It's no secret: America's electoral system faces a crisis of trust, driven by the proliferation of disinformation that threatens Americans' trust in elections. Businesses have a vested interest in a stable democracy, but what can they do to address these challenges? This Business for America webinar explores the risks facing our democracy, the state-of-play regarding state and federal elections policy, and practical actions the private sector can take to promote trust and transparency in campaigns and elections.
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Elon takes on Washington, but can he take it over?
Dec 27, 2024
Watching the year-end budget fights in Congress as we await the second term of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself wondering: Will this era be remembered as the time when Trump was president and Elon Musk ran the country?
Trump earned such nicknames as “Captain Chaos” and worse for his unpredictable, constantly changing and easily distracted approach to governing. But close observers of Trump’s political ups and downs understand a key to understanding the chaos: his mountainous self-regard.
Like Glenn Close’s character in "Fatal Attraction," the 45th and soon to be 47th president is not going to be ignored. The corporate class has gotten wise to this, which explains the procession of tech CEOs, founders, venture capitalists and other "broligarchs" who have filed through Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks to flatter and supplicate Trump.
So far it seems to have worked. "EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!" Trump squealed on Truth Social, his social media platform.
President-elect Trump hasn’t been sworn in yet but he’s already pushing the buttons and pulling the levers of power in his old, familiar style of upheaval, veiled threats and name-calling. But now in the run-up to his inauguration, Trump finds himself competing for headlines with another champion grandstander, the world’s wealthiest human, Elon Musk.
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Musk famously spent a quarter-billion dollars this year to get Trump elected, and lately he’s been swanning around Mar-a-Lago like he co-owns the place. He’s been on hand, reportedly, to welcome Trump’s tech-world dinner guests, including his space-biz nemesis, Jeff Bezos.
Musk, whom Trump has tapped to be the co-leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is not going to be an actual government department but rather a presidential advisory commission, has used his social media network X, formerly Twitter, to exert his new political powers.
We could see the apparent beginning of a new regime of attention grabbing in Musk’s tweetstorm Wednesday criticizing the proposed congressional spending measure unveiled by House Republicans this week.
Denouncing the more-than-1,500-page measure as a big “piece of pork,” he called on the Grand Old Party’s lawmakers to oppose it.
“Stop the steal of your taxpayer dollars!” read one post. “This bill is criminal," read another.
He also declared that any lawmaker who voted for the bill “deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” In other words, any Republican who defies Trump’s wishes can expect Musk to use his money to primary them.
It’s been something to see, this co-presidency that hasn’t even taken office yet. It was aptly summed up in a Bloomberg headline on Thursday: "Trump, Musk Threaten U.S. Shutdown and Republican Party Revamp."
Balanced budgets are easy to demand when you don’t have much of any real obligation to come up with remedies and “pay-fors,” as lawmakers say when they want to know how you pay for your legislative dreams
At stake as the clock ticks toward a new year and new bills to pay, is another “stopgap” spending plan. That’s a temporary solution to funding gaps to keep funds flowing to cover the government’s operating costs into early next year, long after House Republicans elect a new speaker and President-elect Trump is sworn in.
But, as often happens, by the time lawmakers laid eyes on the measure Tuesday, cost-conscious Republicans, in particular, ridiculed it as a true “Christmas tree,” hung with proposals as varied as foreign investment restrictions, new health care policies and, a local District of Columbia favorite, a new stadium site for the Washington Commanders.
The bill included $100 billion in disaster aid funding, billions in farm assistance and dozens of other side deals that pushed the final product past 1,500 pages.
All of which was greeted by Musk’s more than 100 tweets, which also contained a notable number of misleading or outright false claims of the sort that keep fact-checkers busy.
Sarcastic talk of “President Musk” began to bubble up in the ranks of both parties Wednesday, followed Thursday by frustrated budget hawk Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who took a different tack, suggesting Musk as speaker of the house.
If Trump was feeling upstaged, he didn’t say so. He focused his energies against the legislation, calling for it to be dismissed and proposing Congress pass a clean continuing resolution with a debt ceiling increase.
But after that proposal was rejected Thursday night, congressional leaders set to work on a “Plan C” — with less than 24 hours to go to avoid a shutdown. Again, the new effort didn’t have much in the way of pay-fors.
The sorry affair shows the limits of Musk-enabled Trumpism. With dozens of dashed-off posts, Musk made the telephones ring off the hook in many Republican representatives’ offices, demonstrating the awesome new political and media power he’s garnered in the two years since he completed his takeover of Twitter. But neither he nor Trump had any real guidance to offer on how lawmakers from both parties could compromise and write a bill that would keep the government running.
