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GRIT-tv reveals how secret campaign money and non-existent enforcement of federal regulations corrupted the political process.

Michael Winship

By Michael Winship
Senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS

I attended a screening this week of Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Client 9. It’s the story of the rise and fall of New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer, brought down by imperial hubris and a reckless penchant for ladies of the evening.

Gibney, an Oscar-winning filmmaker, creates a fascinating narrative. Both he and Spitzer readily concede that it was the former governor who did himself in; he haplessly provided the guns and ammo that polished him off. But there is a compelling case made suggesting that there were plenty of enemies, both in politics and business, with a motive to see him destroyed, plus the wherewithal and contacts to help grease the skids.

After all, it was Spitzer who, as state attorney general and self-appointed “Sheriff of Wall Street,” went after corruption and greed in the finance industry, exposing investment bank stock inflation, securities fraud, predatory lending practices, exorbitant executive compensation and illegal late trading and market timing perpetrated by hedge funds and mutual fund companies. Some of these practices were, of course, major factors in the calamitous financial follies of 2008.

One of Spitzer’s targets was Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, former chair and chief executive officer of the gigantic insurance company AIG. He was forced to resign by the AIG board in March 2005 after Spitzer charged Greenberg and the company with manipulative behaviors in violation of insurance and securities laws. Ultimately, criminal charges were dropped but when AIG collapsed during the ’08 meltdown, ultimately receiving the largest of the Federal bailouts — 182 billion taxpayer dollars – Greenberg said he was “bewildered” that things could have gone so wrong.

In Client 9, I was struck by a statement attributed to Greenberg, who in his AIG heyday supposedly was fond of joking, “All I ask for is an unfair advantage.”

Just three days before the screening, The New York Times had reported that one of the largest donors to a foundation run by the US Chamber of Commerce is a charity run by Greenberg.

According to the Times, “The charity has made loans and grants [to the chamber's foundation] totaling $18 million since 2003. U.S. Chamber Watch, a union-backed group, filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service last month asserting that the chamber foundation violated tax laws by funneling the money into a chamber ‘tort reform’ campaign favored by AIG and Mr. Greenberg. The chamber denied any wrongdoing.

“The complaint, which the chamber calls entirely unfounded, raises the question of how the chamber picks its campaigns, and whether it accepts donations that are intended to be spent on specific issues or political races.” (more…)

Mike Lux

By Mike Lux
Author, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be”

Okay, I’m very biased because I have been working with my friends at MoveOn for a while on their The Other 98% campaign to fight corporate corruption in our political system, but I couldn’t be prouder of these ads that MoveOn members themselves are making and starring in. Check out Sam Stein’s piece on the ad campaign. The amount of work it took to separately shoot each of these 28 ads with people from those districts and states was incredible, and they capture the spirit of the moment perfectly: regular citizens at the grassroots have to stand up to these incredibly wealthy special interests- the big Wall Street banks, big oil, the big insurance companies, and probably some foreign corporations as well- who are trying to buy this election for their friends in the Republican Party.

Democrats are up against formidable odds this cycle- secretive corporate slush funds busting every record known by far for spending on campaigns, self-funded candidates pouring huge sums of money into their own campaigns (Meg Whitman holds the record at $140 million so far, but many others are already deep into the 7 or 8 figures), an economy so deeply damaged by the profligacy of the Bush years that it will probably take a decade to recover)- but grassroots activists from the progressive movement are fighting back. The MoveOn campaign from day one has involved hundreds of thousands activists and contributors and local demonstrators at various events. The labor movement effort has been phenomenal- check out this memo from their political director Karen Ackerman. Immigration activists have mounted a major GOTV effort among Hispanics in key states and districts all over the country. Progressive organizations of all stripes have kicked things up a notch. The DailyKos community has already directly raised over $800,000 for candidates (not including the money raised by candidates after that first contribution). Blue America has raised almost $910,000. (more…)

Travis McArthur

By Travis McArthur
Global Trade Watch Finance Researcher

The folks at Think Progress have been following the breadcrumbs and connecting the dots on unfair trade policies and corporate influence in elections.

