Category: Campaign Finance

Baltimore’s Man From Teach for America

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With the rather hapless Stephanie Rawlings Blake not running for reelection as Mayor of Baltimore, it it is a bit of a free for all, with pretty much everyone, including her larcenous (she was convicted and served time) predecessor.

Needless to say, there is much opportunity for mischief, and it appears that the hedge funds first choice for pillaging the public school system, Teach for America, has a candidate in the race:

For those who’ve never paid much attention, Teach For America sounds like a benevolent and benign idea: recruit bright college grads, give them some teacher-training and place them in some of the nation’s neediest schools for a two-year commitment to teach kids.

The reality behind TFA’s sunny exterior is somewhat more sinister. Education policy experts today consider the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 to be at the vanguard of the school privatization movement. TFA is also a media juggernaut in its own right, known for deploying a sophisticated public relations arsenal to advance an agenda focused on crushing teachers’ unions and privatizing public school systems. TFA’s funders, including the Waltons, Bill and Melinda Gates and top Fortune 500 corporations, all have plenty to gain from the commodification of public goods and the destruction of public service unions, and its 11,000 corps members provide a valuable service to that end.
………

When Mckesson announced his campaign for mayor of Baltimore this month, his name topped the list of trending topics on Twitter for several hours. Even without outlining a strategy to defeat better-known, more entrenched candidates, Mckesson received nearly $130,000 in online donations, met with President Barack Obama (who said Mckesson and associates “were better organizers than I was”), and secured his status as one of the country’s most closely watched political outsiders. Headlines appeared across national media, from Slate to the Guardian to the Washington Post, with the progressive online magazine Truthdig proclaiming Mckesson “Truthdigger of the Week.”

With his candidacy for a city whose public schools are a key target of the education reform movement, the time seems right to scrutinize Mckesson’s relationship with Teach for America more closely. His high-profile appearance at the TFA gala only days after filing his last-minute bid to enter the race was only the latest collaboration with the organization spearheading a sustained attack on teacher’s unions and traditional public schools.

………

As Mckesson rose to prominence, TFA was there to provide promotion through its powerful PR apparatus.

Mckesson had no connection to Ferguson when he first arrived on Aug. 16, 2014, according to an interview he gave Huffington Post later the same year. But it didn’t take him long to connect with another protester named Brittany Packnett, with whom he began working the same day. The fact that Packnett is executive director of TFA’s St. Louis chapter likely contributed to their immediate rapport.

At the time, Mckesson was senior director of human capital for Minneapolis Public Schools. He says he commuted to Ferguson on weekends before eventually quitting his job to protest full-time.

A Twitter search query produces a clear timeline of Mckesson’s subsequent transition from human resources manager to social justice talent, aided by promotion from Teach For America. It begins with a post to TFA’s official blog, in which Mckesson pontificates on his activities in Ferguson. TFA tweeted a link to that post on Aug. 21, 2014, at which point Mckesson would have been in the besieged midwestern town for five days.

………

I reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that. There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”

After being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated, “You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I, you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”

………

Mckesson the ruthless administrator is a difficult characterization to reconcile with Mckesson the protester, as he’s typically portrayed in print, nor does it come through in his television appearances. But commentary from some activists who have encountered him on the ground in Ferguson and Baltimore suggests that the public image he’s cultivated is a media fiction.

Baltimore activist Duane Davis, in a tweet addressed to DeRay, says, “[W]e crossed paths. On more than one occasion….you never engaged in conversation. [Y]ou were more focused on media attention.”

In a February 15 interview with Jared Ball on Real News Network, Hands Up United Coalition co-founder Taureen Russell offered a withering assessment of Mckesson’s alleged role as a protest organizer. “I never worked with DeRay. I’m really hard-pressed to find any local people who have worked with DeRay. All the local people that I know worked with DeRay…work with the establishment,” he said. “So when I hear him go on Colbert and Colbert is saying he’s organized protests in Ferguson…I don’t know an action or a protest that he was a part of.”

Russell is a founder of the organization that initiated the protests in Ferguson against the police killing of Michael Brown and the acquittal of the officer who gunned him down. He told Ball he was relieved that Mckesson had moved on to politics because “it makes my job [as a grassroots organizer] a little easier.”