Is this a foretaste of the next four years?
Already I am feeling what Yogi Berra called “Deja vu all over again.” Chaos is making a comeback, the product of an age in which it is increasingly tough to tell illusions from reality. That’s always been part of politics, certainly, but it’s getting a viral boost from our newest digital press baron.
Page is an American journalist, syndicated columnist and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.
©2024 Tribune Content Agency. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Keep ReadingShow less
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Corporate political dollars spotlighted by new interactive database
Nov 26, 2024
The Center for Political Accountability recently launched The Barbara and Morris Pearl 527 Interactive Database, a user-friendly system created to shine a spotlight on under-the-radar corporate political spending in the United States.
This groundbreaking tool provides detailed and targeted access to information on contributions from publicly traded American companies to major partisan political organizations called 527s, for the section of the IRS code that governs them.
The database also provides information on spending by these nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations on competitive and high-profile state races, including gubernatorial, attorney general, legislative and state elections.
It focuses on company spending using treasury or corporate funds. These are used for unlimited contributions that are in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
Housed on CPA’s website, this tool will help companies conduct robust due diligence on their own and their peers’ and competitors’ political spending and understand its impact. It will help shareholders, consumers, journalists and other researchers follow the money trail for millions of political dollars.
Users will be able to tailor their searches with advanced filtering options, including by business sector, political cycle and company headquarters, providing unparalleled insights into trends in corporate electoral spending.
“The influence of corporate money in politics is a crucial issue that affects governance and public trust,” said Jeanne Hanna, CPA’s vice president for research and the architect of the new database.
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“This database represents a major step toward greater transparency by offering an accessible way to track the flow of corporate treasury funds via third-party groups into important state elections,” Hanna said. “It brings vast flows of little-known political spending into the sunlight.”
Hanna also noted that state capitals now play a pivotal role in shaping policies on health care, education, environmental regulation and voting rights, directly impacting Americans' daily lives. As a result, political spending in state races has become more critical in influencing election outcomes and driving the direction of these essential policy areas at national and state levels.
The database has two interactive portals:
- Donations Database: Tracking the flow of funds from public companies to major 527 organizations and covering available data from 2010 through October 2024;
- Spending Database: Analyzing how these 527 groups spend corporate contributions on key state-level races and covering the 2022 and 2024 cycles.
As data on the 2024 election cycle continues to be released, this tool provides a timely and essential resource for understanding the role of corporate money in shaping state-level elections. It is designed for users to easily navigate and uncover data that were previously difficult to access.
A unique feature of this tool is its integration with original campaign finance documents from state databases. Each entry in the spending database links directly to the official state filings, ensuring full transparency and providing users with access to primary source materials.
In the near future, CPA will schedule a webinar to assist journalists in their use of the database.
The database was created and launched with the generous support of Barbara and Morris Pearl, who underwrote it. Mr. Pearl is a member of the CPA board of directors and a strong supporter of the center. He is a former managing director at BlackRock.
Freed is president and co-founder of the Center for Political Accountability.
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We have extreme inequality in America, and it’s getting worse
Oct 07, 2024
Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.”
Bloomberg recently reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is now worth over $200 billion. He’s not alone. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and LVMH founder Bernard Arnault are also worth north of $200 billion.
The news is a searing reminder of the uneven distribution of wealth in America. In the same country as Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk reside millions of people without a reliable source of food. (Arnault lives in France.) Redistributing just a small portion of the richest Americans’ wealth could alleviate tremendous human suffering.
The problem is getting worse with time. According to Forbes magazine, “In 1987, the [world’s] 140 billionaires had an aggregate net worth of $295 billion.” But now, in 2024, there are “more billionaires than ever: 2,781 in all, 141 more than last year and 26 more than the record set in 2021. They’re richer than ever, worth $14.2 trillion in aggregate, up by $2 trillion from 2023 and $1.1 trillion above the previous record, also set in 2021.”
Forbes continued: “Much of the gains come from the top 20, who added a combined $700 billion in wealth since 2023, and from the U.S., which now boasts a record 813 billionaires worth a combined $5.7 trillion.”
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What could that vast wealth do? Looking globally, Oxfam International recently explained that $1.7 trillion is “enough to lift two billion people out of poverty.” So just a fraction of the wealth of a small number of people could bring billions out of poverty.
The problem, though, isn’t just the top 0.1 percent. As Pew Research notes, America’s upper class is getting richer as its middle class is getting smaller: “The growth in income in recent decades has tilted to upper-income households. At the same time, the U.S. middle class, which once comprised the clear majority of Americans, is shrinking. Thus, a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling. The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019.”
