( – promoted by buhdydharma )
WASHINGTON (AP) – About 40 current and former corporate executives have a message for Congress: Quit hitting us up for campaign cash. NYT
In a letter to Congressional leaders, executives urged Congress to get out of their pockets.
“Members of Congress already spend too much time raising money from large contributors,” the letter said. “And often, many of us individually are on the receiving end of solicitation phone calls from members of Congress. With additional money flowing into the system due to the court’s decision, the fund-raising pressure on members of Congress will only increase.”
Some of the companies that signed the letter include: Playboy Enterprises, Ben & Jerry’s, Seagram’s, Hasbro, Delta Airlines, Men’s Wearhouse, Quaker Chemical Corporation, Brita Products Company, San Diego National Bank, MetLife and Crate and Barrel. Woot! Woot!
It sounds like there are bills up there.
A Senate proposal would finance campaigns with a fee on businesses that get $10 million or more in government contracts.
The House would finance it with revenue from auctioning off the television broadcast spectrum, which was opened when the country switched to digital broadcasting.
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…. now. All they had to do was to funnel it thru alleged non profit church “charities” that were “educating” the public on certain public referendums such as Prop 8 in CA or People’s Veto #1 in Maine, where one had the Mormon and Catholic Churches directly funding the fight against equality. Individual donors who just happened to be extremely wealthy business tycoons, were donating millions to these.
There are legal actions now ongoing by states, trying to force these phony church charities to disclose donors, and the response has been Ha- Ha, you fools, we have better lawyers, so sue us. Think about this. WHERE did the People’s Veto advocates in Maine really get their money from, other than from the Protect Marriage crowd ? It could even be from foreign countries. We’ll NEVER know.
The MSM is pretty much ignoring the story. Go to Pam’s House Blend, the Courage Campaign, their current Prop 8 trial tracker writeup on the testimony showing the LDS Church directly funded Prop 8, see the LDS trolls still denying this, or some of my older diaries to see how this works.
And because of the Supreme Court ruling this week, that isn’t going to change.
If I am reading this correctly, this so called new public financing campaign these businesses are wanting, it would limit individual contributions but Corporations could STILL spend millions in negative attack ads against candidates.
I would like to make it clear I am very much in favor of publicly funded campaigns and limits, but as I am more familiar with how Congressional campaigns get financed that most, I am getting pretty damned cynical that anything could be actually done to make the situation BETTER, with this Supreme Court which condones the corruption.
Go ahead, anybody, and try to label me a so called concern troll, but if we are all at the mercy of the Supreme Court of the United States, begging them not to install puppet figurehead, while the Corporations rule the land, and the lawyers laugh and make off with the loot, then tell me exactly HOW this changes that.
And tell me how we change the Supreme Court.
there might be at least a tiny reduction in the need for so many corporate $$$’s, requiring politician’s later payback in political favors, IMHO. I wish that campaigns were legally limited to no more than two months, and a month would be even better–before an election.
Not to mention that people wouldn’t be assaulted by endless annoying and mainly false campaign ads for months and months before elections.
I thought this would be a letter to Alan Grayson when I first clicked the link. That dude suuure loves asking for cash.
is a good idea, but they need to couple it with legislation requiring prior shareholder approval for any corporate political expenditures.
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The cartoon is far too cute for the seriousness of the problem, but I kind of liked it.
As long as we have a money system we will have money influencing political affairs. Your alternative, unless you eliminate capitalism, is some form of hereditary rule.
Progressives have had a hard time understanding the nature of capitalism probably because Marxism was virtually banned from American universities in the 50’s and 60’s and probably before. This gives Americans a very gee-whiz view that politics and economics are and ought to be separate. You cannot separate the two.
As long as we operate primarily through the exchange of money we have to form our own corporations or work for those that are progressive and take a pay-cut if we don’t believe in what the corporation we are working with is doing to work elsewhere — if we can’t do that then we should face it. You can bitch and moan about money in politics but you cannot eliminate it no matter how many laws you pass, even public funding laws. Can you limit it? Somewhat, maybe. But it would still find another under-the-table way of doing what it’s doing now and what it proposes to do with the new SCOTUS ruling. Or, to put it simply, moneyed interests would just make physical threats — they already to and they are prepared to go the full route. People think that “hit-men” are just fiction — they are not.