Addressing Baltimore, Russell said of Mckesson: “He’s a proponent for charter schools. He’s not typically a fan of public schools. So the educational issue comes up. His policy, to be honest, most people see as a neoliberal kind of policy. And we know his policy comes from Teach For America.”
………

Mckesson’s political platform, which he has begun rolling out on the DeRay For Mayor website, seems modeled in part on those who have forced corporate education reforms under big-city mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg. Both of those mayors have justified unilateral takeovers of the public school districts in their respective cities using teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores, which have consistently been debunked as unreliable measures of academic performance.

The language in his section on education is typical of school privatization advocates, according to Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of education at California State University at Sacremento who has written extensively about Teach For America on his website, Cloaking Inequity.

………

The lack of transparency in the DeRay For Mayor campaign means the public will have to wait until March to identify all the contributors to its six-figure finances. But if history is any indicator, we can expect it to include many of the same financial interests that have waged assaults on public school teachers and students across the country. It remains to be seen if Teach For America and one of its most famous cadres will finally be held to account for their privatization agenda, before it begins to take hold in Baltimore.

Yes, I know that this sounds tin-foil hat, until one looks at the history of the charter school movement.

There is a lot of  money to made from sucking the marrow from pub lic education, and when there is a lot of money to be made, people work very hard to make it.

It’s basic economics, or to quote Willie Sutton, “Because that’s where the money is.”

Wall Street is hip deep in privatizing education, and leveraging politics to create ill gotten gains is their “A” game.

Well, This Explains Why Chris Matthews Has Been Felching* Hillary Clinton on His Show Lately

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Did you know that Kathleen Matthews, the wife of MSNBC’s Chris “Tweety” Matthews is running to replace Chris Van Hollen in MD-8?

Did you also know that her campaign is getting lots of donations from friends of Hillary?

Funny, that:

After what can only be described as an absolute disaster of an electoral showing in the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton’s hopes of becoming the Democratic nominee in 2016 increasingly hinge on her support from the Democratic establishment.

The establishment, which is connected to Clinton and her financial backers by ingrown threads of funding and financing, is panicking over the surging campaign of Bernie Sanders. It will turn to its people in the media and party leadership to reverse the trend.

………

Chris Matthews has been under considerable fire from the left recently for what’s been interpreted as “relentless shilling” for Hillary Clinton on his MSNBC talk show, Hardball.

………

His endless devotion to the Democratic Party got Matthews the kind of attention that many people only dream of from party elders. Over the past decade, his name has been bandied about as a candidate for Senate or Governor in his native Pennsylvania. He’s been the subject of a speculative New York Times Magazine cover story on his political aspirations.

But in the end, it appears Matthews is sticking with television. Instead, his wife Kathleen is running for political office as a Democrat, in Maryland, where the Matthews family lives.

And herein lies the crux of the matter. As the Daily Caller reported on February 9, many of the wealthiest Clinton donors are funneling money to the Kathleen Matthews Congressional campaign. This, in turn, makes Chris Matthews’ constant kow-towing to the Clinton campaign suspect at the very least. Although it may just be part of ingratiating himself to the Democratis establishment.

The money trail from Hillary Clinton to Chris Matthews crosses the path of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The support each of the latter gives to the former is a direct by product of that financing.

So not a surprise.

*If you do not know the definition of the word, “Felch”, do NOT Google it.

Bought and Paid for by the Vampire Squid

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It appears that during his first campaign for the Texas Senate, Ted Cruz got a million dollar loan from Goldman Sachs, and then in contravention of campaign finance laws, did not report it to the Federal Election Commission:


As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.

“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.

But the couple’s decision to pump more than $1 million into Mr. Cruz’s successful Tea Party-darling Senate bid in Texas was made easier by a large loan from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works. That loan was not disclosed in campaign finance reports.

Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012 Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.

A review of personal financial disclosures that Mr. Cruz filed later with the Senate does not find a liquidation of assets that would have accounted for all the money he spent on his campaign. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year. There is no explanation of their purpose.

Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.

He should take a hit for this, particularly because much of his personal story is about how he risked it all to run for the US Senate, but it won’t make a difference in the primaries, because the Republican Party base has drunk too much Flint municipal tap water.

Oh Snap!

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Hillary Clinton has been going after Bernie Sanders’ single payer healthcare proposals, claiming that single payer would take their healthcare away, and she’s rolled out Chelsea on the campaign trail.

