Politics and Money?

The Koch Brothers

We need a MAJORITY in the Supreme Court TO REVERSE Citizens United!

The founding States of the newly formed United States, very much aware of the exploitive practices of British “corporations” in the colonial period, severely limited the rights and powers of all corporations granted charters by the States – including forbidding influencing elections.

The growth of the railroads and the production of Civil War related industrial goods transformed the U.S. from an agricultural society (where land holdings were a major measure of wealth) to an industrial society with great monetary wealth concentrated in an extremely small portion of the population which, in turn, used its wealth to influence government in their favor. This was the era of John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, etc.

The Tillman Act of 1907, passed during the Teddy Roosevelt Progressive Era, was the first law to attempt to regulate campaign financing – “universally” in the interests of the very wealthy. The Act was, effectively, never enforced.  The Watergate Scandal led to the passage of the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments and was the basis for campaign finance regulation until 2010.

In 2010, the Republican majority Supreme Court fundamentally reversed campaign finance regulation by their Citizens United decision which legalized unlimited corporate campaign contributions. The Citizens United decision was the basis for further decisions which legalized unlimited donations by “social welfare” associations but without public knowledge of the source of donations: hence, “dark money”.  The influence of great wealth upon American elections where the donors cannot be known or are very difficult to identify is probably best studied in the case of the Koch brothers and their affiliated network of anti-regulation billionaires etc.