When the 2012 election is over, here's who will own the country (not that they don't already)

our overlords...

Meet the 26 Billionaires Buying the 2012 Elections | By Sen. Bernie Sanders

So far this year, 26 billionaires have donated more than $61 million to super PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And, that’s only what has been publicly disclosed.

This $61 million does not include about $100 million that Sheldon Adelson has said that he is willing to spend to defeat President Obama; or the $400 million that the Koch brothers have pledged to spend during the 2012 election season.

These 26 billionaires have a combined net worth of $146 billion, which is more than the bottom 42.5 percent of American households (equal to nearly 50 million families in the United States).

note: there are only 23 listed because #2 includes the three koch brothers and #12 includes two marriotts...

Here is a list of the billionaires:

1. Sheldon Adelson, owner of the Las Vegas Sands Casino, is worth nearly $25 billion, making him the 14th wealthiest person in the world and the 7th richest person in America.

While median family income plummeted by nearly 40% from 2007-2010, Mr. Adelson has experienced a nearly eightfold increase in his wealth over the past three years (from $3.4 billion to $24.9 billion).

Forbes recently reported that Adelson is willing to spend a “limitless” amount of money or more than $100 million to help defeat President Obama in November.

While $100 million sounds like a lot, it equals the same percentage of Adelson’s wealth that $300 to $400 does for the typical middle class family (with a net worth of about $77,000).

Sheldon Adelson owns more wealth than the bottom 40.2% of American households or 47.2 million American families.

2. The Kochs (David, Charles, and William) are worth a combined $54 billion, according to Forbes. They have pledged to spend about $400 million during the 2012 election season.

3. Jim Walton is worth $23.7 billion. He has donated $300,000 to super PACs in 2012.

4. Harold Simmons is worth $9 billion. He has donated $15.2 million to super PACs this year.

5. Peter Thiel is worth $1.5 billion. He has donated $6.7 million to Super PACs this year.

6. Jerrold Perenchio is worth $2.3 billion. He has donated $2.6 million to super PACs this year.

7. Kenneth Griffin is worth $3 billion and he has given $2.08 million to super PACs in 2012.

8. James Simons is worth $10.7 billion and he has given $1.5 million to super Pacs this year.

9. Julian Robertson is worth $2.5 billion and he has given $1.25 million to super PACs this year.

10. Robert Rowling is worth $4.8 billion and he has given $1.1 million to super PACs.

11. John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who made his fortune betting that the sub-prime mortgage market would collapse, is worth $12.5 billion. He has donated $1 million to super PACs.

12. Richard and J.W. Marriott are worth a combined $3.1 billion and they have donated $2 million to super PACs this year.

13. James Davis is worth $1.9 billion and he has given $1 million to super PACs this year.

14. Harold Hamm is worth $11 billion and he has given $985,000 to super PACs this year.

15. Kenny Trout is worth more than $1.2 billion and he has given $900,000 to super PACs this year.

16. Louis Bacon is worth $1.4 billion and he has given $500,000 to super PACs this year.

17. Bruce Kovner is worth $4.5 billion and he has given $500,000 to super PACs this year.

18. Warren Stephens is worth $2.7 billion and he has given $500,000 to super PACs this year.

19. David Tepper is worth $5.1 billion and he has given $375,000 to super PACs this year.

20. Samuel Zell is worth $4.9 billion and he has given $270,000 to super PACs this year.

21. Leslie Wexner is worth $4.3 billion and he has given $250,000 to super PACs this year.

22. Charles Schwab is worth $3.5 billion and he has given $250,000 to super PACs this year.

23. Kelcy Warren is worth $2.3 billion and he has given $250,000 to super PACs this year.

we will all be working directly or indirectly for these people (if we aren't already)...

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Barry Ritholtz: This corruption is not an accident. It is the product of years of very patient work.

from economonitor, originally published in the big picture...

We live in an era of defective government.

This corruption is not an accident. It is the product of years of very patient work. It has been brought about through expensive lobbying, relentless propaganda, agnotology. You can see it in this election cycle, where 196 Americans — 0.000063% of the population — have given more than 80% of Super PAC dollars.

Is it democracy or plutocracy when less than 200 people drive election spending in a nation of 300 million?