It is ludicrous and dishonest, and it has led to a huge spike in contributions to the Sanders campaign:

Hillary Clinton’s new barrage against Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential primary opponent she has all but ignored through most of her campaign, is having an effect — though probably not the one she intended.

Sanders’s underdog campaign said it is seeing a surge of contributions as a direct result of the new attention it is getting from the Democratic front-runner, with money coming in at a clip nearly four times the average daily rate reported in the last quarter of 2015.

………

The former secretary of state and her team have stepped up their criticism of Sanders on a variety of fronts in recent days as polls have begun to show him edging even with her in Iowa — and, for the first time, looking competitive in a national poll. But the Clinton strategy may be backfiring in some ways.

………

“As of now, we are at about $1.4 million raised since yesterday when the panic attacks by the Clinton campaign began,” Briggs said. “We’ve gotten 47,000 contributions. We’re projecting 60,000 donations. Even for our people-powered campaign, this is pretty darn impressive.”

………

Even her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, got into the act, bashing Sanders during her first campaign appearance on behalf of her mother this election season.

“Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare and dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea Clinton said at a stop in New Hampshire. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era — before we had the Affordable Care Act — that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”

Ludicrous, and dishonest, and more significantly, desperate.

Hillary’s strength this cycle was her aura of inevitability, and that appears to be vanishing like the mist

As I recall, inevitability was her perceived strength in 2008 as well.

I Did Not Expect This

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It appears that the Bernie Sanders campaign employs no fund raising staff, Hillary Clinton, in contrast, has over 30 dedicated full time staffers working this:

It’s no secret that Bernie Sanders is raising tons of money, but that fact that he’s doing it without a finance team is highly unusual.

Bernie Sanders loves to talk about the fact that he doesn’t have a super-PAC backing his campaign. But the true state of his fundraising strategy is even more astonishing than that: The Sanders campaign doesn’t have a finance team.

And that’s a big deal.

Every competitive presidential campaign in recent election cycles has had team of people exclusively dedicated to finances: figuring out how much money the campaign needs, putting together a plan to get that money, and then making it all come together.

It’s considered a fundamental part of a modern presidential campaign, right up there with having a team to deal with the press. But Sanders may be changing that.

Call it a reinvention of campaign funding, but the Vermont senator has shown so far that a campaign can operate just fine without a fleet of green-visors counting the cash.

“I’ve never heard of a presidential campaign, even a minor party presidential campaign, that didn’t have a fundraising team,” said one campaign finance attorney. “But, OK if it’s working.”

And, judging by Sanders’s latest fundraising numbers, it is.

This is a positive thing for a number of reasons.  Not only does this reduce his burn rate, 30 staffers full time raising cash probably cost something north of 60 Grand a month, but also because the fundraising profession is an entry point for the most repulsive people in public service (See Emanuel, Rahm, and Wasserman-Schultz, Debbie).

I really like this guy.

Nice Work if You Can Get It

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The lobbying operation Purple Strategies is lobbying for the NRA and for the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety:

The growing frequency of mass shootings has done little to change the political stalemate over guns in Washington, with gun rights and gun control groups each declaring that the latest massacre — for now, the one in San Bernardino — supports their diametrically opposed arguments.

In this environment, no one can predict the future of gun policy in America. But at least one thing is certain: The team of political consultants at Purple Strategies will get paid.

The partners at Purple Strategies — a bipartisan lobbying firm and consulting agency formed in 2008 through a merger of Issue & Image, a Democratic-led company, and National Media, a Republican campaign firm — have developed business relationships on both sides of the gun control debate, working with both the National Rifle Association and Everytown for Gun Safety, the umbrella organization for pro-gun control advocacy groups.

Everytown did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Officials from the NRA declined to provide a comment for this article — although they did ask us for more information about Everytown’s ties to Purple Strategies.

A spokesperson for Purple Strategies denied that the firm has relationships on both sides of the gun policy debate.

………

We had asked Morgante to describe what appeared to be a close relationship between Purple and National Media, Red Eagle Media Group, and the American Media & Advocacy Group, all of which had done work for the NRA.

“The founding partners of Issue & Image and National Media Public Affairs founded Purple, however, Purple Strategies operates independently and does not share clients or employees with any other company that you referenced,” Morgante wrote.

