Campaign Cash

Campaign Cash: Tea Party Vows To Block Campaign Finance Reform

Zach Carter — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 11:21:46 -0400

Welcome to the final edition of Campaign Cash, which tracked political spending during this year's midterm elections. Stay tuned for more reporting on money in politics from members of The Media Consortium. To see more stories on campaign funding, follow the Twitter hashtag #campaigncash.

Anonymous millionaires just helped elect dozens of ultraconservative congressional candidates, by pumping millions of dollars into national Tea Party organizations. And guess what's at the top of the legislative to-do list for those same Tea Party groups? Blocking campaign finance reform legislation.

As Stephanie Mencimer explains for Mother Jones, one of the nation's largest Tea Party organizations, the Tea Party Patriots, is already coming out guns-a-blazing against any lame duck effort to crack down on secret corporate spending in elections.

And with good cause. The Tea Party's appeal, after all, is based on its populist, grassroots image. If anybody knew that secret right-wing millionaires were bankrolling the entire operation, the "movement" would lose its luster.

But whether reformers are able to force front-groups to disclose their donors or not, the broader effort to eliminate undue corporate influence from the political process will take years.

Welcome to the plutocracy

The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission allowed corporations and deep-pocketed elites to spend unlimited amounts electing politicians of their choosing. So long as those expenditures are funneled through a front-group, nobody has to know who is buying an ugly attack ad or why. Instead ads are sponsored by groups with a innocuous-sounding names like "Americans for Prosperity" or "Americans for Job Security." Nobody knows who ultimately foots the bill.

In organized crime, this process is called "money laundering." And everyone is getting in on the game, from the Tea Party to Karl Rove to U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As Bill Moyers explains in this Boston University lecture carried by Truthout, it's ravaging American democracy.

Rove, other conservative groups and the Chamber of Commerce have in fact created a "shadow party" ... We have reached what ... former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls "the perfect storm that threatens American democracy: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work. We're losing our democracy to a different system. It's called plutocracy."

That, ultimately, is what is at stake with campaign finance reform. Can democracy continue to serve as a check on elite power? Or will America simply dance to the tune played by the super-rich. Citizens United made an undemocratic mess of this year's election—but the influence of corporate cash is not going to simply melt away. Without serious reforms, the very concept of American elections will become a quaint, naive relic of the past.

Wall Street wins big

And while the plutocracy plainly organized itself against Democrats in this election, democrats have not exactly been strangers to corporate largesse. As Laura Flanders emphasizes for GRITtv, while President Barack Obama occasionally offered rhetorical rebukes against the Wall Street establishment, so far as public policy was concerned, he rarely did anything to ruffle their feathers. Obama continued the Bush bailouts, praised the executives of firms would eventually be investigated for fraud as "savvy," and aimed pretty low on financial reform. But as Flanders notes, all those favors didn't end up helping either Obama or his party on Nov. 2:

Having soaked up the government's largesse, those banksters repaid Obama by pouring millions of anonymous dollars into defeating Democrats.

It worked. The most vocal Wall Street critics in the House and Senate—Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) were bombarded with attack ads courtesy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Now they're gone, along with the Democratic majority in the House.

Last-ditch effort on campaign finance reform

As Jesse Zwick emphasizes for The Washington Independent, Congress can still limit the damage in the coming months before the officials elected last night take office. A modest law that would require corporations to disclose their political expenditures and force front-groups to publicly identify their donors would help limit the damage.

After that, as Moyers emphasizes, it's a long, hard fight.

But wait! There's more.

Andy Kroll at Mother Jones notes that Rick Scott didn't really need money from outside groups to buy the Governor's race in Florida. He did it himself.
Jason Hancock reports for The Iowa Independent that outside groups spent more than $1 million to oust judges that ruled to legalize same-sex marriage in Iowa.
John Nichols and Richard Kim of The Nation talk to GRITtv's Laura Flanders and Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman on the midterm results, and what to expect from corporate expenditures in 2012.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the mid-term elections and campaign financing by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit The Media Consortium for more articles on these issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Campaign Cash: Biggest Loser Corporate Edition—Spending $2 Million on a Losing Race in Iowa

Zach Carter — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:03:31 -0400

Corporate America is on the attack in every state. As Joshua Holland explains for AlterNet, outside groups have spent somewhere between $750,000 and more than $2 million in an attempt to unseat Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) in a state where ad buys come cheap. But Braley is almost certain to win anyway, even if his lead isn't quite as comfortable as it was in 2008, when he took 64 percent of the vote. This is what corporations and wealthy elites are willing to pony up in races they're sure to lose.