Previously, we have pointed out how brazen the lobbying has been to actually cut the SEC enforcement budget. This has created an agency that is defective by design. Take a guess who loses in the battle between you, the individual taxpayer versus the corporation.

Wall Street has taken advantage of the crisis and morphed into a cartel. The tragedy is the only entity that is large and powerful enough to offset their wealth and power are national governments. Yet where ever we look, we see that government has been corrupted and rendered neutered by corporations:

-The Federal Reserve Zero Interest Rate policy is a balm to banks whose balance sheets still have so much bad real estate exposure that higher rates will cause corporate bankruptcy;

-The SEC brings minor insider trading cases while enormous financial crimes go unpunished;

-The Supreme Court has granted natural rights to corporations — rights previously reserved for living and breathing Human Beings;

-The CFTC no longer does the sort of daily audits that can prevent fraud like MF Global and PeregrineFG;-The US Attorney’s office has been captured by the Treasury department, which in turn was captured by large Banks long ago;

-Laws that used to be written by Congressional staffers and academics are now drafted by the regulated industry itself;

-The Attorneys General offices of the states are too timid to sue these same banks for obvious perjury;-Tax loopholes allow wealthy companies to pay very little taxes relative to profits;

-Copyrights that should be in the public domain are retained by companies who have changed intellectual property laws by corrupting legislators.

-The Minerals Management Service (MMS) gives away oil leases and mineral rights for pennies on the dollar.-Money has somehow been equated to speech, turning the idea of “One Person, One vote” on its head.

To function properly, all of these agencies need budgets, a career path for a motivated staff. Yet most of that has been gutted.

Take a look at Neil Barofsky’s book Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. He describes a Federal prosecutorial system that has been systematically disassembled. There are few career lawyers with the know how, budget and balls to go after the big fish. There is little institutional memory.

We see  this throughout government, a product of even a debate that has been corrupted. The framework is not “How can me make government more effective, efficient responsive?“  Instead, the debate has degenerated into “How can we get government out of the way? How can we make taxes lower?”

Its not that I want big government, I want effective regulations. Its not that I want to pay higher taxes, I want efficient government that can accomplish things. I don’t want to live in a corporatocracy, I want to live in a nation where there is a Rule of Law.

The only way to make this happen is to change the campaign finance laws. Without that, we are a plutocracy governed by lobbyists.

Hence:  Its the bankers world, we just live in it . . .

so, what the fuck are we going to do about it...?

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When we talk about "buying" elections, we only talk about the "buyers." Who's doing the selling?

it's abundantly clear that seats for our elected officials are being bought... this isn't news... it's been happening for a long time but never more visibly than in this week's wisconsin recall election... what often gets left out in the buying and selling discussion is where all that money is going... yes, it's easy enough to say it's being spent on political advertising... that's a no-brainer... but just as we're coming to find out just exactly who is doing the "buying," we need to know just exactly who all that money is going to... besides the source, it would be very useful to know how much media outlets and advertising firms are making and the details of the majority ownership - by name - of those outlets and firms... my hunch, which is also undoubtedly a no-brainer - is that we would see a maze of interlocking interests, back-scratching and mutual hand-washing... 

from the huffpo via the republic report...

For decades, broadcasters have kept the public in the dark about their massive election-year windfalls.

Those that own news outlets prefer silence on this issue. (See Disney, which owns eight ABC stations reaching 24 percent of the U.S. population, CBS Corp., which owns and operates 28 stations, Comcast, which provides news programming to more than 200 NBC affiliates, and News Corp., which owns and operates 27 local affiliates) Covering this story exposes their conflict of interest, in which profit-taking trumps the news media’s duty to educate viewers about the forces behind modern-day elections.

In the two years since Citizens United took effect, Super PACs and independent third-party groups have spent hundreds of millions to inundate the airwaves with political ads. That amount is projected to double before viewers become voters in November.

 The FCC’s response was an obvious solution: Require stations, which already archive this information for public view in paper files, to post ad spending data on the Internet, where anyone can see it. As viewers are being hammered by deceptive political ads we need a full accounting of the billionaires and corporate slush funds that stand behind this misinformation. 

but... 

But as with any hard-won reform in the age of big-money politics, this positive change can be undone by a generous application of corporate lawyers, lobbyists and campaign contributions.

the cardinal rule, "follow the money," is anathema to our super-rich elites and their bought-and-paid-for elected puppets... god forbid we should shine a light on their shell game...

