Forget Foreign Money, Here Come the Beck Bucks

Beck’s giving $10,000 to the Chamber. Now that’s truly ‘Chump Change’.

You’ve written quite a bit about the impressive fundraising by Rove and American Crossroads.
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Understandably impressed by the numbers.
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Care to think and then write about what the consequences of Citizen United are to the body politic.
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Basically is it a good or bad thing? Your focus on the money raised, and to a lesser extend how it has been raised, begs the question “Is this healthy?”

Michael, you really should not have written this: “…whether contributions from foreign sources are commingled with its political funds.” It’s a completely meaningless phrase.

Money is fungible. If the Chamber uses foreign dues and donations to, say, fund its operations and maintain its facilities it just means that it can devote a larger proportion of its domestic dues to political spending. The idea of segregated accounts or “this dollar that came from here buys X while this euro that came from there buys Y” is just utter silliness.

And that’s why the idea that people have to somehow support the claim that the Chamber uses foreign corporate money to attempt to influence American politics is just ludicrous. Of course they do. The Chamber has acknowledged for years that has a global membership and that it accepts donations from overseas. So anything the Chamber does politically is, to the extent that the Chamber takes in foreign money, funded by foreign sources.

The End.

It and running from responsibility is the American Way

The real issue isn’t that foreign money is being used, it’s the fact that Beck is donating $10K to the Chamber to fund ads used to sway elections where the donation limit for any particular candidate is $2K.

Democrats do face a quandary in which their attacks on these third-party groups may only help raise their profiles and inspire wealthy conservatives to give them support.

Wow, that sounds like a really stupid theory. This concern-trolling wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that your employer stands to benefit financially from the influx of foreign donations?

Most people would ask, “Gee, we are in the midst of a recession with massive unemployment. Millions of good jobs have been out-sourced to other countries in the past 20 years. Why wouldn’t the media ask whether foreign companies are buying off U.S. politicians to keep the U.S. from enforcing fair trade rules?”

So, let me ask you directly, Michael Crowley. Why would you take the Chamber of Commerce’s denials at face value — going so far as to to call the issue “contrived” and “payback” — when anyone with a lick of understanding can see that their denials are meaningless when money is fungible? It wouldn’t be because you are implicitly paid to NOT take such concerns seriously?

Either the Chamber of Commerce is taking foreign money or it isn’t. If it is, the money is going towards campaigns against Democrats. Period. And every American should be concerned about foreign interests buying off U.S. elected officials.

The GOP has found it’s voice.

“…every American should be concerned about foreign interests buying off U.S. elected officials.”
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…every American should be concerned about foreign corporate interests buying off U.S. elected officials.
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Fixed.

Well sure. Money is speech. “Conservatives” told me so.

square,
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Your comments are pure garbage. The CC money received from foreign membership’s amounts to about 1/10 of 1% of their total revenue.
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Its peanuts. To think they would use this very small amount of money to break the law is total stupidity.
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No one is that dumb. The NYT, WP, AP and all other respected news organizations that have investigated this charge has said there is absolutely no proof or evidence that it is true.
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How you and the rest of the Liberals and the President can keep repeating this lie only shows how dishonest you all are.

The issue of the corrupting influence of money in politics comes up on a regular basis on Washington Journal.

On Tues. morning the discussion centered on whether callers agreed/not with the huge amounts of money being donated without any disclosure. Overwhelming number of callers did not agree with the lack of disclosure and see it as a threat to our democracy.

Two issues time and again that the majority of callers from all parties bring up are the outsourcing of jobs and its effect on the job market, and the influence of money in politics.

Those in the media want to portray the stance Democrats and the president are taking as merely a political ploy. This discussion will continue long after the midterms. At the very least, there should be full disclosure as to where these huge sums are coming from.

Frankly, I’m tired of the media trying to write the narrative as to what we, the voters, should deem important or not.

Interesting timing by Beck-and his adoring media followers.
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Tea Party is exposed as a group funded by the Kochs and Beck drops this shiny object for the media to chase.

