Reich writes: "According to data from Kantar Media CMAG, two-thirds of the money spent so far shaping the 2016 election has come from 'dark money' groups - non-profit political fronts that aren't required to reveal the corporations or individuals behind them."
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
29 January 16
ccording to data from Kantar Media CMAG, two-thirds of the money spent so far shaping the 2016 election has come from “dark money” groups — non-profit political fronts that aren't required to reveal the corporations or individuals behind them. Since the start of 2015, these secret outlets have spent more than $213 million on political ads. Campaigns and super PACs, which have to reveal their sources, have spent about $114 million.
When he wrote the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision in 2010 for the Court’s Republican majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts wouldn’t be a problem because “with the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.”
Wrong. Kennedy didn’t consider the vast loophole for non-profit political front groups and the Republican Congress’s steadfast unwillingness to require full disclosure. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, fully disclosed independent spending fell from 65 percent of all independent spending in the 2008 election cycle to 48 percent in 2010 and 40 percent in 2012 – and continues to drop. (Last fall, Kennedy admitted that disclosure “is not working the way it should” – a remark roughly analogous to Neville Chamberlain’s lame surprise that Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939.)
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