One of the stains on Democracy is “Dark Money,” that, anonymous donors who make large political contributions while masking their identity. The Koch brothers and other funders of corporate assaults on democracy used such conduits. In education elections, such groups as Education Reform Now and the California Charter School Association Advocates hide their donors names. A few years back, California held a referendum about raising taxes to support schools. Certain well-known billionaires publicly supported the tax but quietly funded a Dark Money campaign to defeat it.
The chief judge of the Federal District Court ruled that the names of all those who make political donations must be released, and the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. This is great news for those who believe in transparency and democracy!
Advocacy groups pouring money into independent campaigns to impact this fall’s midterm races must disclose many of their political donors beginning this week after the Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to intervene in a long-running case.
The high court did not grant an emergency request to stay a ruling by a federal judge in Washington who had thrown out a decades-old Federal Election Commission regulation allowing nonprofit groups to keep their donors secret unless they had earmarked their money for certain purposes.
With less than 50 days before this fall’s congressional elections, the ruling has far-reaching consequences that could curtail the ability of major political players to raise money and force the disclosure of some of the country’s wealthiest donors.
In an interview, FEC Chairwoman Caroline Hunter said that the names of certain contributors who give money to nonprofit groups to use in political campaigns beginning Wednesday will have to be publicly reported.
Hunter and other conservatives warned the decision could have a chilling effect just as the midterms are heating up.
“It’s unfortunate that citizens and groups who wish to advocate for their candidate will now have to deal with a lot of uncertainty less than two months before the election,” said Hunter, a Republican appointee.
Advocates for stricter regulation of money in politics celebrated the move.
“This is a great day for transparency and democracy,” Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which brought the case, said in a statement, adding: “We’re about to know a lot more about who is funding our elections.”
Yes, it throws “uncertainty” into the election when donors have to be known to the public.
It is unclear whether the decision is retroactive.
Since Citizens United was approved by the Supreme Court, Big Money has been unlimited in campaign spending. Now it faces the “uncertainty” of being publicly identified.
Boo hoo.
“The Supreme Court’s decision comes less than a week after a new research report by the government reform group Issue One, which puts some dollar amounts on what these unreported donors are giving. The report, which took a year of research, finds that the top 15 politically active nonprofits raised and spent more than $600 million on campaigns between 2010, when Citizens United boosted secret fundraising, and 2016.
“The secret giving is made possible by a regulatory loophole at the FEC. The groups, usually organized as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations or 501(c)(6) business associations, don’t register as political committees with the commission. With the loophole, the FEC wants donor disclosure only when a donor earmarks the money for specific ads.
“The top four spenders identified by Issue One are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the mainstream conservative Crossroads GPS, the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity and the National Rifle Association. Issue One says that collectively, the four groups pumped at least $357 million into elections between 2010 and 2016.
“Opaque organizations are using contributions from opaque donors and secretly funding election campaigns and ads that are urging viewers to vote for or against candidates,” said Michael Beckel, research manager at Issue One. “And it remains very difficult to track back the true sources of dark money groups.”
“Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity has launched AFP Action — a superPAC that will regularly report its donors to the FEC, sidestepping the disclosure controversy.”
This was a long-overdue decision, but it will do little to forestall the continuing decline of the once-decent, severely-flawed (NEVER “great”) U.S. republic.
Never a democracy from its beginning (most of the Constitution’s Framers deeply distrusted democracy), the start of the end of the republic and the beginning of the U.S. oligarchy was the 1886 Supreme Court Southern Pacific Railroad v. Santa Clara County decision which gave human rights to corporations in a very biased head note misusing the 14th Amendment, which was meant to give equal protection of the law to all U.S. citizens, including the newly-freed slaves after the Civil War.
The 1976 Supreme Court Buckley v. Valeo decision then equated money with speech, so, inevitably, more money equaled more speech, which equaled more political influence by the wealthy and corporations.
The 2010 Citizens United decision merely opened the floodgates to unlimited amounts of
influence by the wealthy, corporations, lobbies, and “dark money”.
Long after the despicable Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court continues to be one of the most anti-democratic institutions in the U.S. government. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will merely add to the anti-democratic, regressive, pro-corporate, patriarchal “justices” already on the Roberts Court, driving more nails into the coffin of the long-dead U.S. Republic. Once the elderly RBG is gone, Kagan and Sotomayor will be isolated as the voices of reason, humaneness, and progressivisim on the Court.
The U.S. is an oligarchy pretending to be a democracy. Its massive, extremely-expensive and overpriced military is used primarily to secure its global corporate empire, which goes under the euphemism of its “national interests”.
This can easily be seen by its 800+ military bases in more than 70 countries, its nuclear-armed fleets on and under most of the earth’s oceans, its Special Operations forces in more than 140 countries, and its quest to dominate space as well as the earth itself.