Most of that money comes from two groups: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a front-group for some of the nation’s largest corporations, and America’s Future Fund, a right-wing front-group founded by GOP lobbyist and ethanol executive Nick Ryan. Public News Service's Eric Mack highlights the races in Hawkeye state that are unusually flush with cash.

Thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission earlier this year, corporations and wealthy elites now have license to spend unlimited sums to promote candidates they like (or attack ones they don't). Things are already getting out of hand. Outside groups are dumping millions of dollars into obscure races this year—even in places where they appear to have almost no chance of victory.

Republican candidates are raking it in

Thanks to Citizens United, much of the spending in midterm elections is secret. We'll never know who is spending millions of dollars on anonymous attack ads. But a tiny fraction of the electoral purchases by outside groups have been disclosed, and if those are any guide, the Republican Party is reaping the vast majority of the rewards. As Jesse Zwick details for The Washington Independent, of the roughly $12 million in public corporate expenditures, they're spending more than $9.7 million on behalf of Republican candidates.

The Chamber of Commerce's long history in elections

Though big spending on campaigns is new for many political action committees, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been playing fast and loose with election law for years. As Harry Hanbury explains for GRITtv, the only reason the Chamber’s top brass aren’t behind bars right now may be due to deliberate cover provided by the Federal Elections Commission—its six members consist of three Republicans and three Democrats. Without four votes, the FEC can't to do anything to curb the Camber's activities. With the panel's three Republicans ideologically opposed to the very idea of campaign finance regulation, serious action from the FEC is nearly impossible.

When the FEC’s own top lawyers found that a complaint against the Chamber reveals a gross violation of law, the partisans on the FEC board refused to take action. In 2004, when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington took aim at $3 million in political spending that the Chamber deployed to re-elect President George W. Bush, the FEC did nothing because of the partisan deadlock.

Citizens United helps those at the top

As David Brodwin explains for American Forum, the Citizens United decision doesn’t benefit businesses or corporations in general—it benefits the biggest, wealthiest corporations. When the Supreme Court freed corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political efforts, that freedom doesn’t help companies with constrained resources. In other words, Citizens United is a structural force that will permanently and inevitably reinforce the status quo. As the Wall Street crash, the BP oil disaster, the mining malfunctions in West Virginia and countless other recent corporate shortcuts have shown, the status quo is not acceptable.

“The money that will flood the political system will not represent the views of companies in green America" Brodwin writes. "Instead, the money that will flood the system will come from organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is expected to spend more than $200 million this year on lobbying and direct campaign expenditures. This organization and others like it represent companies that don’t value responsible business. Is this the kind of business thinking that we want to dominate our political discourse?”

But wait, there’s more!

In a Q&A with Sam Petulla at The American Prospect, Sheila Krumholz, executive director at the Center for Responsive Politics, talks about how the current problems with Citizens United remind her of the 1990s.
Check out my interview on corporate spending on The Young Turks.
Alexandra Gutierrez explains at The American Prospect how Alaska's Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller became an unlikely opponent to the new rules created by Citizens United.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the mid-term elections and campaign financing by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit The Media Consortium for more articles on these issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Campaign Cash: The Tea Party Jets to Grassroots Rallies, Wall Street-Style

Zach Carter — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:52:17 -0400

Two Tea Party leaders, Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, have been jet-setting all over the country ginning up support for conservative politicians. Literally.

They’ve been flying around in a private jet like Wall Street CEOs, except they’re heading to “grassroots” rallies instead of merger talks. Meckler and Martin don’t say how outraged, ordinary citizens can find the money to support such extravagance, and they don’t have to. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in this year's Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, they can now accept unlimited funding without disclosing the identities of their donors.

