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What Charles G. Koch Can Teach Us About Campaign Finance Data
Lasrick writes "Lee Drutman is a political scientist with the Sunlight Foundation who does terrific work. In this article, he attempts to trace campaign donations made by one of the Koch Brothers and discovers just how difficult it is to do: 'The case of Charles G. Koch is a nice lesson in just how hard it is to determine who is breaking and who is abiding by campaign finance limits. It's hard to make accurate tallies of individual aggregate campaign contributions when the Federal Elections Commission doesn't require donors to have a unique ID, and when campaigns don't always reliably report donor names. Given this, it is unclear how the FEC would even enforce its own aggregate limit rules. The FEC's spokesperson told me that while the FEC welcomes complaints, it does not typically take enforcement initiative."'
your contributions are tax deductible.
Any other contributions get you audited by the IRS. Those are the only rules that matter these days.
There shouldn't be any 'campaign finance' laws in the first place. Any individual and company should be able to dump as much money as they want into any campaign and do it secretly if they wish so.
That's not the problem, and if you think that by setting some silly limits you can actually prevent problems in politics, you are deluded.
The problem is WHY people want to dump insane amounts of money into political campaigns in the first place, the root cause of this behaviour is that it makes sense to get your own guy into power because it's an investment given the fact that the system is set up TO DISCRIMINATE AND STEAL.
You can't possibly expect people not to try and get their guy into power given the fact that power is used to discriminate and go after individuals and after companies. Power is used to discriminate and steal, it is also used to murder, but that's just a logical extension of the first problem, theft and discrimination.
The real problem is that the government in USA is no longer limited to what it is able to do and to what it does by any laws, by the Constitution and even by the desire of any majority but that specific problem is not related to money itself.
Money is not power, money can be used for power but power in itself is something else. Confusing the two is so dangerous and lacking in understanding. Power is ability to use the system to discriminate and steal and government provides that level of power to individuals and the majority of people actually cheer when governments do that on daily basis.
That's right, majority of people cheer when power in government is used to discriminate and steal. The majority of people gave the government the power by either tacit or explicit approval of such actions. How can any rational individual expect to use this type of power over other individuals and not get a defensive response is beyond me.
If you want to solve the problem of corruption in government you have to APPLY THE LAW. You have to use the law and force the government to live within the chains that the law, the Constitution puts upon the government. You can't remove the chains of the law from the hands of the government (politicians, executives, officials) and not expect massive corruption.
You give them the power and you remove the bounds.
You give them the power and you remove the chains.
You give them the power and you remove the constraints.
The people have to fight back, we would be dead if we didn't have it built into us to fight back against our attackers and the mob uses the power of the government to attack individuals and companies.
Somehow this amazing duplicity, maybe the cognitive dissonance, this thing that Orwell called blackwhite, this lives within the modern day voters and just people. They want a government big enough to give them what they personally want by using the power to steal and discriminate but they don't want the government to get enough power that they themselves would be the subject of discrimination because the government would sell its power to whoever is successful enough to fight back against the initial discrimination.
You will have to grow up eventually because no amount of patches and laws on top of a broken system will solve the problem, you will have to actually solve the root cause of this problem or you will perish as a nation.
You can't handle the truth.
In a decent country, those Koch bastards would have been strung up years ago.
Obama is spying on every American with blanket data grabs and still fails to stop terrorist attacks
An irrational statement. It's kind of like blaming police of not stopping all crime in a very low crime area. Despite the fact that the record shows them preventing crimes and arresting criminals.
Obama has the IRS pry into the personal lives of anyone (and high school kids) who is trying to start a conservative non-profit
Another irrational statement. Obama is not micromanaging the IRS. There is indication Obama did any such thing. The IRS certainly seemed to go more for conservative groups. Though it's unclear if that was for personal political reasons of individuals within the IRS, or simply because they correctly profiled anti-tax activists as more likely to be evading tax.
Unfortunately your chance at the moral high-ground was killed when conservatives profiled black-people as being more likely to have invalid voter-registration, and thus did mass suppression of voting in black areas.
And Soros astroturfed MoveOn, etc. into existence. The question posed was why does one direction seem to be legally sactioned but not the other. If Koch brothers are wrong and Soros is not, then we are making legal rulings based on political ideology and that is definitely not something to support... unless you are a leftist.
Check back with me when the Kochs promote income equality, stop polluting the environment, and do something that indicates they give a shit about ordinary people. We still have to live on this rock and it would be nice to have an intact biosphere and be able to achieve a standard of living higher than corporate feudalism.
I'll probably be modded down for this but what do I expect when this site has moved so far right lately I have trouble recognizing it?
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Should we all be paid the same per hour regardless of what we produce in that hour?
I don't think anyone has ever said that. The phrase "Income Equality" does have an air of grade school, though.
What does have most concerned is the disproportionate gains that the super rich are getting just because they are rich. Rent seeking is the economic term.
And what the Kochs and their ilk are doing is rigging the game.
You or I have pretty much no chance of entering their World unless we are very very very lucky - and meet the right people. Zuckerberg of Facebook is the only person who I can think of who joined their World from his humble moderately wealthy family beginning.
The Koch brothers employ 10's of thousands of people.
I'd like to find out if over the last few years, how much more their employees are paying for their healthcare insurance and how much their contributions have increased. Or what kind of cost of living increases they give their employees. We've all worked for companies that when raise time comes, there isn't any money and every year, our portion of the health insurance premium goes up - the company reduces our salary on the back end.
You see, back in the 19th century, many of the "Robber Barons" gave thousands of people jobs, who had to shop at the company store, rent their housing from the company, and so on so that even though folks had jobs, they ended borrowing from the company for their basic needs - don't forget, back then, they didn't have $200 cable bills, cells phones, Apple products, luxury cars, and every other piddly shit people waste their money on these days. Their pay couldn't cover housing and food that the company charged them via the company store.
tl;dr: The Kochs want the 19th century gilded age back when there wasn't income taxes and the rich got richer and the poor just died.
"Really strange - the lefts HATRED of brothers promoting freedom with their own money."
It's really strange that you are so uninformed. Both parties are owned and could give less of a shit about you, the fact that you think the Koch brothers are 'promoting freedom' means you are seriously ignorant about politics and history.