald Reagan and was cemented with the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision. He calls for ordinary Americans to fight back against the collusion of government and corporations—which he defines as government by oligarchy—by getting involved with progressive political organizations.

An extended quote from his speech:

The Gilded Age returned with a vengeance in our time. It slipped in quietly at first, back in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began a “massive decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich.” As Roger Hodge makes clear, under Bill Clinton the transfer was even more dramatic, as the top 10 percent captured an ever-growing share of national income. The trend continued under George W. Bush – those huge tax cuts for the rich, remember, which are now about to be extended because both parties have been bought off by the wealthy – and by 2007 the wealthiest 10% of Americans were taking in 50% of the national income. Today, a fraction of people at the top today earn more than the bottom 120 million Americans.

You will hear it said, “Come on, this is the way the world works.” No, it’s the way the world is made to work. This vast inequality is not the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand; it did not just happen; it was no accident. As Hodge drives home, it is the result of a long series of policy decisions “about industry and trade, taxation and military spending, by flesh-and-blood humans sitting in concrete-and-steel buildings.” And those policy decisions were paid for by the less than one percent who participate in our capitalist democracy political contributions. Over the past 30 years, with the complicity of Republicans and Democrats alike, the plutocrats, or plutonomists (choose your own poison) have used their vastly increased wealth to assure that government does their bidding. Remember that grateful Citigroup reference to “market-friendly governments” on the side of plutonomy? We had a story down in Texas for that sort of thing; the dealer in a poker game says to the dealer, Now play the cards fairly, Reuben; I know what I dealt you.” (To see just how our system was rigged by the financial, political, and university elites, run, don’t walk, to the theatre nearest you showing Charles Ferguson’s new film, “Inside Job.” Take a handkerchief because you’ll weep for the republic.)

Looking back, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. One of the few journalists who did see it coming – Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post – reported that “business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative arena.” Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. They funded think tanks that churned out study after study with results skewed to their ideology and interests. And their political allies in the conservative movement cleverly built alliances with the religious right – Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition – who zealously waged a cultural holy war that camouflaged the economic assault on working people and the middle class.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also tried to warn us. He said President Reagan’s real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. Senator Moynihan was gone before the financial catastrophe on George W. Bush’s watch that could paradoxically yet fulfill Reagan’s dream. The plutocrats who soaked up all the money now say the deficits require putting Social Security and other public services on the chopping block. You might think that Mr. Bush today would regret having invaded Iraq on false pretences at a cost of more than a trillion dollars and counting, but no, just last week he said that his biggest regret was his failure to privatize Social Security. With over l00 Republicans of the House having signed a pledge to do just that when the new Congress convenes, Mr. Bush’s vision may yet be realized.

Daniel Altman also saw what was coming. In his book Neoconomy he described a place without taxes or a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds. “It’s coming to America,” he wrote. Most likely he would not have been surprised recently when firefighters in rural Tennessee would let a home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn’t paid a $75 fee. 
That’s what is coming to America.

***

Here we are now, on the verge of the biggest commercial transaction in the history of American elections. Once again the plutocracy is buying off the system. Nearly $4 billion is being spent on the congressional races that will be decided next week, including multi millions coming from independent tax-exempt organizations that can collect unlimited amounts without revealing the sources. The organization Public Citizen reports that just 10 groups are responsible for the bulk of the spending by independent groups: “A tiny number of organizations, relying on a tiny number of corporate and fat cat contributors, are spending most of the money on the vicious attack ads dominating the airwaves” – those are the words of Public Citizen’s president, Robert Wiessman. The Federal Election Commission says that two years ago 97% of groups paying for election ads disclosed the names of their donors. This year it’s only 32%.

Socrates again: To remember a thing, you must first name it. We’re talking about slush funds. Donors are laundering their cash through front groups with high-falutin’ names like American Crossroads. That’s one of the two slush funds controlled by Karl Rove in his ambition to revive the era of the robber barons. Promise me you won’t laugh when I tell you that although Rove and the powerful Washington lobbyist who is his accomplice described the first organization as “grassroots”, 97% of its initial contributions came from four billionaires. Yes: The grass grows mighty high when the roots are fertilized with gold.