No one would even know about the jets themselves, but Meckler and Martin never counted on Mother Jones, or a reporter named Stephanie Mencimer. Using public flight-tracking information, the Tea Party Patriots’ flight schedule, and some serious attention to details in the group’s own videos, Mencimer was able to figure out which jet the not-so-populist duo were using. She then traced the plane to Raymond F. Thomson, founder and CEO of a semiconductor company called Semitool, which he sold last year for a cool $364 million.

It’s both sad and hilarious to see the secret financial arrangements of the super-rich masquerading as grassroots activism. But it also shows the lengths to which reporters must go to actually report on political spending in the wake of Citizens United. There is no documentation to follow, just the contrails of private jets.

Social groups target state races

And while secret political spending has been dominated by big corporations this cycle, the legal maneuvering that liberated corporate coffers was actually performed by fringe right-wing groups targeting social issues. As Jesse Zwick emphasizes for The Washington Independent:

Groups advocating against abortion and gay marriage have waged a low-grade war on laws restricting their ability to spend money freely in elections since the early 1980s, and their victory in the recent Citizens United ruling has hardly caused them to rest on their laurels.

Our democracy is now more beholden to corporate greed than ever, but at least gays won’t be allowed to visit each other in the hospital.

This is just the beginning of corporate rights

But the implications of Citizens United extend far beyond the (critically important) realm of campaign finance itself, as Jeff Clements and John Bonifaz of the organization Free Speech for People emphasize in an interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now! As Bonifaz notes:

Citizens United was not just a campaign finance case, it was a corporate rights case. In fact, it was an extreme extension of a corporate rights doctrine that has eroded the First Amendment for thirty years.

At its core, Citizens United grants First Amendment rights to corporations on the grounds that corporations are people, just like ordinary citizens. Sound crazy? It is.

The bill of rights for corporations?

As AlterNet’s Joshua Holland emphasizes in an interview with historian Thom Hartmann, the implications of the view that corporations are people are simply absurd. Now corporations have been granted First Amendment rights, but what happens when they start arguing for Second Amendment rights? And what would it even mean for a corporation to have Second Amendment rights?

A visual map of Campaign Cash

What are the most common themes and issues surrounding the untold amounts of cash flowing into this election cycle? To create that visual, the Media Consortium piped 10 articles by our members through Wordle. While all the articles were generally focused on this topic, they were picked at random and published between October 25-29.

For clarity's sake, we made "Tea Party" "TeaParty," "Supreme Court" became "SupremeCourt," and we also merged the first and last names of key players such as Karl Rove and Jim DeMint. Finally, we removed any extraneous words such as "the," "and," and "even." We did not combine the words corporate/corporation/corporations or Republican/Republicans (but examine the frequency as much as the size). To get the latest reporting on the funds feeding into the mid-term elections, go to www.themediaconsortium.org or follow the search term #campaigncash on Twitter. Wordle research by Amanda Anderson.

But wait, there's more!

Sarah van Gelder argues in Yes! Magazine why families can't afford to stay home on Election Day.
And no matter who wins on Tuesday, it seems one thing is clear: Democracy will pay the price, says Henry A. Giroux at Truthout.
Lobbyists are already buttering up the incoming committee chairs, reports Siddhartha Mahanta in Mother Jones. Time to get to know Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), who could be the incoming chair of the House Ways & Means Committee.

Campaign Cash: Harry Reid Under Siege by Swift Boat Billionaire Bob Perry

Zach Carter — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:51:57 -0400

Remember that horrible 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad that helped derail John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid? Well, Bob Perry, the billionaire tycoon who financed that smear campaign is back, and he's underwriting a barrage of dirty ads that target politicians he doesn’t like.

And this time around, the Supreme Court gave Perry cover in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which allows big donors to fund attacks anonymously.

Swift-boating Harry Reid

Eric Mack of the Public News Service profiles Perry in an interview with The Washington Independent’s Jesse Zwick. Perry is diverting the flow of his real estate fortune to right-wing front groups organized by Karl Rove. One of his biggest targets is Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), who is currently deadlocked in a close race with Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle.

Federal regulators cracked down on Perry’s Swift Boat group in 2004 for violating rules about registering and collecting "soft money" donations to fund direct attack ads, but the Citizens United decision renders those rules obsolete. We only know about Perry’s move to finance $7 million in attack ads because he pushed the money through an explicitly political organization. If he’d selected a different type of front-group, we would have never known—and Perry may be simultaneously funneling funds through other front-groups.