Think Progress reports on a program sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, a corporate interest group, and the Chinese government that puts together workshops on how to offshore work to China. Given the Chamber’s attitude toward offshoring, perhaps we should have expected to find this type of program. As far back as 2004, Tom Donahue, CEO of the Chamber, said that “there are legitimate values in outsourcing – not only jobs, but work.”

This pro-offshoring attitude goes hand-in-hand with the Chamber’s push to approve the unfair Bush-negotiated Colombia, Korea, and Panama Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Tom Donahue recently claimed that passage of these trade pacts will create millions of jobs, but in reality the FTAs will just make it easier for corporations to offshore jobs abroad. That’s the last thing we need in the middle of this jobs crisis.
Think Progress also reports on how foreign corporations that provide offshoring services have been funneling thousands of dollars to the Chamber of Commerce’s political ad account.   The Chamber of Commerce has been using this political ad account to attack champions of fair trade policies this election cycle.

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Disclosure: Public Citizen has no preference among the candidates for office.

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Travis McArthur’s work focuses on documenting the effects of NAFTA-style trade agreements, revealing WTO rules that prohibit re-regulation of the U.S. financial sector, and analyzing trade, employment, and macroeconomic data. Before joining Global Trade Watch, he worked at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, where he analyzed the effects of the TARP bank bailout on competition in the financial industry. In 2008 he worked with the Union de Agricultores Minifundistas (Association of Smallholder Farmers) in Guatemala to develop a plan to help farmers cope with the effects of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. He has also conducted research on the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexico at Oxfam America.

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This piece is republished from Public Citizen’s Blog on Globalization and Trade.

Mike Hall

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Right-wing radio zealot Glenn Beck apparently has decided that all that foreign money coming into the Chamber of Commerce’s kitty just isn’t enough to buy an election.

Last week, he announced he was donating $10,000 to the Chamber and urged his listeners to chip in, too.

Beck is the same guy who called the long-term unemployed un-American, anti-capitalist, socialist losers and who verbally attacked an 80-year-old union activist for speaking at a high school, among other just as outrageous and reactionary rants.

The Chamber, for its part, doesn’t have much respect or use for workers, either. It’s spending $75 million to promote candidates who oppose new rules to discourage U.S. firms from shipping jobs overseas, want to repeal the minimum wage and weaken workplace safety and collective bargaining laws rules. That’s just the short list.

Maybe Beck’s disclosure of his contribution will spur the Chamber to step out from behind the shield of a weak election law and reveal just who else is funding its political attack machine….Nah.

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Re-Posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Republican fund-raisers are treating Americans like little children, as if the GOP knows best and must shelter the youngsters from the truth.

It’s like when a kindergartner asks his father if mommy is coming home soon, and the widower replies that she’s on a long business trip. The parent is attempting to shield the child from the cruel truth, afraid the little one can’t handle it.

That’s what Republican campaign fund-raising groups are doing by concealing their donors from the public. The GOP does not trust Americans to handle the information. Republican operatives want to shield voters from knowing who is actually paying for GOP attack ads. The GOP fears the consequences if Americans know the truth – exactly which giant corporations and Wall Street banksters are funding vicious screeds against Democrats because those covert donors believe Republicans will deliver for big business.

The secret GOP benefactors are right about one thing: A Republican majority will work for the rich. In a study of income growth post WWII, Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels determined that earnings rose faster at all income levels under Democratic administrations, but especially for the middle class and the poor. Under Republican presidents, the wealthiest benefited the most, increasing income inequality.

After the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down decades of precedent in January in its Citizens United ruling, defining corporations as “persons” and permitting them to pour unlimited cash into political advertising, Democrats offered legislation to temper that newly-granted corporate power. Called the DISCLOSE Act – for Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections — it would have required revelation of corporate donations.