The post Celebrate, but think about what’s really happening to US democracy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In the past, Democratic politicians could always count on union campaign contributions. But, when it comes to supporting working families, corporate Democrats have not delivered, or at least not to the extent that they need to in these difficult times. By spending the last three years trying to compromise with the anti-labor GOP, they have moved the party more to the right. As a result, unions are reconsidering how to best spend their money

AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka, who vigorously confronted racism among white union members during the last presidential campaign and turned out the vote for then candidate Barack Obama, is considering withholding union campaign funds for 2012. According to Trumka, Democrats are getting too reliant on corporate money and less helpful to working and middle class Americans. He points out that Republicans get 79 percent of campaign contributions from business, but Democrats are not far behind with 72 percent. Unhappy with the pro-business leanings of the Democratic Party, he is hoping to use union funds that would have gone to politicians to build and strengthen worker movements at the grassroots level. A recent article by Joan Walsh at Salon explores Trumka’s growing rift with Democrats:

[In 2010] Trumka’s AFL-CIO famously bucked the White House, supporting Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s unsuccessful primary challenge to Blue Dog Sen. Blanche Lincoln. [Lincoln lost in the general election.] When Halter lost, anonymous White House officials attacked labor leaders as “absolute idiots” who had been “humiliated” after flushing $10 million “down the toilet.” In an interview last week Trumka seemed unchastened by attacks over the Halter bid, and he pledged the AFL-CIO to a new independence from Democratic Party organizations and candidates. He didn’t spell out exactly what that might mean, citing decisions to be made by the federation’s governing Executive Council. “You’ll see us giving less to party structure, and more to our own structure,” Trumka promised.”

Trumka has been unhappy with how the Obama White House discouraged independent progressive campaigns on behalf of healthcare reform and against anti-union Blue Dog Democrats, and recently with how the White House discouraged direct DNC/OFA support for Wisconsin public sector workers who demonstrated against GOP Governor Walker’s attempts to gut public sector unions. However, Trumka did praise statements Obama made during the union demonstrations in Wisconsin, saying they were “very, very helpful.

“First, he called what was going on in Wisconsin the attack on working people,” Trumka said on MSNBC. “And then he met with the Republican governors and he said: ‘You’re wrong for villainizing public workers. They’re our neighbors, they’re our friends, they’re our nurses, they’re doctors, they’re teachers. They’re all of our friends – you shouldn’t do that.’ ”

Trumka, the only labor representative on Obama’s jobs council, added that “this really isn’t about Obama.”

“This is about those governors that are making war on their employees and trying to deny them a middle-class lifestyle,” he said. “Hopefully, there will be more and more support from politicians, including the president.”

But while Trumka has praised Obama for his pro-union statements, he has also been critical of his lack of substantive action for job creation and relief for working families. According to the Huffington Post:

The labor ommunity — the AFL-CIO especially — has been taking steps towards greater independence from the Democratic Party as its disappointments with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have mounted. The typical response from party insiders has been dismissive assumptions that labor has nowhere else to go.

But, unions, having been reinvigorated by the grassroots uprisings at Madison and in other states, are no longer willing to be taken for granted. When Joan Walsh asked if Wisconsin surprised him, Trumka said:

You know, you knew it was coming. It was more like: When? What’s going to be the final pinpoint that makes it happen? . . . It was truly a spontaneous grassroots rank and file movement, and it’s still growing. Now it’s up to us to convert it from a moment to a movement.

On May 20, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.,  Richard Trumka spoke about a new direction for the AFL-CIO:

We have listened hard, and what workers want is an independent labor movement that builds the power of working people—in the workplace and in political life. Working people want a labor movement strong enough to help return balance to our economy, fairness to our tax system, security to our families, and moral and economic standing to our nation. Our role is not to build the power of a political party or a candidate. It is to improve the lives of working families and strengthen our country.

It doesn’t matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside—the outcome is the same either way. If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball, and advancing working families’ interests, working people will not support them. This is where our focus will be—now, in 2012 and beyond.