Notwithstanding Morgante’s claims, however, documents and business filings reviewed by The Intercept show considerable overlap between National Media and Purple Strategies when it comes to clients, staff, office space, and leadership.

Consider how this works for gun-related clients:

Everytown and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, two groups heavily funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg to enact gun restrictions, have relied on Purple Strategies’ Margie Omera and her firm, Momentum Analysis, for multiple polling services in 2014 and this year. Momentum Analysis was acquired by Purple Strategies in 2013. In a memo to Everytown, Omera identified herself as working for Purple Insights, “the in-house opinion research group at Purple Strategies.”

The NRA’s relationship with Purple and National Media is obscured through a network of affiliate companies. But documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that the NRA regularly buys political advertising through American Media & Advocacy Group and Red Eagle Media, two firms that share an address in Alexandria, Virginia, with Purple Strategies and National Media.

Records maintained by the Alexandria Circuit Court reveal that Red Eagle Media is an “assumed or fictitious” business created and owned by National Media. Robin Roberts, a co-founding partner of Purple Strategies and the president of National Media, registered the name.

They are laughing their way to the bank.

Quote of the Day

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Here’s what U.S. state and city pension funds are getting this year for the hundreds of millions of dollars in fees they’re forking over to hedge funds: almost nothing.

—Bloomberg Business

Private equity and hedge funds have earned lots of money capitalizing on the panic of underfunded public pensions seeking higher returns to deal with chronic under-funding.

There have been no higher returns, but Wall Street has gotten its vig, some of which, of course, gets recycled back to the campaign funds of politicians who might otherwise provide oversight of the pension funds.

As Yves Smith is wont to say, It’s a, “Self licking ice cream cone.”

This is Not the Onion

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She Turned Me Into a Newt!

Former Republican nominee for US Senator Deleware, Christine O’Donnel, who in 2010 was forced to kick of her campaign by declaring that she was not a witch, is now calling an FEC lawsuit over her campaign finance management a “Witch Hunt”.

She needs to get this straight. Is she a witch, or isn’t she?

Former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said Friday that a Federal Election Commission lawsuit accusing her of improper campaign expenditures is a “witch hunt” and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

O’Donnell, who famously declared during the 2010 Senate race that she was not a witch, made the comment in a teleconference with the federal judge hearing the case.

O’Donnell also said she is having trouble hiring a local attorney, claiming that at least three lawyers she has talked to have received phone calls warning of “political backlash” if they represent her. She declined to identify them or provide further details, noting that an Associated Press reporter was listening to the teleconference.

Yes, I know that my characterization is neither fair nor accurate, but seriously, this is just too good, and too weird, to pass up.

Could Someone Please Hang this Guy from a Lamp Post?*

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Don’t You Want to Slap That Smile From His Face

It turns out that Martin Shkreli, he of the rapacious drug price hike infamy donated a few thousand dollars to the Bernie Sanders campaign and demanded an audience.

Sanders donated the money to a medical clinic and told him to piss off:

It must be strange, if you’re the kind of person who generally believes he can wave his wallet in the direction of something he wants and make it — poof! — appear, when that magic trick doesn’t work. When a drunken demand for mac and cheese goes unheeded. Or when a pharmaceutical company CEO gets turned down by a politician. Sorry, Martin Shkreli!

Just last month, Shkreli earned the disgust of a good portion of the Internet — as well as Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — when it was revealed his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, had raised the price of toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 overnight. Sanders even wrote a letter to Shkreli, asking for an explanation. But though Shrkreli quickly vowed that “I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people,” no change has been forthcoming. He now says that “Until we figure out demand, we won’t lower the price. We have to find a safe price to lower it to.” Seems like something he’d want to get on, soon.

Shkreli has, however, meanwhile managed to find the time to troll journalists and retweet photos of cats rolling around in money. He also, according to the Boston Globe, “says he has donated to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — who has been bashing Big Pharma on the campaign trail — to try to get a meeting so the two can talk it out.” It did not work out that way.

Shkreli claims he recently donated $2,700 — the maximum individual contribution — to Sanders’ campaign. He told the Boston Globe he had hoped for a private meeting with Sanders to explain the rationale of drug company pricing. But on Thursday, the Sanders campaign said they were giving the money to the Whitman-Walker health clinic in Washington, adding, “We are not keeping the money from this poster boy for drug company greed.”

