Contributors

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Six Billion Dollars Down the Drain

It looks like we spent at least $6 billion on this election, and nothing really changed. We've got the same president, the same House and the same Senate. And that $6 billion doesn't even count an unknowable amount of "dark money" spent to influence the election, but estimates are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Much of that money was spent on countless misleading TV ads. Shouldn't we be spending our money on something more constructive, instead of giving it to the lamestream media to harangue us with stuff no one wants to see?

The Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision may be catastrophically wrong, but because of that there's little to be done to directly limit the amount of money being spent. What we can do is require more openness in the process: all ad buys should be reported on the web within 24 hours and dark money "social welfare" groups should be required to disclose all large donors on the web.

ProPublica has been working on a series of stories about dark money organizations. The weirdest part of the story is that they found a bunch of financial documents for one of these "social welfare" organizations in a meth house in Colorado. The documents seem to show coordination between Montana political campaigns and Western Tradition Partners (WTP), a dark money organization. Such coordination is illegal even under Citizen's United.

Without full disclosure of donors to such organizations it has become obvious that we cannot meet the Citizen's United's low standard. WTP's shenanigans show how easily the current system could be corrupted, or at least present the appearance of corruption.

If we know who's behind these ads then we can make a better decision about the reliability of the message, and hold them responsible for their actions.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with Nikto.

In other news, Satan just strapped on his iceskates.

Couldn't you have explicitly stated that only (R) fatcats are the ones tap-dancing around the law? You are kinda breaking a long streak...

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I'm feeling cheated. I had to go read the links to find out that (R) connections are BAD, and (D) connections -- not worth mentioning.

last in line said...

You don't care about money going down the drain.

The following is a list of all the clean energy companies supported by President Obama’s stimulus that are now failing or have filed for bankruptcy.

Evergreen Solar
SpectraWatt
Solyndra (received $535 million – now bankrupt)
Beacon Power (received $43 million)
AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy
Nevada Geothermal (received $98.5 million)
SunPower (received $1.5 billion)
First Solar (received $1.46 billion)
Babcock & Brown (an Australian company which received $178 million)
Ener1 (subsidiary EnerDel received $118.5 million)
Amonix (received 5.9 million)
The National Renewable Energy Lab
Fisker Automotive
Abound Solar (received $400 million)
Chevy Volt (taxpayers basically own GM)
Solar Trust of America ($2.1 billion federal loan guarantee – now bankrupt)
A123 Systems (received $279 million)
Willard & Kelsey Solar Group (received $6 million)
Johnson Controls (received $299 million)
Schneider Electric (received $86 million)

That’s 19 (that we know of so far). We also know that loans went to foreign clean energy companies (Fisker sent money to their overseas plant to develop an electric car), and that 80% of these loans went to President Obama’s campaign donors.

http://blog.heritage.org/2011/11/14/report-80-of-doe-green-energy-loans-went-to-obama-backers/

Mark Ward said...

Have you ever looked into the loans that were successful? It seems to me this, again, is a biased in the bubble source.

Mark Ward said...

Have you ever looked into the loans that were successful? It seems to me this, again, is a biased in the bubble source.