By Arlen Grossman
If you happen to be the richest person in the world, and your name is Elon Musk, and your net worth is about $250 billion, you can use as much of your money as you’d like to help your favorite presidential candidate win and nobody needs to know about it.
One of the little-known secrets of American politics is that in some cases there is no limit on how much any one person can spend to support their favorite presidential candidate. That’s right, no limit. The Supreme Court, in their 2010 Citizens United and SpeechNow.org decisions, decided that anyone, except foreign nationals and federal contractors can, in effect, spend unlimited amounts of money to help their favorite candidates. It’s actually much worse than that, as we will see shortly.
Sure, there is a nominal spending limit for giving to presidential candidates– the Federal Election Commission this year set the individual limit at $3,300 per person.https://www.fec.gov/updates/fec-announces-2023-2024-campaign-cycle-contribution-limits/ Most Americans would consider that amount to be fair and reasonable–the Supreme Court thinks otherwise.
The Supreme Court, in its ultra-conservative wisdom, ruled that there shouldn’t be any spending limit at all, as long as the money goes through certain kinds of Political Action Committees (PACs) and is not directly coordinated with candidates.
In the United States, a political action committee (PAC) is a tax-exempt organization that pools campaign contributions from members and donates those funds to candidates or legislation. There are special rules and restrictions for the various kinds of PACs, which represent business, labor or ideological interests.
The most egregious of these, “Super PACs,” (not considered a political action committees at all), are legally known as Independent Expenditures Only Committees (IEOCs). What makes them special is they can accept unlimited contributions and spend an unlimited amount of money. What makes them especially diabolical is that Super PACs are able to use “dark,” i.e. anonymous, money. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-super-pac-3367928
Sorry, you don’t get to know who these “dark money” donors are. Super PACs are theoretically required to reveal their backers, but they can hide their true source of funding by reporting a non-disclosing nonprofit or shell company as the donor. Individuals can mask their identities and their contributions by giving funds to outside groups which then give the money to a Super PAC. Yes, it is a form of laundering money, with no donation limits and total anonymity.
Our 39th president, Jimmy Carter, understands where we are now.. “It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-is-a-whisker-away-from-the-55c
The Brennon Center for Justice, a New York University of Law nonprofit law and public policy institute, alleges “big money dominates U.S. political campaigns to a degree not seen in decades” and is “drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans.”https://www.brennancenter.org/search/?q=Drowning%20out&langcode=en&
And while Super PACs are most visible in federal elections, their influence also extends to state and local races.
U.S. Sen. John McCain warned in 2012: “I guarantee there will be a scandal, there is too much money washing around politics, and it’s making the campaigns irrelevant.” https://www.yahoo.com/news/mccain-warns-campaign-money-scandal-103502226.html
If Elon Musk wants Donald Trump to be elected president this November, who will stop him from surreptitiously spending $50 billion or more to help make that happen? The answer: nobody. Certainly not the Supreme Court.
You see, the real “dirty little secret” of American democracy is that we don’t have a democracy. Mirriam Webster defines democracy as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” Some people prefer the term “republic,” often described as a “representative democracy.” Regardless, we are nowhere close to being a representative democracy
Americans have always believed we have elections to decide our government, because that is what democracies do. In this country the presidential candidate with the most votes should win, right? However, our constitutionally antiquated electoral system, decided otherwise in five previous American elections, including for two of our past three presidents (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016). https://www.history.com/news/presidents-electoral-college-popular-vot In those elections the winner of the Electoral College was in fact the loser of the popular vote.
What would be a better description of our political system? Plutocracy (government by the wealthy) would be one, aristocracy (government by the few) would be another.
If most Americans understood how far we are from a real democracy they would be even more upset than they are now. Fundamental, comprehensive change is in order. If we don’t make significant changes that give more clout to ordinary, regular people, we will be stuck with a continuation of the dysfunctional and deteriorating political system we have now. That should be unacceptable.
American democracy’s “Dirty Little Secret” needs to die off in order to make room for the emergence of real democracy.
thebigpicturereport ™ 
We will.
Dear Arlen:
That is the most informative article that I have seen in many years that pertains to what happened to all of the campaign finance laws that were created in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
I always wondered what happened to all those laws and I wondered how the super-rich managed to get around laws always about two years after each law was enacted.
We have so many campaign finance laws that were essentially nullified by work-arounds created by the wealthiest and nobody ever seemed to care that those laws had all of their teeth pulled one by one and then destroyed en Masse’ by the current Right Wing Supreme Court.
What I like about your article is that you state and cite NOTHING EXCEPT FACTS that are certifiable in accordance with the actual laws themselves.
The only evidence for or against the actions taken regarding all of our campaign finance laws is there in each of your citations which invoke the actual legal actions which have been taken across the years and those citations you gave us stand as part of irrevocable laws that have been made as legal as contracts.
The irony is that well meaning individuals who worked to get the laws that prohibited sleazy under the table campaign financing were all destroyed by equally diligent people whose goals were to erase all of the controls which were put into place.
They worked hard and succeeded at erasing all of the work that had been done before to guarantee tthat each and every person’s vote would count for something.
The process which you have named is a perfect representation of the exact process including the use of legal processes to undermine the application of laws which were originally designed to protect everybody’s RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS TO VOTE AND EXPECT THAT ALL OF US WOULD BE HEARD TOGETHER AS A PRODUCT OF THE WHOLE AND NOT AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE WEALTHY.
You did a very good job of laying out the two conflicting processes and what each of them represents for all of us who are not filthy wealthy.
What you did with your writing reminds me that all of this nation’s first citizens that created this nation all were very conversant with LAW as if they were all educated equivalents of lawyers. Of course, with all of the ill-educated immigrants that followed into this country we have wound up with less than one millionth of a percent of people who can follow the making and breaking of any laws that have ever been made since.
If we were all Lawyers like “THE FOUNDING FATHERS”,
then writings like yours would not be necessary.
Tis a very GREAT Pathetic Pity Our Nation has allowed itself to become so ill-educated!!!
THANK YOU!!!
YT/RET
Thank you, RET. It hurts to put it into words, but it couldn’t be more obvious that this country is owned by those who have beat the system, accumulated more than anyone can spend, but still aren’t satisfied. The values that matter most in the USA are unlimited money and increased profit. This is what capitalism inevitably comes to.
Thanks Arlen. Let’s discuss on Halitics tomorrow at noon ET/9am PT!