And Shrkreli now says he’s “furious” over the snub. “I think it’s cheap to use one person’s action as a platform without kind of talking to that person,” he says. “He’ll take my money, but he won’t engage with me for five minutes to understand this issue better.” And he continues, “I’d ask him, what role does innovation play in health care? Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?” I guess you can’t always get what you want. Meetings with senators, your toxoplasmosis drug returned to a reasonable cost, that sort of thing.

Seriously, Mr. Shrkreli, how about you make the world a better place, and just drop dead.

*From his testicles, not his neck.  Death by rope is too quick,†
†OK, in a perfect world, there would also be some pinata play as well.‡
‡And fire ants, definitely fire ants

Another Reason to Support Bernie Sanders

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In a rally a few days ago, the distinguished gentleman from Vermont has said that he will be introducing legislation to ban private for profit prisons:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is taking his criminal justice reform platform from the campaign trail to the Senate with a plan to introduce legislation outlawing private prisons when Congress returns from August recess.

Daily Kos first noted that at his Reno, Nevada, rally on Tuesday night, the Independent senator told a gathered crowd of 4,500 supporters that “when Congress reconvenes in September, I will be introducing legislation, which takes corporations out of profiteering from running jails.”

Sanders, who is opposed to building any new prisons, has long advocated against draconian sentencing laws, voting in favor of investments in alternative sentencing and telling the Nevada crowd that he also plans to tackle mandatory minimums for certain crimes:

We want to deal with minimum sentencing. Too many lives have been destroyed for non-violent issues. People that are sent to jail have police records. We have got to change that. Our job is to keep people out of jail, not in jail.

Our system of private gulags is deeply and ineluctably evil.

They serve to create a system where taxpayer money goes to increased incarceration by private companies, who then use political contributions to secure their rents.

It is thoroughly corrupt, and it needs to end now.

Fox News Tries to De-Trumpify the Debate

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It looks like Fox and the RNC are looking to find a way to keep Donald Trump out of the debates:

The large field of Republican presidential hopefuls jockeying to make the cut for the first 2016 debate will have to file a public disclosure of their personal finances on time to participate.

That means every candidate who declared before July 6 — a group of 14 contenders including former Florida governor Jeb Bush and real estate magnate Donald Trump — will have to reveal information about their assets and debts to get into the Aug. 6 event in Cleveland.

Trump told The Washington Post in an interview Thursday that he will file his financial disclosure ahead of schedule, perhaps next week. Bush has not yet said whether he will do so.

Fox News, which is hosting the debate with Facebook and the Ohio Republican Party, clarified Thursday that the criteria for candidates to participate include filing the required personal financial disclosure within 30 days of declaring their bids.

“FOX News has never wavered from the initial debate criteria we set forth,” Michael Clemente, the network’s executive vice president of news, said in a statement, which was first reported by the New York Times.

………

Under a 1978 federal ethics law, all presidential candidates have to file details about their financial interests with the FEC within 30 days of declaring. The agency allows two 45-day extensions.

………

Aides to Trump — who claims to be worth $8.7 billion — have maintained that he will file his disclosure within the 30 days allotted, giving him until July 22. Bush has until July 15 to meet the deadline for his paperwork, but his campaign has asked for a 45-day extension. A spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a question about when he plans to file. 

I don’t know how/if Trump is going to finesse this.

If he were to reveal his full personal finances, which would necessarily involve making it public, it would almost show that his wealth of “$8.7 billion” is a complete mirage, which would likely put a serious crimp in both his reputation, and his ability to conduct further business.

I do not think that this is going to work:  If Trump’s finances are as byzantine as I think, and as a real estate mogul, they likely are, he will file a report that is both technically legal completely uninformative.

I Have an Endorsement for the Florida Senate Race

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Rather unsurprisingly, it is Alan Grayson, who formally announced his entry into the Democratic primary:

The 2016 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Florida just got interesting.

 U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, the liberal firebrand whose unpredictability enthralls progressives and worries moderates, announced Thursday that he will run against the more centrist U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy for the Senate seat that would be vacated by current Sen. Marco Rubio, a candidate for the presidency.

 “People understand what I stand for,” Grayson said on the WKMG television station in Orlando on Thursday. “They know I am a champion for justice, equality and peace and I do my best to help people in need.”

 He plans to campaign on giving seniors a Social Security raise, expanding the services covered by Medicare, reducing student loans and expanding access to healthcare.