The ads are particularly effective, Democrats say, because most voters associate the chamber with the mom-and-pop Main Street businesses in their hometowns.
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Which the US Chamber of Commerce is completely separate from. By mentioning and failing to debunk a simple misconception, you assist the its spread. anyone who reads the words you type comes away less informed than when they went in.
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Someone did some actual grown-up reporting about the US Chamber of Commerce a few months back. That the Chamber “categorically denies” wrongdoing is really not evidence of much: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.verini.html
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in 2004, when Donohue publicly exhorted Chamber companies to stop doing business in Mississippi, alleging that the state’s courts had become too friendly to lawsuits against businesses. This came as a surprise to most of Mississippi’s businesses and local chambers of commerce, few if any of whom had been notified of Donohue’s exhortation in advance. That same year, the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform became involved in an attorney general race in Washington State, waging a campaign via a front group called the Voters Education Committee. The Chamber’s interventions met with such broad public disfavor that Steve Leahy, president of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at the time, had to send out 10,000 e-mails distancing his organization from the U.S. Chamber. “We had a lot of cleaning up we had to do on their behalf,” Leahy told me. Even the institute’s director from 1999 to 2002, James Wootton, whom Donohue appointed, regretted at least one attack ad campaign he waged against an Ohio judge, one that resulted in a suit against the Chamber. “I came to believe that we probably shouldn’t have run those ads,” Wootton told me.

Other chamber heads have taken similar steps to separate themselves from the national Chamber. “I now have a standard e-mail saying we’re not a chapter of the U.S. Chamber that I have to send out a couple of times a week,” says Timothy Hulbert, president of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce. Stan Kosciuszko, president of the Butler County, Pennsylvania, Chamber of Commerce, which is no longer a member of the Chamber, said, “They’ve abandoned the interests of smaller chambers like mine for their larger corporate members.”

But corporate members, including some of the larger ones, have been alienated too. …

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In Pennsylvania the chamber has bashed Democrat Joe Sestak for supporting “a Washington takeover of health care” in Congress
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Which is a lie. But the media is terrible at reporting the news, so you’re not going to report that. Your baseless, substanceless speculation as to the White House’s motives also serves to disinform your readers.
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You should really be embarrassed about this article.

No, the GOP lost its voice and has been taken over by moneyed interests.
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Face it, the GOP party and its constituency has been sold out by its leaders to the highest bidders. They stand for what they are paid to stand for. That or demagogues tell them what to stand for and the demagogues are all bought off. Doesn’t Glenn Beck sponsor Goldline, a company now under investigation?

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=gold-line+beck+investigation

Once you’ve stopped caring about the anti-constitutional outrage of corporations buying and controlling our government, what’s left beside the shiny objects. Otherwise somebody might get the idea you’re a willing part of the whoredom.

The CC money received from foreign membership’s amounts to about 1/10 of 1% of their total revenue.
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If that’s the case, they can open their books and prove it. The fact that they refuse to do so speaks volumes about how trustworthy that claim is.
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You may be willing to take them at their word, but I’m not. Prove it.

Beck is getting the Tea Party crowd to support the Chamber of Commerce?
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The Chamber was essential in the lobbying effort to get TARP passed, and has in turn gotten money back from TARP money recipients.
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I thought Tea Party folks were furious about the bailouts? But they’re going to donate money to the organization that lobbied for the bailouts and got money back from bailed out companies?
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Are they really that gullible?

kevin: that’s BS and you know it. The CC isn’t keeping their books closed to protect their claim that they don’t have foreign donors. They keep their books closed to hide the billionaires that fund their operations. It’s the same reason every other Republican group is keeping their books closed – to hide these corporate donors that are buying off government.

Are you suggesting TIME Warner CNN may have an interest in this topic?