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The 1% is a social darwinist force bent on destroying the essential social contract

i've said since i started posting on this blog back in 2005 that there is nothing our 1% desires more fervently than to drive a stake through the heart of any explicit or implied social contract... they are truly the champions of the "you're on your own" society, a dystopian, randian, survivalist nightmare that would turn a blind eye to any effort to support the common good...

robert scheer equates the 1% with the republicans, an equivalency i believe is less than accurate, particularly given the lack of any discernible daylight between the repubs and the dems...

It is with chilling certainty that one can predict that a single Romney appointee to the Supreme Court would seal the coup of the 1 percent that already is well on its way toward purchasing the nation’s political soul. Romney is the quintessential Citizens United super PAC candidate, a man who has turned avarice into virtue and comes to us now as a once-moderate politician transformed into the ultimate prophet of imperial hubris, blaming everyone from the Chinese to laid-off American workers for our problems. Everyone, that is, except the Wall Street-dominated GOP, which midwifed the Great Recession under George W. Bush and now seeks to blame Obama for the enormous deficit spawned by the party’s wanton behavior.

[...]

[T]he Republicans refuse to take ownership of the collapse resulting from their longstanding advocacy of radical financial deregulation that led to the derivatives bubble, hundreds of trillions of dollars of toxic junk, now a permanent, nightmarish feature of the world’s economy. Romney, who made his fortune through such financial finagling, even has the effrontery to call for more of the same and blame Obama’s tepid efforts at establishing some sane speed limits for the financial highway as a cause of our ongoing crisis.

scheer's conclusion is that we have no choice but to re-elect obama...

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama.

it was good to hear obama use the term "social darwinism" in his speech the other day... it's about damn time somebody in our national leadership dared to say it... unfortunately, however, even though i've used the term a million times myself, it's somewhat misapplied... darwinian theory claims that only the fittest survive, but in our current context, the 1% is massively underwritten by national policies designed to benefit them and their interests, the most egregious example being the massive bankster bailout...

predictably, obama's use of the term has spawned controversy...

the huffpo takes issue with obama's use of social darwinism...

For language expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson, social Darwinism seems like a risky term to use for political ammunition.

She says most people are familiar with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection – survival of the fittest.

But Jamieson, a political communication authority at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center, explains that social Darwinism is a concept, an extension of Darwinism, that essentially says that those who are innately superior, often biologically superior, are advantaged in the conflict among or between groups.

She doesn't think that is what Obama is suggesting when he uses the term. Instead, what he is probably trying to convey is that he thinks Republicans subscribe to a theory that each person is on his own – no help from others, no government help.

The term is loaded with all sorts of negative historical associations. It has ties in the past to the rationalization of inequality, says Jamieson, as well as to the eugenics movement and the idea that those who are unfit should not be allowed to propagate.

And that's probably not what the president intends to suggest.

jonathan chait has a different take...

I happen to think "social Darwinist" captures the prevailing Republican philosophy pretty well. The point of the label, created by historian Richard Hoftsadter, is that a species of laissez-faire economics treated the market the way Darwinians treat natural selection — as the sole natural and correct mechanism for distributing rewards. You do not have to venture into the Republican fever swamps to find evidence of this belief. Greg Mankiw, an economist, adviser to Mitt Romney, and relative moderate within the party, has written:

People should get what they deserve. A person who contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his.

Now, I suspect that right-wingers object to the term "social Darwinist" because it can be understood to imply a more literal application of Darwinism — that the poor should be killed off so they cannot reproduce. Almost none of them would take the theory quite so far. But the more symbolic application of Darwinism to the market, as a morally optimal tool for allocating rewards, seems appropriate. Republicans may prefer a more positive-sounding label, but in politics you don't always get to pick your label.

the biggest piece of work that needs to be done in this country is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we are ALL in this goddam boat together and that it takes ALL of us to make it work... and that realization will never come about as long as the 1% insists they are at the top of the economic ladder as a result of their own inherent self-worth... such a misbegotten notion is at the fetid, rotting core of what we so proudly extol as our "capitalist free market" while completely ignoring the dynamics of a system specifically built to empower the rich...

p.s. it's interesting to see both commentators eschew eugenics... believe me, even though - thankfully - it's not part of the national dialogue, for those who are convinced that they have achieved their lofty status in society as a result of their superior genetic attributes, the concept of eugenics is only a small step away...

