Campaign Financing Quotes

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches. May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty. When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer. Guide her, protect her When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age. Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit. May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers. Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait. O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed. And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it. And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Muammar Gaddafi; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to read a foreign policy speech written by someone on the payroll of a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to appoint a national security adviser who has taken money from a Russian propaganda organ. It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the “Order of Friendship” from Putin. The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country. The

Growing inequality, combined with a flawed system of campaign finance, risks turning America’s legal system into a travesty of justice. Some may still call it the “rule of law,” but in today’s America the proud claim of “justice for all” is being replaced by the more modest claim of “justice for those who can afford it.

The big-money campaign finance system is like so much of modern-day structural racism: it harms people of color disproportionately but doesn’t spare non-wealthy white people; it may be hard to assign racist intent, but it’s easy to find the racist impacts.

At the federal level, this problem could be greatly alleviated by abolishing the Electoral College system. It's the winner-take-all mathematics from state to state that delivers so much power to a relative handful of voters. It's as if in politics, as in economics, we have a privileged 1 percent. And the money from the financial 1 percent underwrites the microtargeting to secure the votes of the political 1 percent. Without the Electoral College, by contrast, every vote would be worth exactly the same. That would be a step toward democracy.

I would like to have an ample fund to spread the light of Republicanism, but I am willing to undergo the disadvantage to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics for unworthy purposes.

the polluters had triumphed by overturning the campaign-finance laws. “There was a huge change after Citizens United,” he contends. “When anyone could spend any amount of money without revealing who they were, by hiding behind amorphous-named organizations, the floodgates opened. The Supreme Court made a huge mistake. There is no accountability. Zero.

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

Most politicians are corrupt as they do not represent the masses that voted for them, but rather they choose to return numerous favors to the corporations that funded their election campaigns.

Second, we need to protect our constitutional rights. Our founding charter has served us well for more than two centuries. It protects liberty by separating powers, limiting the authority of the federal government, and guaranteeing every American the freedom to speak your mind, pray to God, and protect yourself and your family by bearing arms in their defense. Every single one of those constitutional protections has come under assault from the Obama administration, which has usurped the power of Congress through executive amnesty, redefined the relationship between the federal government and the governed through Obamacare, and attempted to repeal and undermine the First and Second Amendments through abusive campaign finance regulations, coercions of religious consciences, and repeated attacks on the right to bear arms.

The tipping point for e-voting fraud, I think, will be when they realize it's cheaper to hire hackers than to buy campaign ads.

The [carried-interest] loophole was in essence an accounting trick that enabled hedge fund and private equity managers to categorize huge portions of their income as ‘interest,’ which was taxed at the 15 percent rate then applied to long-term capital gains. This was less than half the income tax rate paid by other top-bracket wage earners. Critics called the loophole a gigantic subsidy to millionaires and billionaires at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, estimated that the hedge fund loophole cost the government over $6 billion a year—the cost of providing health care to three million children. Of that total, it said, almost $2 billion a year from the tax break went to just twenty-five individuals.

If we don’t enact sweeping campaign finance reform we will never see progress on the major issues facing our country… as the special interests and powerful lobbies will continue to get their way, crowding out the desires, hopes, and dreams of the American people.

The Kochs were part of a national explosion of dark money. In 2006, only 2 percent of “outside” political spending came from “social welfare” groups that hid their donors. In 2010, this number rose to 40 percent, masking hundreds of millions of dollars. Campaign-finance reformers were apoplectic but powerless. “The political players who are soliciting these funds and are benefiting from the expenditure of these funds will know where the money came from,” argued Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel at the liberal Campaign Legal Center. “The only ones in the dark will be American voters.

Winning the vote required seventy-two years of ceaseless agitation by three generations of dedicated, fearless suffragists, who sought to overturn centuries of law and millennia of tradition concerning gender roles. The women who launched the movement were dead by the time it was completed; the women who secured its final success weren’t born when it began. It took more than nine hundred local, state, and national campaigns, involving tens of thousands of grassroots volunteers, financed by millions of dollars of mostly small (and a few large) donations by women across the country.

This morally blinkered way of conceiving merit and the public good has weakened democratic societies in several ways. The first is the most obvious: Over the past four decades, meritocratic elites have not governed very well. The elites who governed the United States from 1940 to 1980 were far more successful. They won World War II, helped rebuild Europe and Japan, strengthened the welfare state, dismantled segregation, and presided over four decades of economic growth that flowed to rich and poor alike. By contrast, the elites who have governed since have brought us four decades of stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year, inconclusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the financial crisis of 2008, a decaying infrastructure, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a system of campaign finance and gerrymandered congressional districts that makes a mockery of democracy.

Few people will campaign for an alternative vision of black holes or magnetic inversion, but we know from experience that about soils, vaccines, earthworms, bears, wolves, neurotransmitters, mushrooms, water circulation, or the composition of air, the smallest study will immediately be plunged into a full-scale battle of interpretations. The Critical Zone is not a classroom; the relationship between researchers and the public is anything but purely pedagogical. If we still had any doubts on this point, the pseudocontroversy over the climate suffices to dispel them. There is no evidence that any major corporation has spent a penny to produce ignorance about the detection of the Higgs boson. But denying the climatic mutation is another matter entirely: financing floods in. Ignorance on the part of the public is such a precious commodity that it justifies immense investments.

It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies.

Weak political leadership benefits the rich as it maintains the status quo and all its inequities.

McConnell seemed an unlikely Republican leader. He showed no aptitude for schmoozing, backslapping, or rousing oratory. As far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends even in his own caucus; nor did he appear to have any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign finance reform. Joe told me of one run-in he’d had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring; when Joe tried to explain the bill’s merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.” But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness—all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.

For years, the family funded legal challenges to various campaign-finance laws. Ground zero in this fight was the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser. Conservatives

The very existence of billionaires is not just about who has the money and who doesn’t. It is also a manifestation of a corrupt political system, in which immense power over the lives of the great mass of Americans is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people who—through campaign finance arrangements that can only be described as legalized bribery—buy control of our elections and the policies that extend from them.

McConnell was the case that declared constitutional the next clamp-down on campaign finance, the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which barred political parties from taking soft money and blocked union and corporate political ad spending shortly before an election. At the time, it was hard not to think that the law grew, at least in part, out of an embarrassed Senator John McCain’s wish to transfer the blame to “the system” for his having unwittingly helped a constituent and contributor who turned out to be a $3 billion savings-and-loan fraudster.

Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana gave public voice to what angers so many Americans today about Congress—it operates like a dysfunctional family. “The people’s business is not being done,” Bayh declared in February 2010. Congress suffers from multiple pathologies, he said, and he ticked them off: “strident partisanship, unyielding ideology, a corrosive system of campaign financing, gerrymandering of House districts, endless filibusters, holds on executive appointees in the Senate, dwindling social interaction between senators of opposing parties and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.

VOC’s military campaigns in Indonesia were financed by upstanding Dutch burghers who loved their children, gave to charity, and enjoyed good music and fine art, but had no regard for the suffering of the inhabitants of Java, Sumatra and Malacca. Countless other crimes and misdemeanours accompanied the growth of the modern economy in other parts of the planet.