Republicans wanted concealment of their corporate sources, however, and scuttled the DISCLOSE Act. This freed private political fund-raising groups to take as much money as they can from corporations while providing a cloak of anonymity.

The Republican and Democratic parties still must disclose donors, and unions like the United Steelworkers (USW), which get their political action committee contributions from American members, must provide detailed information on how much they spend, which candidates they support, and the names of people who supply in-kind services as well as the value of the services.

The story of health insurers’ disclosed contributions to political parties reveals why Republicans prefer to keep Americans in the dark about gifts to GOP private fund-raising groups.

Public reports show that last year, the health insurance industry split its donations  between the two parties, but this year, after passage of health insurance reform, the contributions are running three to one for Republicans. The insurance corporations have made their demands clear to Republican beneficiaries. They want Republicans to retain in the law the financial windfalls for insurance corporations – that would be mandates that uninsured Americans get coverage and fines for those who don’t.  And they want Republicans to delete aspects that will cost insurance companies – that would be benefits for Americans like requirements that insurers cover sick children and injunctions against dropping policy holders when they get sick.

Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna Corp., one of the nation’s largest health insurance corporations, told Noam N. Levey of the Chicago Tribune:

“The industry would love to have a Republican Congress. They were very, very successful during the years of Republican domination in Washington.”

Voters need to know that insurance corporations overwhelmingly favor Republicans and what the industry expects to get from the GOP. But Americans will not know how much money insurers and other corporations give to shadowy Republican fund-raising groups and what those donors demand.

A New York Times investigation provided some insight into one GOP shadow group, the American Future Fund. It has spent $6 million so far on ads attacking Democrats in 13 states.  The Times discovered that Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Hawkeye Energy Holdings, one of the nation’s largest corn-based ethanol companies, provided the seed money for American Future Fund. The Times determined that American Future Fund money is funding ads to defeat Democrats who sit on legislative committees that directly affect the ethanol industry and agricultural subsidies.

Two other secretive Republican groups, American Crossroads GPS and the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce, plan to spend $145 million to crush Democrats while concealing their funding sources from Americans.

American Crossroads GPS, brainchild of Republican operative Karl Rove, plans to spend $70 million. Mel Sembler, a shopping mall magnate, told the New York Times that wealthy donors have given the GPS group six and seven-figure checks, and Republicans said one donor, who they refused to name, gave several million dollars. Sembler told the Times why clandestine giving is so attractive to corporations:

“They want to be able to be helpful but not be seen by the public as taking sides.”

What they don’t want to be seen doing is lining their pockets by buying Republican politicians. Neither do the Republican beneficiaries.

Like GPS, the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce is an elephant-sized player in the secretive Republican support game. It has spent $25 million on more than 8,000 ads slamming Democrats and backing corporate Republican candidates. It plans to spend $50 million more.

Oddly, the commerce group calls itself the U.S. Chamber while admitting foreign firms and soliciting funds from corporations in places like Bahrain, India and Singapore whose interests may conflict with those of American companies and American citizens. An investigation by Think Progress, a project of the non-partisan Center for American Progress Action Fund, revealed that the so-called U.S. Chamber has accepted at least $885,000 from 84 foreign firms, money that it placed in the same account from which it draws funds to sponsor ads attacking Democratic candidates.

The so-called U.S. Chamber denied that it illegally co-mingles money it gets from foreign corporations with funds it uses to attack Democrats. When Think Progress and others asked the so-called U.S. Chamber to divulge the account’s firewall to the public, the so-called U.S. Chamber responded by repeating its assurance that it does nothing wrong and asserting, “We are not obligated to discuss our internal procedures.”

Basically, the so-called U.S. Chamber is saying, “trust us,” to the American public. On the other hand, the “U.S. Chamber” and groups like American Crossroads GPS don’t trust the American public to know their donor lists. What they don’t trust is that Americans will do what the GOP wants on Nov. 2 if Republicans’ corporate donors are exposed.