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This is your democracy on meth

post title courtesy of timothy egan in the nyt...

Newt’s Shop of Horrors

ari berman in tomdispatch...

Tomgram: Ari Berman, The Politics of the Super Rich

[T]he super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1% of the 1%. Romney’s Restore Our Future Super PAC, founded by the general counsel of his 2008 campaign, has led the herd, raising $30 million, 98% from donors who gave $25,000 or more. Ten million dollars came from just 10 donors who gave $1 million each. These included three hedge-fund managers and Houston Republican Bob Perry, the main funder behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, whose scurrilous ads did such an effective job of destroying John Kerry’s electoral prospects. Sixty-five percent of the funds that poured into Romney’s super PAC in the second half of 2011 came from the finance, insurance and real estate sector, otherwise known as the people who brought you the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.

[...]

Before Citizens United, the maximum amount one person could give to a candidate was $2,500; for a political action committee, $5,000; for a political party committee, $30,800. Now, the sky’s the limit for a super PAC, and even more disturbingly, any donor can give an unlimited contribution to a 501c4 -- outfits defined by the IRS as “civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare,” and to make matters worse, that contribution will remain eternally secret. In this way, American politics is descending further into the darkness, with 501c4s quickly gaining influence as “shadow super PACs.”

so, the u.s. has now officially joined the ranks of third world countries whose super-rich elites have routinely bought and sold the national assets of their people to the highest bidder, the common good be damned...

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When plunder becomes a way of life

moyers & co...

Here’s what we’re up against. Read it and weep: “America’s Plutocrats Play the Political Ponies.” That’s a headline in “Too Much,” an Internet publication from the Institute for Policy Studies that describes itself as “an online weekly on excess and inequality.”

Yes, the results are in and our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of kings. Only these kings aren’t your everyday poobahs and potentates. These kings are multi-billionaires, corporate moguls who by the divine right, not of God, but the United States Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, are now buying politicians like so much pricey horseflesh. All that money pouring into super PACs, much of it from secret sources: merely an investment, should their horse pay off in November, in the best government money can buy.

They’re shelling out fortunes' worth of contributions. Look at just a few of them: Mitt Romney’s hedge fund pals Robert Mercer, John Paulson, Julian Robertson and Paul Singer – each of whom has ponied up a million or more for the super PAC called “Restore Our Future” -- as in, "Give us back the go-go days, when predators ruled Wall Street like it was Jurassic Park.”

[...]

When all is said and done, this race for the White House may cost more than two billion dollars. What’s getting trampled into dust are the voices of people who aren't rich, not to mention what's left of our democracy. As Democratic pollster Peter Hart told The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer, “It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together.”

These gargantuan super PAC contributions are not an end in themselves. They are the means to gain control of government – and the nation state -- for a reason. The French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat said it plainly: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." That’s what the super PACs are bidding on. For the rest of us, the ship may already have sailed.

rape, pillage and plunder...

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Robert Scheer: Our elections are a hoax

so very, very sad...

robert scheer writing in truthdig...

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year’s presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party’s super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires? The Republicans, enabled by decisions of a Supreme Court they still control, were the first out of the gate and are far more culpable in destroying our system of popular governance. But the Democrats, no less committed to winning at any cost to political principle, have now jumped in.

The generally reserved New York Times editorial page responded to the Obama campaign’s decision to seek super PAC funding with a scathing editorial headlined “Another Campaign for Sale.” The Times reminded that Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech two years ago, called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests,” Obama said then. “They should be decided by the American people.” But sadly, as the Times editorial noted this week, “On Monday, the President abandoned that fundamental principle and gave in to the culture of the Citizens United decision that he once denounced as a ‘threat to our democracy.’ ”

[...]

Once again he has failed to take that case for economic justice to the American people and instead validated the Republican assault on what remains of our democracy.

and, with breakneck speed, we are headed to yet another presidential election where the choices are not really choices at all... i'm both angry and embarrassed that i actually thought 2008 presented a choice... silly me...

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