The storefronts of the front groups

An astonishing amount of money is flowing into the 2010 elections without any accountability whatsoever. As Andy Kroll and Siddhartha Mahanta reveal in a video for Mother Jones, much of the money is laundered through shadowy front-groups that don’t have to disclose their donors. Organizations with innocuous names like the 60-Plus Society and Alliance for America’s Future are funding multi-million-dollar ad campaigns attacking Democrats. But these operations deploy their big budgets in secrecy—operating out of P.O. Box addresses to keep reporters like Kroll and Mahanta from asking questions. When Kroll and Mahanta did track down these groups, at a row house in Arlington, VA, no one seemed to be able to answer questions. Watch:

Conservative groups benefit most

As Paul Waldman emphasizes for The American Prospect, there’s a lot of money in play here. Outside groups have already dumped $170 million into the elections, with conservative organizations making the lion’s share of the ad buys (as much as 9-to-1, depending on the analysis). The editors of The Nation note that corporate cash has helped drive the total price tag for the 2010 midterms to nearly $5 billion. “We are witnessing an assault on democracy by multinational corporations that, freed by the Citizens United ruling, are out to get the best government money can buy,” they write. As the editors say—whichever political party comes out on top on November 2, there’s one obvious loser: democracy.

But wait, there's more!

Be sure to check out Jesse Zwick at The Washington Independent on a lawsuit that wants to push back on the one thing that Citizens United doesn't overturn: Foreign spending on domestic elections.
The group that inspired boycotts against retail giant Target, MN Forward, has raked in $1.9 million so far this year, including $50,000 from the Republican Governors Association, reports Patrick Caldwell at The Minnesota Independent.
And over at Campus Progress, Byard Duncan notes that James Cameron is using the powers of political spending to help progressives for once: the director has donated $1 million to the "No on Prop 23" campaign, in an effort to keep the state's climate protection law in place.
I was on GRITtv with Laura Flanders last night discussing media coverage of campaign finance. The segment starts at 12:30:

Campaign Cash: Corporations Get More Power, Political Parties Get Less

Zach Carter — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:44:41 -0400

War chests from right-wing billionaires and corporate titans are funding tremendous portions of political activity, from the so-called grassroots activism of the Tea Party to the streamlined lobbying assaults of the nation's largest corporations.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's wildly unpopular ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, secret election financing by elites is exploding, even as the public visibility of such electoral purchasing power evaporates.

Corporations get more freedom as political parties get less

As Jamelle Bouie emphasizes for The American Prospect, election funding from political committees and non-profits is already up 40 percent from 2008 levels. But the oft-cited the liberation of the corporate purse was accompanied by less-well-known constraints on political parties themselves. While corporations like Wal-Mart and Bank of America are free to spend as much as they want attacking or promoting specific candidates, the political parties themselves cannot.

As Bouie notes, this scenario further rigs the electoral game in favor of the wealthy and corporations. Candidates who know that their party can't help them out become even more dependent on corporate cash during elections. And while few entities are less popular right now than the Republican and Democratic parties, they are ultimately accountable to their voters. They reach out to a broad array of individuals across the country, while corporations merely advance their own interests.

Political parties—however imperfect—can serve as a check on such destructive corporate influence. Citizens United has made that check much weaker. As Jesse Zwick emphasizes for The Washington Independent, political parties used to dominate independent election spending. This year, for the first time, thanks to Citizens United, front-groups and corporations have taken the lead.

The Tea Party "grassroots" movement is anything but

Billionaires are on the attack, exploiting campaign finance loopholes to prop-up phony "grassroots" political movements. The most egregious—and successful—effort has been waged by David Koch, a long-time GOP fundraiser who is now backing major Tea Party organizers. Koch is the executive vice president of Koch Industries, Inc., which refines and distributes petroleum and other raw materials.

As Adele Stan details in her latest in-depth expose for AlterNet and The Nation Investigative Fund, Koch has found ways to funnel money to the Tea Party in just about every way imaginable. But it's most sinister maneuver was the establishment of two right-wing front groups that keep their donors anonymous. After Citizens United, we'll never know how much money Koch is funneling to the Tea Party, and his front groups—FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity—provide the same cover for other elites.

