In ancient times, before the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, the maximum amount you could give a candidate for president, legally, was two thousand dollars. And, until 2010, to legally donate to a candidate, you had to 1) have a first and last name, 2) be a citizen of the United States, and 3) breathe oxygen.
Then, in 2010, the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision (followed by a lower-court decision, SpeechNow.org v. FEC) blew the doors off the limit on secret political campaign contributions. “Unnatural” persons—headless, heartless creatures called corporations—could now spend in election campaigns. And, unlike us mere mortals, these corporate creatures are not limited to two thousand dollars.
Less noted in the hubbub about corporate personhood was that the Citizens and SpeechNow decisions okayed donations without a face or name, along with political spending by foreigners. Charles Manson can’t vote, but Manson Inc., al-Qaeda LLC, and Putin & Co. can run negative campaign ads on the Fox network.
And maybe they have.
As soon as Citizens came down, billionaires pulled out their debit cards and went on a shopping spree.
What do these billionaires want? What do men who have everything want? Well, Congress, gift-wrapped, would be nice. The White House would be nicer.
Their first purchase after the 2010 Citizens ruling: the 112th Congress, elected that November. Normally, a congressional seat is a lifetime sentence, though a cushy one. Until 2010, with one exception in four decades, reelection rates in the House exceeded 90 percent. But, in 2010, incumbent Democrats were swept out on a diarrhetic tsunami of smear ads paid by new super-PACs, 527s, and tax-exempt social welfare organizations. Rove’s American Crossroads did its part, spending $25.8 million mostly on advertisements savaging policy positions held by Democratic candidates for Congress.
There’s an awful lot of loot paying for involuntary plastic surgery on the face of the body politic. You can look up the sums (at www.opensecrets.org) and (some) of the names. But what do they want?
In 2012, Paul “The Vulture” Singer, a billionaire, gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, a super-PAC. So did his buddies John Paulson (also a billionaire), Julian Robertson (billionaire), Bill Koch (billionaire). Half a dozen other rich guys also ponied up millions to Restore Our Future. And a million bucks came from something called “F8 LLC.” Records indicate that F8 has estimated annual revenue of only $87,000 a year. So that $1 million donation must have been a real sacrifice. The “principal” of F8 is listed as Mr. Diego Villasenor. No photo, so I looked up the F8 man in Google image search and found this:
Whether this is the real Mr. Villasenor, or if there is a real Don Diego, or if he’s a Quechua Indian in Peru who believes photos will steal his soul, or if he has a soul at all, well, that just doesn’t matter. What matters is the “LLC,” which stands for Limited Liability Corporation. And under Citizens, the letters LLC mean F8 LLC can donate unlimited millions for political advertisements—and F8’s owner’s name, whether it really is Diego, his nationality, or even if he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, is none of your damn business.
And what is Restore Our Future? Well, it is a kind of campaign Death Star that can and does emit crushing blasts of money to mutilate and destroy candidates who would oppose the electoral will of Paul “Vulture” Singer, F8, Bill Koch ($2 million donation), and the other billionaires.
In just the first couple months of 2012, Restore Our Future ran about $56 million through its cash colon to crap all over the opponents of Mitt Romney’s presidential bid. (Official records showed 87.4 percent of the super-PAC’s spending went into hate messages, i.e., negative ads and telephone calls.)
Buying a piece of the electoral process today costs tens, even hundreds, of millions of dollars. The Kochs were reduced to cooking for their friends to raise $70 million one night in Vail.
The Kochs’ dinner guests were entertained by the comedy of Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who had the audience rolling with laughter (according to a secret tape recording) with jokes about cutting pensions and teacher posts.3
Christie then explained that gas and oil companies and the very billionaires before him were victims of a cruel government that stood in the way of the Lord and His anointed:
“All they do is layer regulation and taxes and burdens on all those people who just wanted opportunities to use their God-given gifts and their ambition and their vision to try to improve their lives and through that, improve the lives of other people.”
Amen. (But just for the record, it wasn’t God who gave the Koch Brothers their gifts; they were Dad-given, inherited from Fred Koch, who made his fortune through oil deals with Joseph Stalin.)
Shortly after the Koch dinner, a secretly funded group called Committee for Our Children’s Future ran a series of TV ads reminding America that Governor Christie has performed more miracles in New Jersey than Jesus did at that wedding. Remember that name: Committee for Our Children’s Future.
The billionaires who picked up the million-a-plate tab for the Kochs’ “Prosperity,” and the million-a-pop kick-off for Singer’s “Future,” and Ice Man’s twenty big ones for Rove understood this just buys them a seat at the table, just the first stack of chips.
But why play? What do they want? And as Butch said to Sundance, “Who are these guys?”