Actually, no matter how you cut it, the entire thing strikes me as ridiculous. We all know that corporations and corporate lackeys are the major contributors to the CC. Now, between corporations and CEOs, do you honestly believe that the foreign donations are significant enough to the CC that it is actually MORE of a threat to American democracy than the corporations and CEOs that are actually based in America that are undoubtedly pouring way more money into CC than the foreign entities?

There are a couple of separate issues here. First, transparency. I don’t trust anyone. Least of all the Chamber of Commerce. Open up the books, by subpoena if necessary, and lets see what the truth is. More importantly, the Chamber — and entities like it — should be forced to disclose their donors.

The second issue really isn’t about legality at all. It is simply about understanding what kind of operation that the Chamber is running and understanding what their agenda is.

It begins by asking why foreign corporations, including many that are state-owned or run, would be donating money to the Chamber in the first place. The answer is that the foreign corporations want to maintain competitive advantages by sticking U.S. companies with policies that they would oppose in their own countries.

For example, nearly all of the foreign companies primarily operate in countries with more socialized medical policies. Those companies benefit because they don’t have to pay for the health care of their employees. Do you think that the foreign companies that are paying the GOP to defund the health care legislation want to privatize health insurance in their own countries? Hell no! They want U.S. companies to be less competitive and go under and/or off-shore jobs to the foreign countries.

In short, legal or illegal, the Chamber is lobbying for policies that are bad for the U.S. and good for foreign countries and foreign corporations. Voters should know that when the Chamber is attacking “Obamacare” they aren’t doing it on principle. They are doing it at the bidding of foreign corporations and large U.S. corporations that off-shore jobs.

“TIME Warner support to the Chamber of Commerce”
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Google answers all.

So are the real forces behind the 2010 midterms Middle Eastern oil companies and communist cash? Not quite. The chamber categorically denies the accusation, saying it spends “zero … not a single cent” of foreign funds on its U.S. political activities. And media organizations found no evidence to the contrary: the nonpartisan FactCheck.org, for instance, called it “an unproven claim.”

Still have time to do a retraction, Crowley?

“The Chamber is being deceptive. In addition to multinational members of the Chamber headquartered abroad (like BP, Shell Oil, and Siemens), a new ThinkProgress investigation has identified at least 84 other foreign companies that actively donate to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6). Below is a chart detailing the annual dues foreign corporations have indicated that they give directly to the Chamber (using information that is publicly available from the Business Council applications and the Chamber’s own websites)

Again, all of these annual dues are collected in the same 501(c)(6) the Chamber is using to run partisan attack ads. The data above reflects information from public sources, and the Chamber likely has many more foreign corporations as dues-paying members — but refuses to divulge any of the funders for their ad campaign. Unfortunately, many reporters in the traditional press covered the Chamber story, but missed the entire point of our reporting. Most reporters (from the New York Times, McClatchy, the Associated Press, etc.) never contacted ThinkProgress, instead opting to only interview Chamber officials.*”

*For that last point…Did you contact anyone at ThinkProgress?

Hundreds of $ millions of corporate money poured into media buys, generating gobs of political Sturm und Drang to pump up flagging reader/viewer numbers? Some questions don’t need teh Google.

Yes.

“In short, legal or illegal, the Chamber is lobbying for policies that are bad for the U.S. and good for foreign countries and foreign corporations.”
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The US Chamber lobbies to provide more multi-national corporate power over government policy to the corporations that support The Chamber. From a practical standpoint, it doesn’t matter whether those corporations are foreign-based or US-based, what matters is that no multi-national corporate profit interest is really compatible with US national policy interests. I doubt that any amount of foreign-based corporate money could do more harm to the country’s policy interests than the money from America’s home-grown banking, energy agro-business, or defense interests.