How much cover? Americans for Prosperity brags that they'll spend at least $45 million on the 2010 elections, while FreedomWorks plans to throw in another $10 million.

As Stan emphasizes, these two groups are the major organizers of all things Tea Party. They provided logistical organizing for Glenn Beck's 9/12 rally, held over 300 rallies against health care reform and hosted "voter education" workshops pushing the glories of deregulation to anyone who would listen. They even have an unofficial partnership with Fox News, hosting conservative Fox personalities at their rallies, which are, in turn, promoted by Fox programming. Glenn Beck is even featured in advertisements and fundraising pitches for FreedomWorks.

The anonymity provided by Koch's front-groups is critical to the Tea Party's appeal. In popular media, the Tea Party is often described as a grassroots coalition of ordinary, mad-as-hell citizens. That image is hard to sustain in the face of a wildly expensive top-down campaign orchestrated by billionaires. As Stan explains:

The armies of angry white people with their "Don't Tread on Me" flags, the actual grassroots activists, are not the agents of the Tea Party revolt, but its end users, enriching the Tea Party's corporate owners just as you and I enrich Google through our clicks.

Of course, Koch isn't the only man operating anonymous front-groups. The Citizens United decision allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of their own cash directly influencing elections. But so long as that money is laundered through a third-party, they can keep these expenditures out of the public eye.

Oil giants dominate U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Nobody has exploited this loophole more aggressively than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying clearinghouse for the nation's largest corporations.

The Chamber doesn't just rely on domestic donors. It also accepts cash from dozens of foreign corporations. As Kate Sheppard explains for Mother Jones, no less than 14 foreign oil giants belong to The Chamber, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual dues alone. This is important, because as sweeping and destructive as Citizens United was, it did not grant foreign corporations the right to spend on U.S. elections. There's nothing xenophobic about that—it's a U.S. election, after all, and foreign firms don't have to live with many of the social and ecological consequences of U.S. deregulation. The Chamber insists it has accounting devices in place to separate its funding and keep its operations within the law, but so far, it hasn't explained how these work.

But ultimately, as Sheppard and her MoJo colleague Nick Baumann note, the influence of domestic corporations on the American political process is equally sinister as foreign corporate influence. If the narrow interests of a U.S. corporation hijack our democracy with campaign war chests, that can be just as bad as subjecting our democracy to the whims of a foreign corporation. Whether the Chamber's foreign funding follows the letter of the law or not, the organization is still running a destructive campaign to further entrench corporate power in our political system—and shield those same corporate titans from public accountability.

And the existing campaign finance regulators aren't even enforcing the meager laws that do exist to curb legalized bribery. As Jesse Zwick explains for The Washington Independent, three recent appointees to the Federal Election Commission have waged an all-out war to mire the agency in gridlock, preventing it from cracking down on straightforward abuses. President George W. Bush actually named former Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX)'s campaign finance lawyer to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). His term has expired, but getting new FEC commissioners confirmed by the Senate in the face of Republican filibusters appears nearly impossible. So Delay's lawyer, Donald McGahn, is still working to keep campaign finance laws from being enforced, and succeeding.

Democracy is not a corporate bidding war. Corporate cash belongs in the board room, not the voting booth.

Campaign Cash: How Citizens United Will Change Elections Forever

Zach Carter — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:39:45 -0400

Undue corporate influence over U.S. elections has been a serious problem in American politics for decades, but this year's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission made things worse. Worst of all, we may never know the extent of the damage.

Citizens United freed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money backing specific political candidates, and without congressional action, those expenditures can be completely anonymous. Major corporations are already capitalizing on the new legal landscape by the millions, and the public doesn’t really know who is buying what influence or why.

That's why The Media Consortium will be carefully watching the effects of this ruling in the run up to this year's midterm elections. Every day through Nov. 4, we'll bring you some of the best independent reporting on the effects of corporate spending in an attempt to measure just how widespread the effect of Citizens United will be on this—and the next—election. Keep your eye on "Campaign Cash" as we follow this issue in the coming weeks. If you want to tweet about it, use the hashtag #campaigncash.

