The June 5 Wisconsin Recall Election was a sobering illustration of the role of money under the current election regime. I’ve copied an interesting excerpt from Democracy Now, June 27, 2012, featuring two contributors to Mother Goose Magazine: Andy Kroll and Monika Bauerlein.
The major issues of interest to me: 1) State politics has increasingly given way to national politics. Most of the money pouring into the Wisconsin election came from outside of the state. This is a national pattern of grave consequence. 2.) Almost all of the money is spent on television, which requires us to consider what it means when the role of the citizen is reduced to evaluating television. 3) The money being spent by the extremely wealthy is not, in general, very much for them. In 2011, Koch industries is said to have had an annual revenue of just under $100,000,000,000. If they give .1% of that to a political campaign, that would be 100 milliion, more than was spent on the entire Wisconsin recall election by both sides. If the average American citizen has a revenue of $50,000 and gives .1%, that would be $50.
The interview below can be seen online at: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/27/dark_money_inside_the_final_frontier
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s stick with the Wisconsin recall election earlier this month, the most expensive in the state’s history, with more than $63 million spent. Governor Walker, who survived the recall, outspent Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett seven to one, close to eight to one. I want to turn to an ad that was bankrolled by this secretive Virginia-based organization called the Coalition for American Values.
KAREN: I didn’t vote for Governor Walker.
LINDA: I did not vote for Scott Walker.
TIM: I didn’t vote for Scott Walker, Joel, but I’m definitely against this recall.
JIM: Recall isn’t the Wisconsin way.
KAREN: There’s a right way. There’s a wrong way. And I just—I think this is the wrong way.
JIM: I elected him to do a job.
BOB: Let him serve it out.
BOB: Living in a democracy, you have to have faith in who the people elect.
CHAD: I didn’t vote for Scott Walker, but I’m against the recall.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is an ingenious ad, because I’m sure they did some kind of focus groups or polling, and they saw that Walker was not popular in Wisconsin. But they realized they could raise the issue of the recall being undemocratic. You know, there was an election, someone was elected, let him serve out his time. Andy Kroll, talk about who it was that bankrolled this.
ANDY KROLL: I wish I could tell you exactly who it was, because I—but I still don’t know. The group behind it was called the Coalition of American Values, which it does really not get more generic than, I guess, Americans for a Better America. What I found—so this ad comes out. As you mentioned, it really does have a potent message. And in retrospect, you know, or in hindsight, we now know that it was incredibly potent, because exit polls showed that a lot of the people who voted for Walker were really voting—you know, were voting on discontent over the recall itself. So, I start digging into this group, find that their address in Milwaukee, in the state, is a mailbox, essentially, and that their office—they have another office in Virginia, and that’s a UPS store box. And so, there is no home address or home office. The treasurer, as far as I could tell, and we could never actually pin this down, was a gentleman named Brent Downs, who appeared to be a recent graduate of a university in Milwaukee, didn’t answer phone calls, didn’t reply to emails.
And what brought them to my attention was not only were they running this ad and spending six figures on this ad around the state, they had not filed a single report with a state disclosing their spending. I mean, it’s one thing to just funnel money through an incorporation—an incorporated entity in Virginia into Milwaukee, into Wisconsin, and not tell us where your money came from, and they can legally do that with the weird way that campaign finance law works in Wisconsin post-Citizens United, but we also had no idea what they were spending. And I raised this with the elections watchdog in Wisconsin. And not only had this group not disclosed its donors, but they had not even filed a report on their spending, as required. This is what brought them to my attention before the election. They said they were going to fix it. They still hadn’t.
And so, what you—you know, the takeaway here is you have Wisconsinites who are completely in the dark about a group called the Coalition for American Values, running ads in their state, telling them that this recall is bad; not only do they not know who the donors are, based on our tattered campaign finance system, but they also don’t know how much this group is spending, really, and where, as the group is required to disclose. And so, it was just a—it was a really, really disturbing glimpse into how dark money can come into a state election and put out this message, and surely have an impact on voters, and keep those same voters entirely in the dark about how much is being spent, who’s spending it, and just who the heck is behind this group in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: Andy Kroll, reporter for Mother Jones magazine, and co-editor Monika Bauerlein. Andy’s new cover story is called "Follow the [Dark] Money." We’ll continue our conversation after break.
There is presently an act in congress, the Disclose Act, that would require that the the true and complete identity of the authors of political ads be made readily available to the public. Our congress has so far refused to pass it.
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