But even if men wanted to read the truth about their condition, women would still be the decisive factor. Though both men and women read, women are in addition the big consumers. Since women do most of the buying, most advertising campaigns are aimed directly or indirectly at them. Since most Western papers are financed largely through advertising, they cannot risk displeasing women by their editorial content; the day on which they do so, they would hear from their advertisers in no uncertain terms. Men would not stand a chance, even if they wanted to publish independent opinions about women, of being published in any medium addressing both sexes, as the great majority do. The same is true of television, financed as it is in most Western countries by advertisers, promoters, publicity aimed at consumers. Here too the editorial content must pass female censorship. It is not pre-censored, of course, but subject to a censorship which functions on the principle that the producer is done for if the product does not sell. The producer is therefore motivated to avoid catastrophe by censoring himself.

One of the very hot topics between Jimmy and Sam Giancana was Senator John F. Kennedy’s upcoming campaign for president. This was very controversial between them. Giancana had been promised by Kennedy’s old man that he could control Bobby and nobody had to worry about Bobby if Jack got in. The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with. Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood.

It does not take much to provide the objective biological needs of Homo sapiens. After those needs are met, more money can be spent on building pyramids, taking holidays around the world, financing election campaigns, funding your favourite terrorist organisation, or investing in the stock market and making yet more money – all of which are activities that a true cynic would find utterly meaningless.

That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level. Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

During the 1950s, American cold warriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained, and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support for the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It

THE DEFENDANT: Thank you, your Honor. I stand before your Honor humbly and painfully aware that we are here today for one reason: Because of my actions that I pled guilty to on August 21, and as well on November 29. I take full responsibility for each act that I pled guilty to, the personal ones to me and those involving the President of the United States of America. Viktor Frankl in his book, "Man's Search for Meaning," he wrote, "There are forces beyond your control that can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation." Your Honor, this may seem hard to believe, but today is one of the most meaningful days of my life. The irony is today is the day I am getting my freedom back as you sit at the bench and you contemplate my fate. I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the fateful day that I accepted the offer to work for a famous real estate mogul whose business acumen I truly admired. In fact, I now know that there is little to be admired. I want to be clear. I blame myself for the conduct which has brought me here today, and it was my own weakness, and a blind loyalty to this man that led me to choose a path of darkness over light. It is for these reasons I chose to participate in the elicit act of the President rather than to listen to my own inner voice which should have warned me that the campaign finance violations that I later pled guilty to were insidious.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

Great speech to the German Reichstag Berlin, January 30, 1939 Once again I will be a prophet: should the international Jewry of finance (Finanzjudentum) succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe. Thus, the days of propagandist impotence of the non-Jewish peoples are over. National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy possess institutions which, if necessary, permit opening the eyes of the world to the true nature of this problem. Many a people is instinctively aware of this, albeit not scientifically versed in it. At this moment, the Jews are still propagating their campaign of hatred in certain states under the cover of press, film, radio, theater, and literature, which are all in their hands. Should indeed this one Volk attain its goal of prodding masses of millions from other peoples to enter into a war devoid of all sense for them, and serving the interests of the Jews exclusively, then the effectiveness of an enlightenment will once more display its might. Within Germany, this enlightenment conquered Jewry utterly in the span of a few years. Peoples desire not to perish on the battlefield just so that this rootless, internationalist race can profit financially from this war and thereby gratify its lust for vengeance derived from the Old Testament. The Jewish watchword “Proletarians of the world, unite!” will be conquered by a far more lofty realization, namely: “Creative men of all nations, recognize your common foe!

Hitler, then, as his future Reichsbank president and Minister of Economics says, was beginning to see the men in Germany who had the money, and he was telling them more or less what they wanted to hear. The party needed large sums to finance election campaigns, pay the bill for its widespread and intensified propaganda, meet the payroll of hundreds of full-time officials and maintain the private armies of the S.A. and the S.S., which by the end of 1930 numbered more than 100,000 men—a larger force than the Reichswehr. The businessmen and the bankers were not the only financial sources—the, party raised sizable sums from dues, assessments, collections and the sale of party newspapers, books and periodicals—but they were the largest. And the more money they gave the Nazis, the less they would have for the other conservative parties which they had been supporting hitherto.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

Though we’d argued over the drain of his political career on our family for years now, I did love and trust Barack. He was already a man with two families, his attention divided between me and the girls and his 200,000 or so South Side constituents. Would sharing him with the state of Illinois really be all that different? I couldn’t know one way or another, but I also couldn’t bring myself to stand in the way of his aspiration, that thing always tugging at him to try for more. And so that day, we’d made a deal. Valerie agreed to be the finance chair for Barack’s Senate campaign. A number of our friends agreed to donate time and money to the effort. I signed off on all of it, with one important caveat, repeated out loud so that everyone could hear it: If he lost, he’d move on from politics altogether and find a different sort of job. If it didn’t work out on Election Day, this would be the end.

Mueller kicked off the meeting by pulling out a piece of paper with some notes. The attorney general and his aides believed they noticed something worrisome. Mueller’s hands shook as he held the paper. His voice was shaky, too. This was not the Bob Mueller everyone knew. As he made some perfunctory introductory remarks, Barr, Rosenstein, O’Callaghan, and Rabbitt couldn’t help but worry about Mueller’s health. They were taken aback. As Barr would later ask his colleagues, “Did he seem off to you?” Later, close friends would say they noticed Mueller had changed dramatically, but a member of Mueller’s team would insist he had no medical problems. Mueller quickly turned the meeting over to his deputies, a notable handoff. Zebley went first, summing up the Russian interference portion of the investigation. He explained that the team had already shared most of its findings in two major indictments in February and July 2018. Though they had virtually no chance of bringing the accused to trial in the United States, Mueller’s team had indicted thirteen Russian nationals who led a troll farm to flood U.S. social media with phony stories to sow division and help Trump. They also indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers who hacked internal Democratic Party emails and leaked them to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Trump campaign had no known role in either operation. Zebley explained they had found insufficient evidence to suggest a conspiracy, “no campaign finance [violations], no issues found. . . . We have questions about [Paul] Manafort, but we’re very comfortable saying there was no collusion, no conspiracy.” Then Quarles talked about the obstruction of justice portion. “We’re going to follow the OLC opinion and conclude it wasn’t appropriate for us to make a final determination as to whether or not there was a crime,” he said. “We’re going to report the facts, the analysis, and leave it there. We are not going to say we would indict but for the OLC opinion.

The Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither the Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches. May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty. When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer. Guide her, protect her When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age. Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit. May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers. Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For Childhood is short—a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day— And Adulthood is long and Dry-Humping in Cars will wait. O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed. And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it. And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, That I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes. Amen

opportunities inherent in the logic of the system. The American system of government has never separated money from political power, and in the two decades before Trump’s election, the role of money in American politics had grown manifold. Elections are decided by money: unlike in many other democracies, where electoral campaigns last from several weeks to a few months, are financed by government grants and/or subjected to strict spending limits—in the United States, it is contributions from the private sector that allow campaigns to exist in the first place. National and state party machines reinforce this system by apportioning access to public debates on the basis of the amount of money a candidate has secured. Access to media, which is to say, access to voters, also costs money: where in many democracies media are bound by obligations to provide airtime to candidates, in America the primary vehicle for addressing voters is through paid advertisements. No one in the political mainstream seemed to think anything was wrong with the marriage of money and politics. Former elected officials went to work as lobbyists. Using campaign contributions and lobbying to create (or kill) laws was normal. Power begat more money, and money begat more power. We could call the system that preceded and precipitated Trump’s rise an oligarchy, and we would be right.