The impact of Citizens United

As Harvard University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig explains in an interview with The Nation’s Christopher Hayes, the Citizens United v. FEC decision represents one of many ways that corporations buy political favors.

Prior to the ruling, companies couldn’t spend money to directly advocate the election of a particular political candidate during election season. They could form Political Action Committees (PACs) to support or attack specific candidates, but those PACs had to be funded by individuals who worked for the company and couldn't be funded from the corporation's treasury directly. The executives of Goldman Sachs, for instance, could band together to form GoldmanPAC and spend their money on whatever candidates they wished—and many corporate employees exercised that right and spent freely on elections through their corporate PACs.

Now corporations can spend as much as they want and actual corporate funds—not just organized individuals—can also be deployed, making massive amounts of corporate cash eligible for political purchasing.

But the scariest part of Citizens United, as Lessig emphasizes, is the money that isn't spent. That is, if a firm makes it known that they are willing spend millions of dollars to fight any politician who opposes them on a particular policy issue, representatives and senators might begin changing their voting behavior in Congress before the company actually has to put up the cash.

And ultimately, Citizens United didn’t just legalize unlimited corporate expenses on elections. It also allows those expenses to be anonymous. If companies launder their political cash through a front group, that third-party spender doesn’t have to disclose who its donors are.

This isn't your local Chamber of Commerce

As Harry Hanbury details for GRITtv, this laundering scheme is essentially the business model for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-- a lobbying powerhouse in the nation's capital. Don’t be fooled by its name—the U.S. Chamber has almost nothing to do with the local small business coalitions who help strengthen local economies.

As Hanbury notes, 40 percent of the U.S. Chamber’s 2008 funding came from just 26 corporations. The group represents many of the nation’s largest and most irresponsible corporations, from those responsible for the financial meltdown on Wall Street to BP, the company that spilled millions of barrels worth of oil in the Gulf this summer. The Chamber's branding allows them to disguise their political as a coalition of local businesses while it does dirty work for corporate titans.

When BP was publicly promising to do everything in its power to fix the massive oil disaster it created in the Gulf of Mexico, it was also funneling money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And what was the Chamber up to? It was lobbying furiously to protect BP from new rules that would force the company to pay for oil disaster clean-up. The Wall Street banks did the same thing as financial reform legislation moved through Congress, and companies never have to disclose these expenditures to the public.

So it’s no surprise that the Chamber responded to Citizens United by immediately announcing a 40 percent boost in its political spending operations. So much corporate money then flowed into the Chamber that the group chose to boost this budget again by 50 percent, allocating $75 million for its 2010 war chest. So far, the Chamber’s ads have favored Republican’s 93 percent of the time. No entity spends more on politics than the Chamber—not even the political parties themselves.

Corporations top the list of big election spenders

But while the future of corporate spending in campaigns looks bleak after Citizens United, corporations are still barred from contributing directly to political campaigns. A company might take out a television ad attacking Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), but it can’t make unlimited contributions directly to Grayson’s challenger, Republican Dan Webster.

Nevertheless, corporate employees and company PACs have already been spending lavishly on elections for decades. In a feature for Mother Jones, Dave Gilson compiles the 75 biggest political spenders, both companies and trade groups, from 1989 through 2010, and breaks them down by industry. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are all among the top 20 most extravagant political spenders—but the American Bankers Association, a trade group that all four belong to, is also in the top 10. If you’re wondering how Wall Street was able to secure its massive taxpayer bailout in the face of widespread voter outrage, this is your answer.

To soften the Citizens United blow, Congress has been debating the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act, which would require companies to disclose all of their political expenditures as well as requiring front-groups like the Chamber to list the identities and amounts of its donors. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Christopher Van Hollen (D-MD) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), cleared the House this summer but was stymied by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Undoing the damage dealt by Citizens United through something like the DISCLOSE Act will help, but it won’t make our democracy totally safe from corporate abuse. As Lessig notes, the day before the decision was handed down, U.S. election financing was already encouraging rampant corruption and in need of serious reform.

Lessig suggests banning political expenditures by corporations altogether, and placing a hard cap on the amount that individuals can contribute. By limiting individual donations to $100, the ability of corporate PACs to funnel cash into the political process would be thwarted.