Don’t Worry About Super PACs–Worry About Big Business
The Article: Never Mind Super PACs: How Big Business Is Buying the Election by Lee Fang in The Nation.
The Text: On January 27, 2010, one year into his term, President Barack Obama used the occasion of his State of the Union address to issue a warning. The Supreme Court had just opened the “floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.” He was speaking about the ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Court struck down nearly a century of law, granting corporations vast new leeway to influence the outcome of elections.
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In the months after Obama’s speech, the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade association that represents hundreds of multinational oil and gas companies, would demonstrate just how prescient the president’s warning was.
Before Citizens United, API had gone to battle with the president over his efforts to address global warming. It took out issue ads, hired lobbyists from K Street, and financed dubious studies to claim that even the most piecemeal legislative fixes, such as the Waxman-Markey bill designed to cap carbon emissions, would lead to economic ruin. The group spent $7.3 million on federal lobbying during the year the bill was being debated.
