Fight Money in Politics With...Money in Politics. - Granite Grok

Fight Money in Politics With…Money in Politics.

Larry Lessig has been promoting the idea of publicly funded elections, and fighting corporate money in politics.  He is the impetus behind ‘NH Rebellion,’ a local effort to advance the progressive narrative against corporate speech.  Lessig’s overriding theme has come to a head with his latest effort to combat money in politics, Mayday PAC.

The group, the brainchild of Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and GOP media strategist Mark McKinnon, is trying to reduce the influence of money in politics by helping to elect candidates who have pledged to reform campaign finance laws.

Lessig and McKinnon are spending millions to elect candidates to public office.

McKinnon was a major mover behind No Labels, the center left group created to move independents and low-information voters toward supporting candidates with progressive policy prescriptions under the cover of a non-partisan movement.  It was a response to the TEA Party, to give progressive a place to pretend to be moderate.

Pro tax, pro abortion, anti-free speech, anti-second amendment, ObamCare supporting, central planner left-wing NH Governor Maggie Hassan was at the unveiling of the group and an early adopter, if that gives you an idea of the “centrism” of No Labels.

So you’ve got a well connected ‘Republican insider’ who advocates hiding progressivism and a Harvard law professor pushing the Democrat parties anti-corporate speech narrative, combining forces to create a Super PAC (They call it and anti-Super PAC) that will spend millions of dollars on ads in support of select candidates (or attacking opponents) to fight big money in politics.

Sure.

In New Hampshire, Mayday PAC has already run ads to advocate for the campaigns of Carol Shae-Porter, and Jim Rubens.  I wonder how Jim Rubens feels about being viewed in the same ideological framework as Carol the communist Shea-Porter the 99% Pelosi supporting, Obama backing, far left Democrat?

Jim, send the money back, man.

To the credit of Mayday PAC, they are soliciting donations from the peasants to fund these candidates, but if you at look at who is donating to the PAC, peasants is not exactly the word to describe them.

 

RYAN, VINCENT
BOSTON, MA 02111
Schooner Capital 06/13/14 $250,000
ANDERSON, CHRIS
NEW YORK, NY 10013
TED Conferences LLC 06/30/14 $250,000
HOFFMAN, REID
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94126
LinkedIn 06/05/14 $150,000
THIEL, PETER
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94129
PayPal 06/10/14 $150,000
BURNHAM, R BRADFORD III
NEW YORK, NY 10011
Union Square Ventures 06/04/14 $100,000
BYERS, SHAWN
WOODSIDE, CA 94062
At Home 05/15/14 $50,000
ROBERTS, JEFFREY
KIRKLAND, WA 98033
RAD Game Tools 05/12/14 $25,000
L DANIEL, MATTHEW
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94115
Radius Intelligence, Inc 06/26/14 $24,000

As an example, Vincent Ryan is a venture capitalist and Democrat heavy hitter, who  supports Democrats like Corey Booker and Ed Markey with large donations, as well as the Democrat congressional committee.

Reid Hoffman – Major Democrat Donor.

Bradford Burnham – Democrat donor

Peter Thiel at least supports conservative groups…

Yeah, there are other sorts of donors here but the list is top heavy with connected corporate types or big dollar donors the PAC admits it can’t do without.  Irony, anyone?

Lessig wrote a letter to supporters announcing that he would make the names of major donors public by Aug. 5, and continue to provide disclosures every two weeks through Election Day. In the letter, Lessig also notes that his effort will be “much more expensive than it seemed.”

While Mayday claimed to be crowd sourcing, there are triggers for matching funds from wealthy backers.

From what we have seen in the group’s FEC report, Mayday has had some success in attracting small dollar contributions. Of the $2,091,015 in itemized contributions it received from April through June, $481,269.88 came from donors who gave less than $1,000 total. An additional $1.2 million came from donors who gave less than $200. None of the itemized money came from other PACs or corporations.

Even so, Mayday’s fundraising follows traditional patterns in other respects: Most of the group’s donations prior to June 30 came from just three ATM states (so called because they are where politicians go to withdraw money): California, Massachusetts and New York.

There is always room to talk about big donors in politics, and I have no objection to Lessig raising money to spend on candidates he thinks support his ideas, but that is what everyone else does and taking large dollar individual contributions from corporate movers to do so seems a bit hypocritical to me.   And the goal is still strongly tied to the progressive narrative which attacks 1st amendment protections regarding political speech.

Jim Rubens can’t stop Mayday from running third party Super PAC ads in support of him, but he should be wary of the message and how neatly it fits the Democrat corporate-speech narrative.

 

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