Yet in 2012, he returned. Plenty of the speechwriters were livid. The club was the embodiment of everything we had promised to change. Was it really necessary to flatter these people, just because they were powerful and rich? In a word, yes. In fact, thanks to the Supreme Court, the rich were more powerful than ever. In 2010, the court’s five conservative justices gutted America’s campaign finance laws in the decision known as Citizens United. With no more limits to the number of attack ads they could purchase, campaigns had become another hobby for the ultrawealthy. Tired of breeding racehorses or bidding on rare wines at auction? Buy a candidate instead! I should make it clear that no one explicitly laid out a strategy regarding the dinner. I never asked point-blank if we hoped to charm billionaires into spending their billions on something other than Mitt Romney’s campaign. That said, I knew it couldn’t hurt. Hoping to mollify the one-percenters in the audience, I kept the script embarrassingly tame. I’ve got about forty-five more minutes on the State of the Union that I’d like to deliver tonight. I am eager to work with members of Congress to be entertaining tonight. But if Congress is unwilling to cooperate, I will be funny without them. Even for a politician, this was weak. But it apparently struck the right tone. POTUS barely edited the speech. A few days later, as a reward for a job well done, Favs invited me to tag along to a speechwriting-team meeting with the president. I had not set foot in the Oval Office since my performance of the Golden Girls theme song. On that occasion, President Obama remained behind his desk. For larger gatherings like this one, however, he crossed the room to a brown leather armchair, and the rest of us filled the two beige sofas on either side. Between the sofas was a coffee table. On the coffee table sat a bowl, which under George W. Bush had contained candy but under Obama was full of apples instead. Hence the ultimate Oval Office power move: grab an apple at the end of a meeting, polish it on your suit, and take a casual chomp on your way out the door. I would have sooner stuck my finger in an electrical socket. Desperate not to call attention to myself, I took the seat farthest away and kept my eyes glued to my laptop. I allowed myself just one indulgence: a quick peek at the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s right, buddy. Look who’s still here. It was only at the very end of the meeting, as we rose from the surprisingly comfy couches, that Favs brought up the Alfalfa dinner. The right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham had been in the audience, and she was struck by the president’s poise. “She was talking about it this morning,” Favs told POTUS. “She said, ‘I don’t know if Mitt Romney can beat him.

I'll bet My. Pinter knows his way around a rifle. She scowled. He probably thought he was a grand shot, anyway. For a man whose lineage was reputedly unsavory, Mr. Pinter was so high in the instep that she privately called him Proud Pinter or Proper Pinter. He'd told Gabe last week that most lords were good for only two things-redistributing funds from their estates into the gaming hells and brothels in London, and ignoring their duty to God and country. She knew he was working for Oliver only because he wanted the money and prestige. Secretly, he held them all in contempt. Which was probably why he was being so snide about her marrying. "Be that as it may," she said, "I'm interested in marriage now." She strode over to the fireplace to warm her hands. "That's why I want you to investigate my potential suitors." "Why me?" She shot him a sideways glance. "Have you forgotten that Oliver hired you initially for that very purpose?" His stiffening posture told her that he had. With a frown, he drew out the notebook and pencil he always seemed to keep in his pocket. "Very well. Exactly what do you want me to find out?" Breathing easier, she left the fire. "The same thing you found out for my siblings-the truth about my potential suitors' finances, their eligibility for marriage, and...well..." He paused in scratching his notes to arch an eyebrow at her. "Yes?" She fiddled nervously with the gold bracelet she wore. This part, he might balk at. "And their secrets. Things I can use in my...er...campaign. Their likes, their weaknesses, whatever isn't obvious to the world." His expression chilled her even with the fire at her back. "I'm not sure I understand." "Suppose you learn that one of them prefers women in red. That could be useful to me. I would wear red as much as possible." Amusement flashed in his eyes. "And what will you do if they all prefer different colors?" "It's just an example," she said irritably.

America capital has taken up this easy banner of world disorder and we are simply the poor willing fools that follow on behind. We are expected and asked to beat the Russians to death, and yet we are the ultimate victims ourselves: we socialists, we democrats, we progressives, we liberals, we republicans. Though it isn't the private crusade of America, American capital is conducting it, financing it, directing it, and using it, because America to-day is in the hands of violent expansionists, imperialists, capitalists, fascists—call them what you like. They believe the world is theirs, with their atom bomb and their sickening dollars. They are men who have seized America from the feeble hands of a frightened man, and through him they are directing a brazen attack upon the common liberties of all men. With our Imperialists they ask the world to stop Russia! Stop Russia for what?...So that American capital can extend its economic and political dominion over this entire universe, even to the poles! Like our own--these American imperialists are terrified of any movement for social and economic freedom because their Imperialism cannot exist in a better world and they know it. It cannot exist while Russia remains an example in social ownership and social courage. If we ever looked to America for leadership in human affairs, we may have looked to the late President Roosevelt, but these men are not Roosevelt men. Roosevelt's men have gone. Instead we have the new men of America. The men of capital representation, of military ambition, of political threat, of economic force. These are the men we are expected to follow in this great campaign against Russia. But it isn't only Russia that they attack. Their war is upon a world of resisting people who seek self-determination and some ultimate, simple, liberty. Their war is upon every progressive citizen, particularly those desperate partisans who fight for their liberty in America itself. Already the American schemers have the world by the throat. This very nation they have buttered with their silver dollars, saving us from the sins of all-out Socialism. Our entire economy to-day is primed and based on the American loan. What more dominion could one nation have over another?

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

When you have an honest heart, you do not get engaged nor get involved with any smear campaigns nor black propaganda! When you have an honest heart, you do not malign nor take advantage of generous people who helped and trusted you! When you have an honest heart, you do not shit on people whom you used and abused for three years! Do not fall into a political naïvety and become a victim or a doormat nor have your generosity and honest heart be used and abused by unscrupulous political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans who scam gullible generous hearts by asking donations, funds, services, foods, urgent favours, and after using you and abusing your generosity, trust, and kindness; whereby these unscrupulous and deceptive political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans intentionally and maliciously create forged screenshots of evidence convincing their audience or political groups that you are a mentally ill person, a brain-damaged person as they even brand you as "Sisang Baliw," or crazy Sisa, a threat, a risk, a danger, they maliciously and destructively red-tag your friends as communists, and they resort to calumny, libel and slander against you, to shame you, defame you, discredit you, blame you, hurt you, make you suffer for having known the truth of their deceptive global Operandi, and for something you didn’t do through their mob lynching, calumny, polemics mongering, forgery, and cyberbullying efforts. Their character assassination through libel and slander aims to ruin your integrity, persona, trustworthiness, and credibility with their destructive fabricated calumny, lies, identity theft, forged screenshots of polemics mongering, and framing up. Amidst all their forgery, fraud, libel and slander they committed: you have a right to defy and stop their habitual abuse without breaking the law and fight for your rights against any forms of aggression, public lynching, bullies, threats, blackmail, and their repetitive maltreatment or abuse, identity theft, forgery, deceptions fraud, scams, cyber libel, libel, and slander. When you defend human rights, you fight against corruption and injustice, help end impunity: be sure that you are not part of any misinformation, disinformation, smear campaigns and black propaganda. Do not serve, finance, or cater directly or indirectly for those dirty politicians. Those who are engaged in abusively dishonest ways do not serve to justify their end. Deceiving and scamming other people shall always be your lifetime self-inflicted karmic loss. Be a law-abiding citizen. Be respectful. Be honest. Be factual. Be truthful. You can be an effective human rights defender when you have clean and pure intentions, lawful and morally upright, and have an honest heart." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Calunniatopia Book 1, Stronzata Trilogy Genre: inspirational, political, literary novel © 2021 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn

