How dirty is the money in the 2016 presidential election going to be? Dirtier than santorum, from the looks of things.
The problem is that rich people have figured out how to basically deactivate the Federal Election Commission, the agency in charge of enforcing finance rules. The rich folks' brilliant solution: Stack it with three ideologically opposed staffers, so all of the votes end in a deadlock and nothing can ever be done. The result is an ever-escalating war in which neither side will back down even as civilization crumbles around it.
"People think the FEC is dysfunctional," said Ann Ravel. "It's worse than dysfunctional."
Ann Ravel is not some kind of independent government watchdog. She is the head of the FEC. That is her own commission she's talking about. This is sort of like a chef sending food out to customers while shrugging and muttering, "Oh well, I guess there's rat poison in the pasta tonight."
It's gotten to the point where Ravel reportedly doesn't even plan to attempt any sort of enforcement actions anymore. Her only goal is to be super up-front about how disastrously the government is regulating elections. Good thinking! The public is definitely going to care about the minutiae of campaign finance regulation.
The super-crazy-hyper-mega-rich are going to spend about $10 billion to produce a multimedia event called "the election" over the next year and a half, and the fact that the regulators are throwing up their hands means that we'll really have no way of knowing how much of the spending will be illegal.
For example, have you heard what Jeb Bush is doing? Martin O'Malley probably shouldn't be raising money if he hasn't declared his candidacy. And Carly Fiorina's super PAC may be violating rules about what it can be named... but who's going to correct them? Ha-ha, nobody.
But the candidates' organizations are small fries compared to the really big money. The bulk of the dirty money is coming from four sources, according to Ravel at the FEC: Crossroads GPS, Americans for Job Security, the American Action Network, and the American Future Fund.
Gee whiz, wouldn't you know it, all four are controlled by Republicans. Crossroads GPS was started by oily turnip Karl Rove; Americans for Job Security was started by Bush 1's political director, David Carney; the American Action Network was founded by Nixon lackey Fred Malek; and the American Future Fund has puppet strings attached to the fingers of the Koch brothers.
As you might expect, Democrats are freaking out about this, and Republicans are chortling with glee and explaining that this is precisely how government should be working. In the last presidential election, about $310 million came from unidentified sources. This time, maybe all of it will.
Between the Citizens United decision and the neutering of the FEC, shadowy unknown gazillionaires will be spending the next couple of months filling out the paperwork to purchase the White House. The FEC is supposed to keep an eye on them, and one of the key mechanisms for doing so is making sure that the people spending money are publicly identified. After all, if the wealthy are going to fuck us, we should at least know their names. But with regulators in a manufactured logjam, the electorate is essentially bound, gagged, blindfolded, and at the mercy of an anonymous gangbang.
