Predator's ball ("dismantle the post-Watergate efforts to limit the impact of money in politics")

[ProSense]

Predator's ball

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

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More important, the campaigns have been aided by an unprecedented wave of independent expenditures -- over $150 million and rising, the vast bulk spent on attack ads against besieged Democrats. Many of these contributions are anonymous, made to nonprofit institutions that don't have to reveal their donors. Karl Rove, infamous as George Bush's political "brain," has essentially displaced the Republican National Committee with his American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS organizations, claiming that they will dispense over $50 million into the elections.

This flood of conservative money isn't an accident. As a clarifying article by Eric Lichtblau in the New York Times detailed, conservatives -- led by Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, the "Darth Vader of campaign finance" -- have systematically sought to dismantle the post-Watergate efforts to limit the impact of money in politics, and to curb secret donations.

They've linked legislative obstruction with litigation, placed conservative zealots on regulatory agencies to block enforcement of the laws, and propagated the ideological distortion that money is speech. Aided by the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court, the conservative drive has effectively shredded much of the financial arms control of the post-Watergate period. As Lichtblau reported, conservatives acknowledge their purpose: the more money in politics, the better the party of the monied class -- the Republicans -- is likely to fare.

The barrage of attack ads, however, comes not simply from the absence of legal restraint, but from the decision of conservative corporate wealth to open fire. Some of this surely is ideological, the financial side of Tea Party revolt against Democrats in power. But much of it isn't about ideology, it's about interest. Faced with the cumulative calamities besetting this nation, President Obama had little choice but to challenge entrenched corporate interests. He sought to cut subsidies to Big Oil and King Coal. He pushed health-care reform to the dismay of the insurance companies. Financial reform, however limited, angered Wall Street's barons. He even had the gall to suggest that private equity billionaires should pay income taxes like the rest of us.

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