 “I don’t think Obamacare has gone far enough,” he told the Miami Herald after his announcement.

 The race pits polar opposites against each other.

 Grayson, 57, from Orlando, is known for his raucous style. In 2009, he described a proposed GOP healthcare plan as “if you do get sick, die quickly” and once compared former Vice President Dick Cheney to a vampire.

The Democratic Party establishment is supporting Patrick Murphy who, “Was a Republican until he ran for Congress in 2012,” who voted for the Keystone Pipeline, the House kangaroo hearings on Benghazi, corrupt for profit colleges, donated to Mitt Rmoney in 2007, and is a member of the corporatist “New Democrat” caucus.

Hmmm…..The DSCC, which is effectively run by Chuck “Wall Street’s Bitch” Schumer, is supporting a Wall Street loving faux Dem.

What a surprise.

Needless to say, Alan Grayson is now on Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page.

Another Reason not to Support DINOs

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Because even if you get Democrats in Name Only into office, it turns out that it takes a lot more money to do so:

Writing for Stars and Stripes and the Washington Post Sunday, Anne Kim, an operative for Wall Street’s deceptively named Progressive Policy Institute (a pro-corporate/anti-worker New Dem outfit that was founded by the DLC to promote neoliberal ideas like NAFTA and the TPP), decries how much more it costs reactionary Democrats– New Dems and Blue Dogs– to run for election than it costs real Democrats. It costs the Democrats who support the Republican/Wall Street agenda double what it costs actual Democrats to run for office. Kim’s research finds that the fake Dems “spent roughly twice as much as their liberal counterparts to win or defend their seats.” That trend is getting more pronounced and she pointed out that for every dollar that the average Progressive Caucus member directly spent to defend his or her seat in 2014, the average right-wing Democrat spent $1.93. By comparison, right-wing Democrats shelled out $1.54 for every campaign dollar spent by liberals by 2012 and $1.65 in 2010.

She doesn’t get into it, but these figures include the way Wall Street-backed conservaDems gigantically outspend progressives in primaries, often with the help of the Democratic Beltway Establishment which has now entirely abandoned its pretense of being neutral in primaries. Let’s look at a few of the most recent examples from the last cycle. Here are 4 notable races that pitted New Dem types who back cutting Social Security benefits against progressives who favor expanding Social Security. In each case, the corporate-backed right-winger seriously outspent the progressive:

  • CA-17- Ro Khanna- $4,427,701, Mike Honda- $3,447,979
  • CA-31- Pete Aguilar- $2,246,265, Eloise Reyes- $1,029,617
  • IL-13- Ann Callis- $1,936,927, George Gollin- $522,126
  • VA-08- Don Beyer- $2,688,020, Patrick Hope- $307,599

The New Dem analysis for why they have to spend more than real Democrats never touches on the fact that the New Dems’ conservative policy agenda turns off Democratic primary voters. Instead they claim that “moderate districts are by definition competitive… In 2014, outside groups spent an average of $2.2 million per race in New Democrat and Blue Dog districts, compared with an average of $299,339 in Progressive Caucus districts. All told, outside groups spent $121 million on moderate districts, vs. $20.4 million in liberal ones.” [Keep in mind that New Dems and Blue Dogs and their propagandists like Kim, always refer to them as “moderate” rather than as the conservatives that they are.]

What a surprise.  People require a lot more money to vote for a phony Democrat as they do  to vote for a real Democrat.

I’m Shocked! Shocked! To Find That Gambling Is Going on This Establishment!

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Scott Walker is under investigation for possible illegal coordination between his campaign, and so-called “independent” campaign groups.

Well, the prosecutor who is investigating the matter, it is called a “John Doe” proceeding under Wisconsin law, but this is being challenged in court.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is to here this challenge, but it now appears that some of the judges in question appear to be involved in the scheme:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is facing an investigation into whether his 2012 recall campaign illegally coordinated with nonprofit groups that spent money to support him. Campaign finance laws prohibit “coordination” because they would allow candidates to run shadow campaigns outside of campaign finance law. The Center for Media & Democracy’s PRWatch said, “Prosecutors gathered evidence of Walker secretly raising millions of dollars for the supposedly ‘independent’ nonprofit Wisconsin Club for Growth (WiCFG), with the express purpose of bypassing campaign finance disclosure laws.” The secret donations were revealed to include money from a mining company that received permission to open a mine soon after Walker won reelection.