Equally unsettling was the discovery that the country’s major political parties were being financed by those same corporations. Congress and

As one of the German employees of the WIC in Brazil noted, “the Jews, more than anyone else, were in a desperate situation and therefore, preferred to die sword in hand than face their fate under the Portuguese yoke: the flames.”32 The Amsterdam Jews showed their support of the Jews in Brazil by helping to finance a privateering campaign that captured approximately 220 Portuguese vessels, effectively imposing a blockade on

Swachh Bharat, Clean Ganga: Tax sops likely for CSR investments PTI | 296 words Finance minister Arun Jaitley is likely to provide tax incentives in Budget to encourage companies to participate in Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and Clean Ganga campaign as part of the mandatory 2% CSR spending.

One American political figure saw Russia for the growing menace that it was and was willing to call Putin out for his transgressions. During President Obama’s reelection campaign, Mitt Romney warned of a growing Russian strategic threat, highlighting their role as “our number one geopolitical foe.”[208] The response from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and other Democrats was not to echo his sentiment, but actually to ridicule Romney and support the Russian government. President Obama hurled insults, saying Romney was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp” [209] and in a nationally televised debate mocked the former governor, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back…” [210] When asked to respond to Romney’s comment, Secretary Clinton refused to rebuke the over-the-top and false Obama campaign attacks. Instead, she delivered a message that echoed campaign talking points arguing that skepticism of Russia was outdated: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards,” she said, adding, “In many of the areas where we are working to solve problems, Russia has been an ally.”[211] A month after Secretary Clinton’s statement on Romney, Putin rejected Obama’s calls for a landmark summit.[212] He didn’t seem to share the secretary’s view that the two countries were working together. It was ironic that while Obama and Clinton were saying Romney was in a “Cold War mind warp,”[213] the Russian leader was waging a virulent, anti-America “election campaign” (that’s if you can call what they did in Russia an “election”). In fact, if anyone was in a Cold War mind warp, it was Putin, and his behavior demonstrated just how right Romney was about Russia’s intentions. “Putin has helped stoke anti-Americanism as part of his campaign emphasizing a strong Russia,” Reuters reported. “He has warned the West not to interfere in Syria or Iran, and accused the United States of ‘political engineering’ around the world.”[214] And his invective was aimed not just at the United States. He singled out Secretary Clinton for verbal assault. Putin unleashed the assault Nov. 27 [2011] in a nationally televised address as he accepted the presidential nomination, suggesting that the independent election monitor Golos, which gets financing from the United States and Europe, was a U.S. vehicle for influencing the elections here. Since then, Golos has been turned out of its Moscow office and its Samara branch has come under tax investigation. Duma deputies are considering banning all foreign grants to Russian organizations. Then Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of sending a signal to demonstrators to begin protesting the fairness of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.[215] [Emphasis added.] Despite all the evidence that the Russians had no interest in working with the U.S., President Obama and Secretary Clinton seemed to believe that we were just a Putin and Obama election victory away from making progress. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on a live microphone making a private pledge of flexibility on missile defense “after my election” to Dmitry Medvedev.[216] The episode lent credence to the notion that while the administration’s public unilateral concessions were bad enough, it might have been giving away even more in private. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Putin didn’t abandon his anti-American attitudes after he won the presidential “election.” In the last few weeks of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Putin signed a law banning American adoption of Russian children,[217] in a move that could be seen as nothing less than a slap in the face to the United States. Russia had been one of the leading sources of children for U.S. adoptions.[218] This disservice to Russian orphans in need of a home was the final offensive act in a long trail of human rights abuses for which Secretary Clinton failed to hold Russia accountable.

When W. Clement Stone, an insurance magnate and philanthropist, gave $2 million to Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 campaign, it caused public outrage and contributed to a movement that produced the post-Watergate reforms in campaign financing.” Accounting for inflation, Balz estimated that Stone’s $2 million might be worth about $11 million in today’s dollars. In contrast, for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million, completely dwarfing the scale of money that was considered deeply corrupt during the Watergate days.

In striking down the existing campaign-finance laws, the courts eviscerated a century of reform. After a series of campaign scandals involving secret donations from the newly rich industrial barons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Progressives had passed laws limiting spending in order to protect the democratic process from corruption. The laws were meant to safeguard political equality at a time of growing economic inequality. Reformers had seen the concentration of wealth in the hands of oil, steel, finance, and railroad magnates as threatening the democratic equilibrium.

Guideline #12: Hire a professional. Remember the definition of a job seeker I posted at the front of this book? Take a moment and go back to the definition, and study all the aspects of the job campaign you have to master or be proficient in. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies would be hard-pressed to master or be proficient in that many disciplines. They have finance professionals, sales teams, IT departments, management personnel, and consultants to help them. However, most job seekers conduct the job campaign solely on their own.

Conservative elites first turned to populism as a political strategy thanks to Richard Nixon. His festering resentment of the Establishment’s clubby exclusivity prepared him emotionally to reach out to the “silent majority,” with whom he shared that hostility. Nixon excoriated “our leadership class, the ministers, the college professors, and other teachers… the business leadership class… they have all really let down and become soft.” He looked forward to a new party of independent conservatism resting on a defense of traditional cultural and social norms governing race and religion and the family. It would include elements of blue-collar America estranged from their customary home in the Democratic Party. Proceeding in fits and starts, this strategic experiment proved its viability during the Reagan era, just when the businessman as populist hero was first flexing his spiritual muscles. Claiming common ground with the folkways of the “good ole boy” working class fell within the comfort zone of a rising milieu of movers and shakers and their political enablers. It was a “politics of recognition”—a rediscovery of the “forgotten man”—or what might be termed identity politics from above. Soon enough, Bill Clinton perfected the art of the faux Bubba. By that time we were living in the age of the Bubba wannabe—Ross Perot as the “simple country billionaire.” The most improbable members of the “new tycoonery” by then had mastered the art of pandering to populist sentiment. Citibank’s chairman Walter Wriston, who did yeoman work to eviscerate public oversight of the financial sector, proclaimed, “Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda” and gave “power to the people.” His bank plastered New York City with clever broadsides linking finance to every material craving, while simultaneously implying that such seductions were unworthy of the people and that the bank knew it. Its $1 billion “Live Richly” ad campaign included folksy homilies: what was then the world’s largest bank invited us to “open a craving account” and pointed out that “money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you marshmallows, which are kinda the same thing.” Cuter still and brimming with down-home family values, Citibank’s ads also reminded everybody, “He who dies with the most toys is still dead,” and that “the best table in the city is still the one with your family around it.” Yale preppie George W. Bush, in real life a man with distinctly subpar instincts for the life of the daredevil businessman, was “eating pork rinds and playing horseshoes.” His friends, maverick capitalists all, drove Range Rovers and pickup trucks, donning bib overalls as a kind of political camouflage.

