Subject: Re: [EL] Independent Spending Dwarfs Party Spending
From: Salvador Peralta
Date: 10/15/2010, 9:37 PM
To: Ray French <ray.french@yahoo.com>, Election Law <election-law@mailman.lls.edu>

Ray,

Opening corporate coffers has dramatically increased the amount of money spent in this election cycle.  The size and wealth of corporations dwarfs that of individuals. 

For example, Carlos Helu is the wealthiest man in the world with about $53 billion in assets.  By contrast, JP Morgan, ranked #9 on the Forbes 500, holds $2 trillion in assets.

Despite protestations to the contrary, the issue of foreign money is a significant one when dealing with multinational corporations incorporated in the United States.  How do we know that any corporation that spends money to influence US elections is not acting at the behest of a foreign individual or government that is a major shareholder?

For example, Lenovo, which is 28% owned by the Chinese government and 13 percent owned by IBM, now owns IBM's PC manufacturing division.  So when IBM lobbies the US Government on trade policy, where does IBM's corporate interest end and where does China's State interest begin?

There are any number of similar examples.

Best,

Sal


From: Ray French <ray.french@yahoo.com>
To: Election Law <election-law@mailman.lls.edu>
Sent: Fri, October 15, 2010 8:58:16 PM
Subject: Re: [EL] Independent Spending Dwarfs Party Spending

Here is today's blog post by the Sunlight Foundation that goes into more detail than the USA Today article:

http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2010/10/15/court-rulings-change-elections-independent-spending-dwarfs-party-spending-in-midterm/

I know this topic has been talked to death here, but I think there's something missing from the conversation. The message seems to be that all of this "outside money" is "new" money to the electoral process, when in reality it is likely to be money that would have been largely directed to the parties. Sure, the amounts seem astronomical, but more money is spent in each election than in the previous one. So what would have been funneled to the parties is being spent by organizations with no disclosure obligations. Yes, disclosure has been talked to death here too, but the implication I keep reading from those on the left is that this is new money that would not otherwise be spent on the election but for the lack of disclosure serving as protection. Wouldn't it be a safer assumption that many people that would have contributed to the parties are now contributing to the CoC or other c4s? An interesting project after the election might be surveying the contribution records from the last few elections to see if there are any regular contributors that are missing in 2010.

I'm still new to this so I accept that I could be totally off!

Ray French
Hamline University School of Law '12



"Campaign spending by outside groups skyrockets"

USA Today offers this report.

Posted by Rick Hasen at 07:18 AM