The investigation is at a preliminary stage, called a John Doe proceeding under Wisconsin law, which determines whether charges are filed. PRWatch said that “Walker and his allies have fought the probe not by denying coordination, but by claiming the rules don’t apply to so-called ‘issue ads’ that stop short of expressly telling viewers how to vote.” The Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering one of the many lawsuits filed to stop the investigation.

In a newly released court filing, the prosecutor in the case raised the question of whether one or two of the justices hearing the case are implicated in the same kind of scheme. Two groups suspected of coordinating with Walker’s campaign have also spent $10 million to elect the four-justice conservative majority. The prosecutor’s heavily redacted brief also suggests that two justices, or, at least, their campaigns, may have committed the same offense that is at the heart of the Walker investigation—coordinating with dark money groups to get reelected.

Special prosecutor Francis Schmitz—a Republican who voted for Walker in 2012—noted that the groups “had significant involvement in the election of particular justices,” though the document redacts the names of the justices and the groups. (The suspects in a grand jury or John Doe proceeding remain anonymous, unless and until charges are filed.) While the justices are not named, the brief refers to the justices benefiting from money spent by John Doe groups to support the reelection of the justices, and the groups have spent money to support the election of all four members of the court’s conservative majority.

Schmitz’s brief also referred to a “history of control, collaboration and coordination” between the groups and “political campaign committees that may potentially include judicial candidates.” The brief describes persons who worked for both a supreme court campaign and the John Doe groups. A redacted portion quotes an email that seems to provide evidence that a group was “actively involved” in a justice’s reelection campaign. Other redacted portions seem to describe contacts and “close connections” between the justice’s campaign and John Doe groups, before concluding:

Justice David Prosser was up for reelection in 2011, when Walker faced a recall election. At the time, the Wisconsin Supreme Court was hearing a legal challenge to Walker’s controversial law restricting collective bargaining rights. Both sides in the debate—unions and big business—spent big in the supreme court election. Two of the John Doe groups spent around $2.5 million to reelect Justice Prosser—much more than the justice’s own campaign.

Anyone wanna take money on whether David Prosser, who has been alleged to have physically assaulted a fellow justice in the court offices, is going to recuse himself?

I’ll take 5:1 odds that he won’t recuse himself.

The Coveted “Biggest Asshole in Silicon Valley” Endorsement., Marco Rubio Haz It

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I am referring, of course, to Larry Ellison, even if one ignores the persistent rumors of sexual harassment at Oracle, who will be hosting a fundraiser for Marco Rubio’s Presidential campaign.

Rubio is, “Not a mindful human being,” to borrow Ron Reagan Jr.’s phrase,* which is why he accepts Ellison’s money with such equanimity.

Of course, for a Republican Party candidate for President, being a, “Mindful human being,” is a luxury that he cannot afford.

Just look at the amount of fellating that is directed toward Sheldon Adelson by various Republicans, where recent news strongly implies strong ties to Chinese mobsters.

We need real campaign finance reform, if just so that Republicans can tell people like Ellison and Adelson to shut the f%$# up.

*RRJ said about Dick Cheney, “I don’t think he’s a mindful human being. That’s probably the nicest way I can put it,” when describing Cheney’s behavior toward his mom, Nancy Reagan at his Dad’s funeral.†
†The Link is here. The Cliff Notes version is that Dick Cheney escorted her to Reagan’s casket, and he stopped at the bottom of some stairs, and allowed an 80 year old woman with glaucoma to flounder her way up the stairs. (Really classy)

Bernie Sanders Is More Serious than the Media Thinks

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 And I am not just saying this because the famously curmudgeonly Matt Taibbi  wrote him a political love letter.

In the US, the lifeblood of politics is money, and the fact that the Sanders for President campaign raised $1.5 million dollars in the first 24 hours after his announcement, and raised $3 million in the first 4 days.

Needless to say, unlike most modern candidates on both sides of the aisle, these were small individual donations, not Wall Street and other big donors.  (About ½ of Obama campaign funds came from big donors in 2008)

I think that it is highly unlikely that he can wing the primary, and if he did, we would see the Blue Dog and New Dem wings of the party surreptitiously campaigning against him, much like Henry “Scoop” Jackson and his ilk did in 1972 to George McGovern.