We will uphold the dignity of work and restore respect for working people. In this season’s political battles, teachers, nurses and firefighters have been vilified. Decent jobs with economic security have been cast as more than America’s workers deserve. Low-wage, part-time, temporary, no-benefit work is being sold as the “new normal” for our economy. We know that only a dynamic, effective movement of working people working together can reclaim the value of work. Our unions must reach out to every working person in America—to those whose jobs have been outsourced and down-sized, to carwash workers in Los Angeles, to domestic workers who have few legal rights, to freelancers and young people who have “gigs” rather than jobs. And together with the AFL-CIO’s construction and manufacturing workers, pilots and painters, plumbers and public employees, bakers and others, we will be heard.

The stakes are so high, for working families, for America. Will we be a country ruled by greed, by people who would cut or take pensions away from first responders, people who would take away the fundamental human rights of our workers, who would choose tax breaks for the richest among us over a future for all of us? Or will we be a country where we choose the future, where we look out for each other, where all of us have a voice?

We’ll only win investments in our future if we again embrace the idea that we are one national community. That our very identity is bound up with the promise that all of us have a voice—in the workplace, at the ballot box—and that we are responsible in a deep sense for each other. The fabric of our government, our democratic republic, is about making that responsibility for each other real.

The moral character of America is worth fighting for, and that is exactly what working people are going to do in the days and months to come.

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Even before the last dollar has been tallied, we already know one thing: We’re not going to be able to identify a lot of the donors—small and large—in the 2010 mid-term elections. According to the Center for Responsibility in Washington [CREW],  “of the nearly $300 million spent by outside groups in attempts to influence the election, the public remains completely in the dark about who’s behind 42 percent of these expenditures.”

42 percent? Yikes! Almost half of what was spent came from anonymous donors. And, as the final tallies emerge, that figure could rise. That’s a fact that should frighten us—a fact that is a huge threat to democracy. It’s bad enough that in the Citizens United case, the US Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate contributions in elections. But not to be able to know who paid what to whom—and not to be able to use that information to extrapolate motivations behind elected officials’ votes—that just seems to push American democracy even more toward the banana-republic corruption that we’ve smugly joked about many years.

CREW says:

Some groups spending big bucks in advance of the election — namely nonprofits that classified as 501(c) groups under the U.S. tax code — are not required by law to disclose their donors. And their political investments this year have proliferated, with some of these groups taking advantage of the new campaign finance landscape that no longer prohibits their use of corporate cash in the final stretch of the election.

At the federal level, more than $123 million has been donated by anonymous sources to nonprofit organizations that have run television and radio advertisements, sent out direct mailers and bought up Internet ad space ahead of today’s election.

Many of these nonprofits are affiliated with explicitly political groups registered under section 527 of U.S. tax code — political action committees, “super PACs” or other 527 organizations, entities that must disclose their donors. Oftentimes, one organization’s different legal entities use the same name, so tracking where the money is coming from — and which one of those legal entities is making the expenditures — is all the more difficult.

The 2010 election marks the rise of a new political committee, dubbed “super PACs,” and officially known as “independent-expenditure only committees,” which can raise unlimited sums from corporations, unions and other groups, as well as wealthy individuals. Super PACs may overtly advocate for the defeat or election of federal candidates. In addition to super PACs and regular political action committees (which raise money via contributions capped at $5,000 per year), special interest groups also have other vehicles at their disposal to influence elections and policy. These include 527 organizations registered with the Internal Revenue Service and 501(c) nonprofits, which aren’t primarily supposed to be involved in politics, but are allowed limited political activity. 501(c) groups must also register with the IRS, but do not have to publicly disclose their donors.

And, by the way, progressives should refrain from feeling smug about all of this. Several groups advocating for Democratic candidates spent big money, too, and a big chunk of their donors will remain anonymous, as well. Democrats were outspent, but not for lack of trying.

CREW offers several charts with eye-popping totals of independent expenditures. It’s not a pretty picture, if you care about democracy.

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