The United States of Aggression and Arrogance is currently waging war on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and would like to war on Iran and Venezuela as well, because those two countries have the audacity to defy the wishes of the “exceptional” United States by going their own way (plus, they will never forget the past violent U.S. interventions in their countries).
None of those countries threatens the U.S., but that means nothing to the bipartisan consensus in Congress which continues to vote for bloated military budgets like the recent $700 billion+ one which Trump wanted, which is more than the military budgets of the next seven nations COMBINED, including China and Russia.
The Merchants of Death, which include Lockheed Martin (EACH F-35 costs $400 million), Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Grumman Northrup, cleverly spread their subcontractors into most of the 535 Congressional Districts, so nearly every member of Congress is beholden to them for claims of jobs. This is the 2018 version of the Military-Corporate-Congressional-Surveillance Complex (which now also includes Amazon with its $600 million CIA contract, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, all of whom are now censoring anything deemed “dissenting” by their Overlords).
As long as these imperial oligarchs rule, we will have crumbling schools and infrastructure, poverty, homelessness, and inequality, but never democracy.
Never despair. Never give up. Never stop trying.
evolution toward actual democracy has been happening slowly through long years: those who have fought long, hard fights to gain the vote and recognition in society would stand up and say COUNT ME, SEE ME
YEP, Ed, YEP!
Does this ruling apply to state races? DeVos & Koch money are all over TN trying to buy state elections. They’ve targeted SPED teacher & past state rep Gloria Johnson as their number one person to beat. Her Republican opponent has money coming from the Waltons, Reed Hastings (those donations were reported) but there are groups Student’s First & TN Students for Success who are working with him. Does anyone know if they need to report their funders?
I bet they have to report.
jcgrim. This appears to be a federal ruling, but stilll with some loopholes. Money, Money, Money. A little publicized requirement in ESSA is about to be in the news, and the money hawks/producivity preditors hope to extract several stripped down models of education financing. Here is the deal.
State and Local Education agencies are required under ESSA to report on multiple, disaggregated measures about district- and school-level per-pupil expenditures. User-friendly dashboards are supposed to be fully in place for 2018-2019
The contractors in charge of “helping states” were probably active in shaping that part of ESSA. The technical assistance available for meeting ESSA requirements for per-pupil accounting comes from three sources.
The first is the The Building State Capacity and Productivity Center at WestEd. (BSCP Center) “assists state education agencies (SEAs) throughout the country as they adapt to constrained fiscal resources and increased demands for greater productivity.” (Note the predetermined conclusion about “constrained fiscal resources“ and quest for “productivity” meaning more bang for the buck. Austerity is taken for granted as a virtue and necessity for public schools.
The second source of assistance is the Council for Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), primarily through it’s timeline and details indicating how fine-grained the disaggregation of per-pupil costs must be. I think the level of disaggregation by school puts at risk the personal information of students. See https://www.ccsso.org/sites/default/files/2018-02/ESSA%20Implementation%20Timeline%20Resource.pdf page 13
The third “help” center for ESSA is the Edunomics Lab under the direction of Dr. Marguerite Roza, a research professor at Georgetown University. Dr. Roza is a big fan of thinking there should be a direct correlation of per-pupil money spent with “outcomes.” It should be no surprise that she served as Senior Economic Advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Roza earned a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Washington. She has also studied at the London School of Economics. She served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy teaching thermodynamics at the Naval Nuclear Power School.
The Edunomics Lab is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the following:
CASEL (Center for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning)
Center on Reinventing Public Education
Council of Chief State School Officers
New America Foundation
Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho
Building State Capacity & Productivity Center
Smith Richardson Foundation
Walton Family Foundation
I analysed affiliations of key staff and researchers at Edunomics. Many have prior work at charter friendly foundations and agencies: Key Staff (4) affiliate researchers (9). Among other backgrounds are leadership training from Education Pioneers (5), prior work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (3), and the charter friendly Center for Reinventing Public Education (3). Some bios cite work with Bridge International (for-profit schools in Africa, India for poorest of the poor), Bellwether Education Partners (charter promoter), and Teach for America.
Here is a 2009 article by Dr. Roza that shows how all of this works in a simple form. https://www.educationnext.org/breaking-down-school-budgets-2/ Here is a related Gates-funded paper on School Finance Redesign. https://www.crpe.org/sites/default/files/wp_sfrp12_monk_mar07_0.pdf
Roza and colleagues have academic papers that show high-school allocations of funds per-pupil are higher for AP courses, foreign Language, and instrumental music courses. The end game for these ESSA exercises is fresh information for voucher supporters and state funding hawks, and anyone who thinks teachers are overpaid and unwilling to up their productivity (name any oucome measure you choose).
Roza worked at Center for Reinventing Education. I recall a paper called “Frozen Assets” in which she criticized teacher pensions. Big into charters and portfolios. No actual acquaintance with teaching, children, education per se.
Good News!