America’s inequality, moreover, is markedly worse than other wealthy nations. The Gini coefficient is a common measure of a country’s inequality. It uses a scale of 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (complete inequality). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2017, “the Gini coefficient in the U.S. stood at 0.434.” This number “was higher than in any other of the G-7 countries, in which the Gini ranged from 0.326 in France to 0.392 in the UK, and inching closer to the level of inequality observed in India (0.495).”
There are many reasons for this inequality. Among them: technological automation, inherited wealth, lax corporate regulation, liberal trade policies, outsourced labor, insufficient taxation and broken public schools. Some inequality, of course, is also driven by individual choice (people electing to spend time on less-lucrative activities) and work ethic (some people work more than others).
And, importantly, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with people getting rich. Some amount of inequality should even be encouraged. Hard work and ingenuity should be rewarded, as wealth must be created in order to be redistributed. And high-profile business successes motivate others to innovate and take risks that improve society at large.
But an excessive amount of inequality — see Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk — allows large-scale human suffering to go needlessly unaddressed. This isn't just unfair. As the International Monetary Fund explained, it has widespread societal consequences: “growing inequality breeds social resentment and generates political instability. It also fuels populist, protectionist, and anti-globalization sentiments.”
These problems aren't surprising or complicated. They’re obvious consequences of a deeply flawed economic system. The same nation simply shouldn’t have a few jackpot winners hoarding billions and, at the same time, tens of millions struggling to get by.
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Corporate black holes prevent fair play in the U.S. economy
Aug 23, 2024
Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.
NASA defines a black hole as “a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out.” This celestial abnormality can even distort space-time. Though invisible to the human eye, a black hole is detectable by the extent to which everything around it is morphed to its will.
The same is true of our biggest corporations. The total reach of companies like Amazon, Meta and Google seemingly exceeds human capabilities. Yet, the extent to which our laws, culture and daily lives revolve around these corporate black holes reveals a hard truth: Fair play does not characterize our economy. The best ideas may never come to fruition and the smartest people may never realize their potential — they lack the escape velocity necessary to operate beyond the pull of the black holes.
Affording every individual economic opportunity and liberty is at the core of our antitrust tradition. It’s the idea that motivated Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson to reorient our approach to goliath corporations. They realized that when some companies have an unearned advantage over others, there’s a need to help level the playing field. Roosevelt used publicity to call out CEOs who wanted to flout the rules. Taft leaned on the courts to enforce existing laws. Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission to spot new corporate shenanigans.
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Each president thought creatively about how best to curtail corrupt, fraudulent and just plain bad business practices. They succeeded … sometimes. They also fell short … a lot. Teddy couldn’t help but assume that his fellow gentlemen would only do right by the American people. His predecessors likewise paid close attention to the interests and demands of the elite class that bankrolled their campaigns and demanded passes from too much regulatory scrutiny.
Those shortcomings shouldn’t distract from the larger message: They each acknowledged that fair play was more important than unjust economic growth.
Fair play is missing from today’s economy. Consumers are trapped in the orbits of a few massive corporations. You can quit Facebook, but your friends will demand you join WhatsApp or Instagram. Your social media still resolves around Meta.
Startups are likewise roped into these economic black holes. Companies like Amazon will extract everything from novel threats. They’ll lure employees from small businesses, or emulate the products of mom-and-pop shops. And, if necessary, they will simply absorb their competition via an acquisition.
The long-term ramifications of giant corporate black holes are significant. Consolidation across several industries has had a particularly pronounced effect on workers and their wages. Leading antitrust scholars forecast that Americans could be earning upwards of $10,000 more in annual income under more competitive conditions. Competition would not only boost incomes but also stretch dollars further. As companies bunch together they also tend to jack up prices. Americans may also have more career opportunities in a more competitive economy. The dominant corporations in their respective industries generally hire fewer workers — driving down total employment.
The laws of anti-competitive gravitational forces under which corporate black holes trap us in their orbit may finally be coming to an end. Like Copernicus realizing the sun’s pull, federal officials have awoken to the democracy-sapping effects of corporate black holes. FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, for one, acknowledged that “society reaps the benefits of free enterprise only if it protects the system from monopolies and fraud.” His colleague, Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, has similarly called for the public interest rather than private profit to be at the center of our economic policies.
This emerging consensus justifies optimism but begs the question: How can individual Americans achieve the escape velocity necessary to wrest control over their economic fates from the biggest corporations? A full outline of those policy options exceeds the scope of this short essay. For now, the most important thing is realizing that our economy does not have to revolve around the priorities of corporate black holes. This Copernicus Revolution can serve as the basis for rewriting our collective narrative and understanding of what fair play means in the modern economy.
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