In most southern, and perhaps most most northern, states a man with political ambition-and some political prospects-can always find a disgruntled or hopeful contractor or supplier willing to help finance a campaign. And these businessmen are often not concerned about political ideology: they want to do business with a winner, be he right, left, center, or monarchist.

vested interests that financed their election campaigns. In August 2011, as Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya was falling apart, a BBC correspondent in Benghazi spotted some remarkable graffiti on a wall. On the left side of the wall there was a classically straightforward revolutionary message: ‘The tyrant should fall, he’s a monster.’ Direct and to the point. But on the right side, the message was anything but simple. It read: ‘We want constitutional rule and for the president to have less authority and the four-year presidential term should not be extended.’17 As that (quite correctly) suggests, the devil in any

The Mercantilism represented by the Hamilton-Clay tradition transcends the history of the American political economy in its significance. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, France stood out for state commitment to internal improvements: in 1666, Colbert had convinced Louis XIV to finance the Canal du Midi as one aspect of the generations-long campaign to establish centralized state authority over the still-feudal French nation. Since time immemorial however, the public credit of the state had been predominantly devoted to the financing of war, whether the state was in the hands of a feudal king, an absolute monarch, a republican city-state, or the conflation of royal power circumscribed by parliamentary representatives of the propertied classes and tempered by "the mob" that emerged in Britain from 1688. The game between the financial markets and the state was played out over the terms on which the owners of liquid capital would fund the state's armies relative to the problematic likelihood of their being repaid.

The campaign-finance limits help incumbents and substantially hurt unknown challengers...An abject willingness to strip away the free speech rights of American citizens has become an explicit litmus test for judicial appointments from today’s radicalized Democrats. And, as a constitutional matter, on the Supreme Court, when it comes to either protecting or destroying our fundamental protections for political speech-- the very heart and soul of our representative democracy-- we are, sadly, only one vote away. -pp. 134, 137

The great crisis that we face as a nation is not just the objective problems that we face–a rigged economy, a corrupt campaign finance system, a broken criminal justice system, and the extraordinary threat of climate change. The more serious crisis is the limitation of our imaginations. It is falling victim to an incredibly powerful establishment–economic, political, and media–that tells us every day, in a million different ways, that real change is unthinkable and impossible. That we have got to think small, not big. That we must be satisfied with the status quo. That there are no alternatives. The future of our country and, perhaps, the world requires us to break through those limitations.

But what if instead, we paired a majority-vote Senate with steps to strengthen our democracy, rebuild accountability, and reestablish the consent of the governed? Imagine the filibuster’s demise followed immediately by statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, automatic voter registration throughout America, tougher disclosure laws for political donors, a public campaign finance system, and more.

Over the next three weeks Yeltsin’s approval ratings jumped from 22 to 28 percent. For the first time since his campaign began, people started to factor in a real possibility that Yeltsin would win. New buyers entered the stock market, pushing my fund up 15 percent.

My wife, Debbie, talked about Venezuela. She also thanked him for my presidential pardon, which wiped out my felony conviction on the campaign finance violation.

The AMA launched the first modern public relations and lobbying campaign to paint government insurance as a threat not to doctors’ finances, however—but to the entire American way of life. They labeled the idea socialist.

A famous expression goes, “The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.” Our human rights campaign made strange bedfellows with Montana beef farmers, Russian human rights activists, and Boeing airplane salesmen, but by working together it appeared as if we had the strength to overpower any remaining resistance to getting the law passed.

The economics exam at Lucknow University for the bachelor of commerce (BCom) asked students to evaluate schemes launched by Modi, such as Digital India (to develop digitization throughout the country) and Startup India, or to describe job-creation schemes.86 The civil service exam went even further. In Madhya Pradesh, candidates to join the state administration were thus asked in 2016: “The Swachh Bharat campaign led by the honorable Prime Minister has a great impact on the society because 1) People understood the importance of cleanliness, and 2) People across the country like the campaign.”87 The trap was obviously only discernible to Modi supporters: both answers were correct! The nationalist tone of textbook rewriting deliberately extols ancient Indian knowledge systems over contemporary science.88 For instance, the minister of state for human resource development responsible for higher education, Satya Pal Singh, denied the validity of the theory of evolution89 and in one of his speeches claimed that it was an Indian who invented the airplane.90 The deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh maintained that the test-tube baby procedure had existed in ancient India because Ram’s wife, Sita, was born in an earthen pot, while the chief minister of Tripura, Biplab Kumar Deb, explained that the technologies of satellites and the internet existed in ancient India.91 In the same vein, the education minister of Rajasthan claimed that the law of gravity had been discovered in India in the seventh century.92 And along the same lines, another BJP minister—health, education, and finance minister in Assam—claimed that cancer patients were paying for their “sins.”93

The dark money playbook is straightforward. Take advantage of shady campaign financing; circumvent electoral rules where you can; and draw on a network of supportive think tanks, a receptive media run by a handful of magnates and hard-line caucuses within the long-established political parties.

The blame for the overturning of Roe v Wade does not fall upon the overzealous, vindictive evangelical—either in a pew or judge’s robe—anymore than it does the bruised-knee legislator and his Plus-1, the campaign-financing lobbyist: All are boorish cultural phenomena, buoyed by society’s currents, political inertia determining their every direction. Instead, history will shake its head in disappointment at those who stood idly by and did nothing.

The Citizens United decision profoundly changed American politics. The Court’s ruling effectively lifted any limitations on American corporations’ political expenditures. The ruling permitted for-profit corporations to use corporate funds for campaign contributions to support candidates and issues. It also permitted wealthy and well-connected individuals to form corporations as vehicles to solicit, collect, and disperse funds, with little to no transparency.

In all, just 158 American families had donated half of all the money to candidates on the ballot [in the 2016 election].

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question. Nonpartisan districting, same-day registration, and weekend elections would all increase the competitiveness of races and might spur more participation from the electorate- and the more the electorate is paying attention, the more integrity is awarded. Public financing of campaigns or free television and radio time could drastically reduce the constant scourging for money and the influence of special interests. Changes in the rules in the House and the Senate might empower legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and encourage more probing reporting.