On the flip side, foreign corporations may have legitimate business interests within US borders. Halliburton is now technically a foreign corporation – it’s headquarters are in the Middle East. I’d be shocked if they don’t donate to the CC. Tim Hortons, a beloved Canadian franchise, has a significant number of stores operating in the US. Every major Canadian bank has some degree of market share or ownership of companies within the US. Heck, the company I work for is headquartered in Canada but has a branch office in the US and is actively trying to increase its sales in the US. Do we have legitimate interest in American domestic policy? You bet we do. Especially if its policy issues such as protective tariffs go up in our market field – something that the CC generally actively opposes. Considering we have American employees, considering we have market share within the US, does this mean we should get no right to petition the American government? I don’t believe that. I don’t think we should be in the business of influencing elections, but I do believe we should have the right to lobby and have our positions considered.
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But even if we were to assume that every single penny going into CC from foreign entities was for the explicit purpose of encouraging a competitive disadvantage of American companies, there is no doubt in my mind that there is no way all of that money comes close to the amount of money spent by major corporations within America looking to pad the pockets of CEOs and shareholders at the expense of the American taxpayer. This is why the entire foreign policy issue rings hollow to me.
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Should these lobby’s be forced to reveal their donor lists? Absolutely. Should groups like American Crossroads be forced to reveal their donor lists? Absolutely. Is the wanton spending by both of these groups to influence elections an absolute atrocity for democracy? Absolutely.
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But that doesn’t mean I’ll accept ridiculous, parabolic claims like they’re keeping their books closed to hide the fact that they’re funneling foreign money into elections when a much more obvious reason is there. Especially when that more obvious claim is just as scandalous and everyone is playing the squirrel game with the wrong problem.
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Because at the end of the day, what happens? If you win the fight and it ends up being only 1/10th of 1% of their actual income and they promise to return every single foreign investment, they still have $12.999M to spend on American Crossroads and we still have a crisis for Democracy.
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Stop thinking Squirrel

Sorry, got that final number wrong. It would be $74.925M to spend on political ads

You don’t donate to the far left liberal extremist sites who do the same EXACT thing? Shame on you for letting all your fellow libtards down!!

Put your tinfoil hats back on girls your paranoia is beginning to show again!! LOL!!

How do you spell P-A-R-A-N-O-I-D?? Liberal!!!

I’m Canadian. Our Federal elections cost less as a whole than an American Presidental run. Soft money is nearly non-existent up here (and the one time it was noticeable was when the cable companies and the broadcast networks went head to head and that didn’t happen near ANY election and ended when a court order told them both to shut up). So no, I don’t violate donation limits by a factor of 5.

You’re an old white man who actually uses “LOL,” Rusty.
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You might want to refrain from calling other people “girls.”

Do I know what rhetorical means?

Just a couple of weeks ago, when the subject of Crossroads GPS came up, the same Michael Crowley countered with the false equivalence of “Democrats have done it too, during the 2004 cycle”
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Michael Crowley gave 2 examples – The Media Fund and America Coming Together (ACT)
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What Michael Crowley deliberately omitted to add was – Unlike Crossroads GPS, which is a 501c group, the above 2 liberal groups are 527 groups and therefore need to disclose their donors.
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The only liberal group that I am aware of, that operates as a 501c group, is Media Matters for America. But then MMFA have set themselves a very narrow mandate – monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. And they consistently stick to that mandate.
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I think it is time for Media Matters for America to add Michael Crowley to the list of conservative media “pundits” who deliberately misinform the general public.

What a tiresome argument from the whining paranoid left. When Clinton was getting money from Charley Tre and Johnny Chung from China and Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz was giving millions to Demos to sell technology to China there was not nearly the spittle on the keyboards as now over still unsubstantiated charges.
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Or Gore getting money from Tibetan monks (And the ever famous no controlling legal authority)
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Or Obama’s ther presidential candidate allows such an easy channel for illegal campaign contributions. For example, John McCain and Hillary Clinton do not accept donations from abroad without a complete, written documentation packet sent via postal mail.

It would seem to me that Obama’s form is in direct violation of federal law. I think we should demand an accounting of these foreign contributions and his campaign should follow precedent by requiring documentation of legal status for foreign donors
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Now we have outrage. This is not a “they did it too” defense. There is still no proof other than bat crap crazy leftist insistence without proof (including ThinkProgress). The outrage over corporations are running the government seems hollow after the silence over Unions and Soros blatant grabs at power.
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Want a real end and not mud slinging. Have Obama name an independent prosecutor to investigate all. The sudden silence for the left will be golden.