The USW challenges the “U.S. Chamber” and GOP funding groups like American Crossroads GPS to show their trust in the American people by disclosing their donors.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

Michael Winship

By Michael Winship
Senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS

“Somebody once said that Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.” So John F. Kennedy famously remarked in 1961, and so the town seemed to remain when I first moved there in 1969 to go to school.

Clerks in dusty stores moved with the majestic inertia of tall ships becalmed. You could count the number of good restaurants on the fingers of one hand — okay, maybe two hands. There was a rendering plant on the south side of K Street that turned animal carcasses into glue; when the wind blew the wrong way, the awful smell brought tears to the eyes of those who lived and shopped along the fashionable lanes of Georgetown.

There were still “temporary” buildings on the National Mall that had been there since the end of World War I, filled with government workers. But any citizen could freely walk the corridors of Congress, enter a member’s office to leave an opinion or pick up a pass for the visitors’ galleries of the House or Senate, ride that little subway that runs underneath the Capitol. No campaign contributions required.

Or so it seemed to a white, middle-class college kid. Washington also was a city in decline. Not quite a year and a half had passed since the three days of riots that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Thirteen people had died, more than a thousand were hurt, and you could still see piles of rubble and burned out storefronts. Hundreds of businesses had been damaged or destroyed. (more…)

Michael Winship

By Michael Winship
Senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS

(With apologies to the late, great Damon Runyon)

So I am in Washington, DC, our nation’s capital, admiring the buildings and the fine monuments and so forth, when I run into my very dear friend Gorilla Bagsley, whom I have not had the pleasure of seeing for many a year.

We shake hands with joy indeed and Gorilla says to me, come and have a drink for old time’s sake. I have not imbibed in a very long time, I tell him, and fear that such a thing will give me gas, but he persuades me to come into an establishment he knows and to bend an elbow with a pint of something pale and weak while he imbibes a beverage of a more muscular variety.

I have not been with Gorilla since he and I were young and flimflamming the tourists around New York Harbor, telling them that the Statue of Liberty is green on account of it was a gift from the generous people of Mars. Now here he is in Washington, which to me is passing strange. For if Boston is the home of the bean and the cod, as the poet once said, then surely Washington is the home of the scheme and the fraud, and so I ask Gorilla, who I thought had gone the route of the straight and narrow, what he is doing in such a place.

“Oh,” he says. “This is a wonderful place.”

“Why?” I ask, and Gorilla replies, “Because, dear pal of mine, it is coin-operated.” (more…)

Lori Wallach

By Lori Wallach
Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch

The growth rate of U.S. exports to the countries with whom we do NOT have Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) has been over double that to U.S. FTA partners. That stunning finding should put an end to recent Obama administration talk about reviving three NAFTA-style FTAs leftover from the Bush era. And, it should provide impetus to finally implement President Obama’s campaign commitments to renegotiate aspects of the past FTAs, and create a new American trade pact model going forward.

The core justification for FTAs like NAFTA and CAFTA is that they boost exports. Yet Public Citizen’s recent study “Lies, Damn Lies and Export Statistics,” analyzes the actual government trade flow data. It showed that, if exports to the 17 U.S. FTA partners had only grown as much as exports to the rest of the world, the U.S. would have had an extra $72 billion in exports over the past decade. Check out this stunning graph:

Yup, U.S. FTAs resulted in a relative export penalty! Not only did U.S. manufacturing exports grow faster with non-FTA countries, but so did service sector exports. And, we have a substantial agricultural trade deficit with our FTA partners, contrary to the sales pitch about the supposed gains for our heartland farmers. (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

The Chamber of Commerce is rolling out its “jobs and economy” political initiative today. As Politico reports, the blitz is “designed to drive voters toward ’5 Questions to Ask Your Candidates,’ to be distributed by mail and online to millions of voters.”

Here are the five, accompanied by five alternatives tied to reality rather than the Chamber’s ideological phantasmagoria:

1. Do you believe that our free enterprise system is currently threatened?

Do you believe that entrenched corporate interests are blocking reforms vital to our country’s future? (more…)