The loss of Mecca threatened Sultan Mahmud II’s authority and finances, and in 1811 he ordered the Ottoman Governor of Egypt, Mohammed Ali Pasha, to expel the Wahhabis. Mohammed Ali Pasha and his son, Ibrahim Pasha, campaigned for seven years to destroy the First Saudi State. When Imam Saud al-Saud died in 1814, his son, Imam Abdullah, withdrew to the Nejd pursued by Ibrahim Pasha and an army of 5,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 150 artillerymen with howitzers, mortars, and cannon.14 This largely Egyptian army besieged the then Saudi capital of Dir’iyyah, where the vastly outnumbered and outgunned Wahhabis, who had no artillery, held out for six months before surrendering on September 11, 1818.

When big news happens in other states, people say, 'Oh my goodness!' or 'What the-?" But we Floridians will scan a story or click over to CNN or Fox and mutter to ourselves, 'Okay, where's the Florida connection?' We do this because we know that any big story is likely to have a link to America's strangest state. A guy lands a gyrocopter at the Capitol to protest campaign finance laws? He's a Floridian. A Major League Baseball doping scandal? The clinic was in Florida. The 9/11 hijackers got their flight training here. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, President George W. Bush was reading a story about a heroic goat to Florida schoolchildren. Who gave special prosecutor Ken Starr permission to dig into President Bill Clinton's affair with an intern? Attorney General Janet Reno, a Florida native. Remember the 1972 Watergate break-in that brought down Richard Nixon? Guess where the burglars were from.

was very much the result of a deliberate campaign by

Those elected officials need money to finance their campaigns, so when they get elected, they owe a lot to the people who donated millions to their campaigns.  Those people expect them to return the favor via guiding the government in ways that help them out.

The hard-won lesson of the last two centuries, which even many liberals don’t grasp, is that most injustices shrivel under the application of light. And light consists of photons called facts. Reiterating: we see zillionaire oligarchs finance relentless propaganda aimed at riling millions into hatred, and not only wrath aimed at powerless minorities. Just as dangerous is their campaign – stirring up that pre-existing SoA reflex – of open war against “knowledge elites” – precisely because those skill castes do have power! Civil servants, scientists, teachers, doctors, intel agents and so can do a lot to thwart the New Lords’ ambitions. All must be gelded. Broken to harness. Taught their place.

This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way. When growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe. Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed. The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans. The individuals who bought the shares, the brokers who sold them, and the managers of the slave-trade companies rarely thought about the Africans. Nor did the owners of the sugar plantations. Many owners lived far from their plantations, and the only information they demanded were neat ledgers of profits and losses. It is important to remember that the Atlantic slave trade was not a single aberration in an otherwise spotless record. The Great Bengal Famine, discussed in the previous chapter, was caused by a similar dynamic – the British East India Company cared more about its profits than about the lives of 10 million Bengalis. VOC’s military campaigns in Indonesia were financed by upstanding Dutch burghers who loved their children, gave to charity, and enjoyed good music and fine art, but had no regard for the suffering of the inhabitants of Java, Sumatra and Malacca. Countless other crimes and misdemeanours accompanied the growth of the modern economy in other parts of the planet.

We never did lack for eager volunteers, but there was no one who could give them [Florida volunteers] clear-cut directions. Some work was duplicated while other chores were left undone. The national office in Washington was in the same plight. In the confusion, local jealousies and rivalries thrived. Compared with the professional and well-financed campaigns of the other candidates, mine did not inspire confidence. There were countless damaging results; a trip to St. Petersburg was rescheduled five times and finally cancelled four days before the last date agreed on, but no one in Tampa thought to tell the St. Petersburg TImes, and its reporter went out and waited for me to arrive. It was not a good way to treat one of the state's leading newspapers.

BDS on college campuses is a savvy, well-funded political operation whose sponsors and organizers include groups and individuals with ties to Islamist agendas. I didn’t make this up. A much smarter person than me said this in his sworn testimony in front of the United States Congress. Here is Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, former terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury: The overlap of former employees of organizations that provided support to Hamas who now play important roles [in the BDS movement]… speaks volumes about the real agenda of key components of the BDS campaign.10 Schanzer, now senior vice president at the Washington, DC–based think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is an expert in uncovering financial ties that are designed to be hidden. In his testimony, Dr. Schanzer describes a head-spinning web of financial and personal connections between BDS and supporters of terrorism. The BDS US campus operation represents a savvy rebranding of the Palestinian cause to make it more palatable—and, you know, less terror-y—for the American people. Key figures in the BDS movement come from a particularly uncompromising strain of Palestinian nationalism that calls for a State of Palestine to stretch from the river to the sea (yes, without Israel). Apparently, when they saw that their message was not resonating with Western society (not surprisingly, I would say), they decided to pivot and started pouring their resources into American colleges in order to influence future leaders and voters in America and Europe. “Investing in the future they are,” as Yoda would say.

Why were you given a choice between bad and worse in the presidential election? I’ll tell you why. Our system is broken. Elections are broken, because of our corrupt campaign finance system, which undermines our democracy, and which allows corporations and billionaires to pour in huge sums of money to elect the candidates of their choice.

The exchange between the president and Justice Alito underscored their very different personal orientations to campaign finance regulations. On one hand, Alito and his majority colleagues had crafted an opinion in accordance with the views of many civil libertarians. In this framework, political money is viewed as effectively the same thing as political speech, because the former presumably facilitates the dissemination of a specific message. Assuming that political speech is sacred in a free society, adherents to this viewpoint tend to view campaign finance regulations with skepticism, arguing that they complicate the act of speaking in a political setting.

campaign finance laws are typically subject to strict scrutiny, which necessitates that the government prove a law furthers a compelling government interest (for example, reducing the appearance of corruption) and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest (United States v. Carolene Products, 304 U.S. 144 (1938), Footnote Four).

It was, however, a 2008 film about then–New York Senator Hillary Clinton that garnered Citizens United national attention and set the stage for significant changes to American campaign finance regulations. Clinton was running in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, and in Hillary: The Movie, Citizens United advanced a sustained case against her nomination. Over its 90 minutes, Hillary: The Movie employed archival video intermingled with both critical narration and interviews conducted with Clinton detractors. The film unrelentingly assaulted Clinton’s character, accusing her of untruths and obfuscation throughout her career not only as an Arkansas attorney, but also in public life as both first lady (of both Arkansas and the United States) and as a United States Senator.

and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, a set of reforms which became commonly known as “McCain-Feingold” after Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Russell Feingold (D-WI) had sponsored similar legislation in the Senate. The BCRA had made sweeping changes to campaign finance regulations in federal elections, including higher individual contribution limits and the banning of so-called soft money raised by parties in unlimited sums. Soft money was ostensibly for “party-building” activities such as phone banking or party (not candidate) advertising, but in practice, the line between “party” functions and “campaign” activities—that expressly advocated the election or defeat of an individual candidate—was often blurry (Magleby 2010). By the end of the 1990s, donors could write massive checks to aid the campaigns of their favored candidates (Gill and Lipsmeyer 2005). The Democratic and Republican Parties combined raised a little more than $85 million in soft money in 1992; in 2002 the combined figure was nearly $500 million (Gill and Lipsmeyer 2005, Table 1). By banning such funding, the BCRA was widely seen as an impediment to the ability of moneyed interests to “buy votes” (see: Corrado 2003; Malbin 2003).