And while the left creates another bogus diversion we have the FLOTUS actually breaking campaign laws:
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Wonder how unreported this will be

First lady Michelle Obama may have violated Illinois law today — when she engaged in political discussion at a polling place!

Mrs. Obama stopped off at the Martin Luther King Center on the south side of Chicago to cast an early vote.

After she finished at the voting machine, Obama went back to the desk and handed in her voting key.

She let voters including electrician Dennis Campbell, 56, take some photos with her.

“She was telling me how important it was to vote to keep her husband’s agenda going,” Campbell said.

According to the pool reporter at the scene, the conversation took place IN the voting center not far from the booths.

Illinois state law — Sec. 17-29 (a) — states: “No judge of election, pollwatcher, or other person shall, at any primary or election, do any electioneering or soliciting of votes or engage in any political discussion within any polling place, within 100 feet of any polling place.”

OTOH, maybe all these corporations are just stoopid. Rank-and-file “conservatives” seem to think these Galtian geniuses are pouring $ millions from their corporate coffers into the election campaigns of their chosen candidates and get absolutely nothing for it.

Kevin,
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You have to be joking to think this video proves anything but that the Koch brothers did provide seed money to start the AFP.
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That AFP over several years grew into a large organization and it now supports The Tea Party Movement and many other conservative organizations. What’s wrong with that? Soros provided seed money for a least 20 different Liberal organizations that have grown into larger organizations.
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The Video is a LW effort to cut and splice videos to make it look like the Koch Brothers directly supporting the Tea Party.
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There is no proof that they have supported the TP. LW organizations like the 400 who marched on Washington had many LW organizations supporting them and paying their expenses for the Trip.
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Even with all the financial support they could not get half the number of people to their rally that Beck did and the people at Beck’s Rally paid their own expenses.
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All you liberal whiners are doing is crying because the field is not to your advantage like it was in 2008.
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Here’s you song again.
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Cry me a River
Cry me a River
I Cried a River over you.
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Or do you prefer the song
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“Born To lose”.

Not very……
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http://www.google.com/search?q=First+lady+Michelle+Obama+may+have+violated+Illinois+law+today+–+when+she+engaged+in+political+discussion+at+a+polling+place%21&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1
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About 56,200,000 results (0.55 seconds)

Is Michelle Obama the 4th member of the New Black Panthers party? Was she wielding a baton at the polling booth?
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wooo.. I am scared to vote now.

Heavy emphasis on the first word.

Aww c’mon free. Nothing like this happens in Chi.
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Nice redirect there mavvy!

The huckster makes over $35 million a year. He isn’t even tithing.

Michael C: I see you are anxious to add to the new Village, pundit meme:The Dems are foolish to campaign on foreign money used by the CC. Now we can add how it just causes the right to raise more money.
How much time have you spent on really reporting where the fungible campaign money comes from, the motive of those donating and where exactly it is being directed?

