Groups supportive of each party employed a technique that allows them to cloak the identities of many of their donors. Those groups, including Crossroads and Priorities USA, have affiliates that are organized as nonprofit organizations known as 501(c)(4) groups, which can raise unlimited money but do not have to reveal their donors. Donors wishing to remain anonymous have the option of making their contributions to those nonprofit groups, which raised tens of millions of dollars in 2011, according to officials at the groups.While Citizens United limits the degree of regulation governments can use to restrict the flow of such money, it seems important to know who is donating to these organizations which are flooding the media with all kinds of advertisements about candidates, all with limited accountability. It seems to be enhancing the situation where those who have such super PACS on their side really benefit--making it difficult for candidates to remain viable in the face of such resources. This may be especially concerning if such super PACS are bankrolled by wealthy individuals. Here's an example from a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich slamming Romney.
Given how expensive it might be to produce and distribute these kinds of ads, does this not limit access? Give certain people unfair advantages? I really question this free market approach to elections. It just seems to highlight how much they really are becoming like any other commercial transaction. Something to buy.
Maybe that's not news, but I suggest it should be of great concern to us all if we are to have really free and fair elections. While defending a marketplace of ideas really seems important, should we not also be figuring out how to prevent elective offices going to the highest bidder? At least it seems like this to me.
It seems to me that these Super PACs demonstrate that the free market has never really been free. If anything, it is more limiting than a controlled market, because the former controls who has access to it.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, this is just another playing out of the extensive privilege of this country's top officials. Those with money, who are almost always conveniently white, male, straight, and able bodied (but it doesn't mean anything, because bootstraps!) continue to make effort to keep people similar to them in power. And then they have the gall to claim that the free market regulates itself, when in reality their money keeps them firmly on top of the market and in the seat of power. If the "free" market happened to regulate itself against them, it wouldn't be a free market anymore to them and they would find a way to re-regulate it back in their favor.
(Be gentle! It's scary to try to reply to one's professor about a topic on which he is an expert.)