Given the FEC’s previous refusal to grant Citizens United a media exception to disseminate its John Kerry movie, there was a high probability that Hillary: The Movie would meet a similar fate in 2008. Citizens United probably knew that the FEC was likely to claim that considering its exclusively negative tone and laser-like focus on Senator Clinton, Hillary: The Movie amounted to a 90-minute campaign commercial well within the BCRA definitions of “electioneering,” and as such could neither be aired on broadcast outlets nor advertised over the airways within the applicable time limits. This presented an obvious marketing challenge. Were it limited to only movie theater screenings and online DVD sales, the film’s audience would be considerably narrower than intended. Citizens United surely realized that the only way to proceed with its plans to market political documentaries was to change the rules of the game. In December 2007, Citizens United brought suit against the FEC in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The purpose of the suit was to secure an injunction prohibiting the FEC from enforcing the electioneering provisions of the BCRA with regard to Hillary: The Movie. To that end, Citizens United made a First Amendment challenge, claiming that the BRCA’s bans on electioneering communications amounted to an unconstitutional infringement on its members’ freedom of speech. Moreover, the group alleged that because in its view its electioneering activities could not be banned, the disclosure requirements of the BCRA were also unconstitutional. First Amendment speech protections have long clashed with the restrictions imposed by campaign finance regulations. The general conflict in American campaign finance case law is that restrictions on contribution and/or spending are viewed by some as unreasonable restrictions on political speech, which has traditionally garnered significant protection (for an excellent summary, see: La Raja 2008, Ch. 3).

The seminal case in American campaign finance is Buckley v. Valeo (424 U.S. 1 (1976)), in which the contribution and spending limitations enacted in the early 1970s with the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) were challenged on First Amendment grounds. The FECA was a significant, wide-ranging reform that had for the first time created a meaningful regulatory environment in federal campaign finance. The law implemented statutory campaign contribution limits, and also originally mandated spending limitations for congressional campaigns. Moreover, the FECA barred all expenditures made by either private citizens or groups “advocating the election or defeat of (a) candidate” in excess of $1,000 per annum. In Buckley, the Supreme Court held that while contribution limits were constitutional, there could be no prohibition on either individuals or candidates looking to spend their own money to directly communicate a political message. The distinction between contributions and direct spending in Buckley is based on two premises. First, the government has an interest in preventing instances of corruption, or even in limiting public perceptions of corruption. Second, money spent on election communications effectively equates to speech in the modern political realm, so more money spent in this manner is equivalent to more speech. In contrast, the act of contribution by an individual to a candidate, party, or PAC is itself an expressive act.

Citizens United got its day in court on March 24, 2009. Its counsel, Theodore Olson, got straight to the point in arguing that byzantine federal campaign finance rules were infringing on the First Amendment rights of citizens and groups alike. Freedom of speech, he said, was “being smothered by one of the most complicated, expensive, and incomprehensible regulatory regimes ever invented by the administrative state.” Olson argued that it was unfair to exempt media corporations (whose primary focus was disseminating information) from penalty while punishing a group like Citizens United, which had done nothing more than create a film that was “the very definition of robust, uninhibited debate about a subject of intense political interest that the First Amendment is there to guarantee.

Around 10:00 p.m. on that February 6, the Obama campaign informed its top contributors that the president would endorse super PAC Priorities USA Action, with the aim of benefitting from its fundraising capacity. In an email later that evening, Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina wrote to supporters that given the financial dynamics apparent in the Republican primaries, something had to give: In 2011, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney raised $30 million from fewer than 200 contributors. Ninety six percent of what they’ve spent so far, more than $18 million, has been on attack ads. The main engine of Romney’s campaign has an average contribution of roughly $150,000. The stakes are too important to play by two different sets of rules. If we fail to act, we concede this election to a small group of powerful people intent on removing the president at any cost. (Thrush 2012) The age of the super PAC in presidential politics had begun. The emergence of super PACs represented a new era of American campaign finance. Prior to some groundbreaking federal court decisions in early 2010, almost all money that was funneled into the political system was subject to “hard money” limitations. That is, since the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002, anyone wishing to donate to a political committee (such as a campaign, PAC, or “527” organization) was constrained by campaign finance law.

Justice Ginsburg asked the first question, and wasted no time in getting to the heart of the matter. Ginsburg asked, Mr. Olson, are you taking the position that there is no difference in the First Amendment rights of an individual? A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights. So is there any distinction that Congress could draw between corporations and natural human beings for purposes of campaign finance? Mr. Olson’s reply—which made a claim on speech rights of all corporations— was a marked departure from the first argument, and set the stage for all that followed: “What the Court has said in the First Amendment context … over and over again, is that corporations are persons entitled to protection under the First Amendment.

The Senate report laid out a basic picture of the money trail: (1) Koch Industries supported the Economic Education Trust; (2) that trust gave cash to Triad; (3) Triad gave the cash to campaign groups like Citizens for Reform, which, in turn, (4) pumped money into elections to defeat Koch Industries’ opponents. (Koch Industries also gave at least $2,000 directly to Triad.) Triad was a new kind of campaign finance machine. It acted as a third party that didn’t directly donate money to politicians. Triad hired consultants who created attack ads for Republicans in tight races. Triad was careful in its language. It never used words like “vote for,” “support,” or “defeat” that might have triggered oversight from campaign regulators like the Federal Election Commission.

Tristan Sommer, a top graduate in Music Studies, is Tallahassee's rising star. With a keen interest in finance and a passion for politics, Tristan envisions a future as a political lobbyist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. His dynamic pursuits include community outreach, writing, and strategic campaign management.

In 1996, Koch Industries created a nonprofit group called the Economic Education Trust. The group did not need to disclose its donors because it was not ostensibly a lobbying or campaign finance organization. Koch funneled money through the Economic Education Trust to state and federal campaigns in Kansas and other states where it did business. In October of 1996, the Economic Education Trust gave $1.79 million to a company in suburban Washington, DC, called Triad Management Services Inc. Triad was supposedly a political consulting firm, but it had a strange business model: it offered its services for free, to Republican candidates. A US Senate report in 1998 concluded that Triad was “a corporate shell funded by a few wealthy conservative Republican activists.