To All Swampland Liberals and Michael, Kate, Jay and Joe Klein,
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Mainstream Americans totally reject your Liberal/Progressive Agenda.
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According to the a new Gallup poll, you are totally out of step with the vast majority of Americans. Your and Obama’s agendas are rejected.
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All your Whining does no good.
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Gallup …
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October 13, 2010
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Majorities in U.S. View Gov’t as Too Intrusive and Powerful
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Independents largely side with Republicans in denouncing big government
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by Lydia Saad
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PRINCETON, NJ — Record- or near-record-high percentages of Americans are critical of the size and scope of government, as measured by four Gallup trend questions updated in September. This sentiment stretches to 59% of Americans now believing the federal government has too much power, up eight points from a year ago.
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Americans’ Perception of Federal Government’s Power
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Too Much……….59%
About Right…….33%
Too Little……..….8%
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Nearly as many Americans also give the antigovernment response to a question asking whether government should do more to solve the country’s problems or whether it is doing too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals. Today’s 58% saying it is doing too much is just slightly below the 59% to 60% levels recorded in the mid- to late ’90s.
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Perception Of the Governments Role in Solving the Nation’s Problems
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Doing Too Much……….58%
Should Do More………..36%
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Americans are about evenly split over whether the government is overreaching with its regulation of business and industry versus doing too little or the right amount in this area. However, the 49% now saying there is too much government regulation is the highest seen in the past decade.
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Views on Government Regulations
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Too Much……….49%
Too Little…….….27%
About Right…….21%
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Americans continue to disagree rather than agree that the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. However, the current 51% to 46% split on this question represents the narrowest margin since Gallup first asked it in 2003.
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Independents Join Republicans in Rebuking Government
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Solid majorities of Republicans are critical of government on all four government role questions reviewed here, while equally large majorities of Democrats defend the government’s size and influence.
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Consistent with independents’ ongoing preference for Republican congressional candidates this year, majorities of independents side with Republicans in saying the government has too much power, is doing too many things, and is going too far with regulation of the private sector. Independents are divided at 49% to 49% over whether the government represents an immediate threat to citizens’ liberty.
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Bottom Line
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An expanded proportion of Americans in 2010 believe the government has overstepped its bounds — growing too intrusive and too powerful. Also, nearly half now consider the government a threat to individual liberty. However, the boundaries Americans want government to operate within are well described in the 2010 USA Today/Gallup Governance survey, and they turn out to be fairly moderate. On a 5-point scale ranging from extreme activism on the part of government to extreme minimalism, Americans are evenly distributed around the midpoint, with relatively few picking either extreme. Thus emerges a picture of a populace that wants a certain amount of government involvement in promoting the wellbeing of Americans — certainly not too much, but also not too little.
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http://www.gallup.com/poll/143624/Majorities-View-Gov-Intrusive-Powerful.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=syndication&utm_content=morelink&utm_term=Politics%20-%20USA

“An expanded proportion of Americans in 2010 believe the government has overstepped its bounds…Today’s 58% saying it is doing too much is just slightly below the 59% to 60% levels recorded in the mid- to late ’90s.” [Emphasis mine]
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No hackery there.

Gallup Poll,
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When analyzing the numbers in this Poll one finds some very interesting points.
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1. Only 8% of American citizens want the Federal Government to have more power than it currently has.
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2. Only 36% want the Federal Government more involved in the solving of the Nation’s problems.
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3. Only 27% want an increase in Fedreal Government regulations.
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Bottom Line
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An expanded proportion of Americans in 2010 believe the government has overstepped its bounds — growing too intrusive and too powerful. Also, nearly half now consider the government a threat to individual liberty.
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It appears that everything Progressive want to do, the American public is strongly against.

Maybe there weren’t as many people at the dem march because Dems have jobs even on the weekends. I wanted to go to that march, but had to work in a college cafeteria. Its my second job, which I hate, but I do it because I have a family to support and the primary job doesn’t allow me to earn quite enough to provide for them.

And yet it is these people who complain that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is NOT providing enough jobs.
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Can’t have it both ways.

erieangel,
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“And yet it is these people who complain that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is NOT providing enough jobs.’
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You are misinformed. They do not want the government to provide jobs. They want the government to stop it’s policies that are destroying jobs.
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There are things the government can do to make it easier for companies to expand and hire more people. Government providing jobs is not the way to create sustainable jobs.

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“I think it is time for Media Matters for America to add Michael Crowley to the list of conservative media “pundits” who deliberately misinform the general public.”
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Media Matters another George Soros funded organization. It must be nice to have your own personal billionaire to support all the LW organizations.

The foreign money is not coming into a big pot but rather it is coming in earmarked for political/campaign use. That is the problem!

Only $10K? That’s weak.
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According to Forbes Beck makes $32 million a year.