Once the ACCF’s study was published, Koch Industries carried out the next phase of its echo chamber system. The study was quickly promoted by a think tank called the Institute for Energy Research, which sent out a press release on August 13 that highlighted the study’s findings. The IER was an outgrowth of the Institute for Humane Studies, the libertarian think tank cofounded by Charles Koch.IV By 2009, the IER was funded by Koch Industries and other companies, and a former Koch Industries lobbyist named Wayne Gable sat on IER’s board of directors. After the study was promoted by the IER, it was then recycled by another Koch Industries–affiliated think tank. This one was called the American Energy Alliance, and it was essentially the political action arm of the IER. The AEA was organized under the tax code in a way that it could be directly involved in politics, while the IER was organized as an “education” foundation that could not lobby or get involved in political campaigns. Where the IER was high minded, the AEA was something more of a street brawler. The AEA was headed by a former Koch Industries lobbyist named Thomas Pyle, who remained in close contact with his former colleagues at Koch’s lobbying shop. The AEA produced a series of political radio advertisements that were based on the new ACCF findings, along with other statistics that highlighted the potential economic threat of a cap-and-trade bill. A narrator in one of the radio ads intoned: “This tax will further cripple our already struggling economy—costing more American jobs. . . . Higher taxes and more job losses—what could Congress be thinking?” A corresponding fact sheet for the ad cited the ACCF for this claim. The AEA political ads were targeted in a way that benefited from keen knowledge of how the Waxman-Markey bill was then working its way through the Senate. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was a particular target. “Why would Senator Lindsey Graham support a new national energy tax, called cap and trade?” one advertisement began. Citing the ACCF study, the advertisement claimed that “cap and trade . . . could significantly increase electricity bills, gas prices, and cost American jobs.” In all of these statements and advertisements, the same set of numbers were used again and again: More than two million jobs lost. Electricity prices would be 50 percent higher by 2030. These facts were also carried into Congress in the form of direct testimony. When the Senate Finance Committee sought to learn more about the economics of climate change, the committee invited Margo Thorning to testify. The ACCF study was submitted as evidence beforehand.

II Duce had a megalomaniac vision of merging this territory with the colonies of Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, and Libya to forge an East African empire. Some five hundred thousand Ethiopians were sacrificed in a campaign infamous for its savage use of mustard gas.

Why should we care so much about a mere £700,000? Let’s be clear on this point: Vote Leave’s scheme was the largest known breach of campaign finance law in British history. But even if it wasn’t, elections, like a 100-meter sprint in the Olympics, are zero-sum games, where the winner takes all. Whoever comes first, even if it’s by just a few votes or milliseconds, wins the whole race: They get to sit in the public office. They get the gold medal. They get to name your Supreme Court justices. They get to take your country out of the European Union. The only difference, of course, is that if you are caught cheating in the Olympics, you get disqualified and lose your medal. There are no discussions of whether the doped athlete “would have won anyway”—the integrity of the sport demands a clean race. But in politics, we do not presume integrity as a necessary prerequisite to our democracy. There are harsher punishments for athletes who cheat in sport than for campaigns that cheat in elections.

Furthermore, it is not the people or the citizens who decide on what to vote, on which political program, at what time, and so on. It is the oligarchs and the oligarchic system that decide on this and that submit their choice to the vote of the electorate (in certain very specific cases). One could legitimately wonder, for instance, why there are not more referendums, and in particular referendums of popular initiative, in “democracy.” Cornelius Castoriadis perfectly described this state of affairs when he wrote: “The election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are being stuffed, but because the options are determined in advance. They are told, ‘vote for or against the Maastricht Treaty,’ for example. But who made the Maastricht Treaty? It isn’t us.”127 It would thus be naive to believe that elections reflect public opinion or even the preferences of the electorate. For these oligarchic principles dominate our societies to such an extent that the nature of the choice is decided in advance. In the case of elections, it is the powerful media apparatus—financed in the United States by private interests, big business, and the bureaucratic machinery of party politics—that presents to the electorate the choices to be made, the viable candidates, the major themes to be debated, the range of possible positions, the questions to be raised and pondered, the statistical tendencies of “public opinion,” the viewpoint of experts, and the positions taken by the most prominent politicians. What we call political debate and public space (which is properly speaking a space of publicity) are formatted to such an extent that we are encouraged to make binary choices without ever asking ourselves genuine questions: we must be either for or against a particular political star, a specific publicity campaign, such or such “societal problem.” “One of the many reasons why it is laughable to speak of ‘democracy’ in Western societies today,” asserts Castoriadis, “is because the ‘public’ sphere is in fact private—be it in France, the United States, or England.”The market of ideas is saturated, and the political consumer is asked to passively choose a product that is already on the shelves. This is despite the fact that the contents of the products are often more or less identical, conjuring up in many ways the difference that exists between a brand-name product on the right, with the shiny packaging of the tried-and-true, and a generic product on the left, that aspires to be more amenable to the people. “Free elections do not necessarily express ‘the will of the people,’ ” Erich Fromm judiciously wrote. “If a highly advertised brand of toothpaste is used by the majority of the people because of some fantastic claims it makes in its propaganda, nobody with any sense would say that people have ‘made a decision’ in favor of the toothpaste. All that could be claimed is that the propaganda was sufficiently effective to coax millions of people into believing its claims.

Furthermore, it is not the people or the citizens who decide on what to vote, on which political program, at what time, and so on. It is the oligarchs and the oligarchic system that decide on this and that submit their choice to the vote of the electorate (in certain very specific cases). One could legitimately wonder, for instance, why there are not more referendums, and in particular referendums of popular initiative, in “democracy.” Cornelius Castoriadis perfectly described this state of affairs when he wrote: “The election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are being stuffed, but because the options are determined in advance. They are told, ‘vote for or against the Maastricht Treaty,’ for example. But who made the Maastricht Treaty? It isn’t us.” It would thus be naive to believe that elections reflect public opinion or even the preferences of the electorate. For these oligarchic principles dominate our societies to such an extent that the nature of the choice is decided in advance. In the case of elections, it is the powerful media apparatus—financed in the United States by private interests, big business, and the bureaucratic machinery of party politics—that presents to the electorate the choices to be made, the viable candidates, the major themes to be debated, the range of possible positions, the questions to be raised and pondered, the statistical tendencies of “public opinion,” the viewpoint of experts, and the positions taken by the most prominent politicians. What we call political debate and public space (which is properly speaking a space of publicity) are formatted to such an extent that we are encouraged to make binary choices without ever asking ourselves genuine questions: we must be either for or against a particular political star, a specific publicity campaign, such or such “societal problem.” “One of the many reasons why it is laughable to speak of ‘democracy’ in Western societies today,” asserts Castoriadis, “is because the ‘public’ sphere is in fact private—be it in France, the United States, or England.”The market of ideas is saturated, and the political consumer is asked to passively choose a product that is already on the shelves. This is despite the fact that the contents of the products are often more or less identical, conjuring up in many ways the difference that exists between a brand-name product on the right, with the shiny packaging of the tried-and-true, and a generic product on the left, that aspires to be more amenable to the people. “Free elections do not necessarily express ‘the will of the people,’ ” Erich Fromm judiciously wrote. “If a highly advertised brand of toothpaste is used by the majority of the people because of some fantastic claims it makes in its propaganda, nobody with any sense would say that people have ‘made a decision’ in favor of the toothpaste. All that could be claimed is that the propaganda was sufficiently effective to coax millions of people into believing its claims.

Campaign laws are virtually nonexistent. By 1975, thirty-two people from the Nixon era had gone to jail or paid heavy fines for campaign finance law violations. All of the things for which they were convicted are now legal.

called for the repeal of all campaign-finance laws and the abolition of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It also favored the abolition of all government health-care programs, including Medicaid and Medicare. It attacked Social Security as “virtually bankrupt” and called for its abolition, too. The Libertarians also opposed all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, and called for an end to the prosecution of tax evaders. Their platform called for the abolition too of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, among other government agencies.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

Bauer understood the modern power of using government—even if only the threat of it—to silence political opponents. And his special insight was realizing that the tool for getting those government drones trained on the right targets was campaign finance law.