The Washington Post:
A network of conservative advocacy groups backed by Charles and David Koch aims to spend a staggering $889 million in advance of the next White House election…. The amount is more than double the $407 million that 17 allied groups in the network raised during the 2012 campaign…. The figure comes close to the $1 billion that each of the two major parties’ presidential nominees are expected to spend in 2016…. [The Kochs'] resources will go into field operations, new data-driven technology and policy work, among other projects, along with likely media campaigns aimed at shaping the congressional and White House elections.
For those who still believe that ultraconservative money is of declining influence -- a belief once nurtured by Karl Rove's magnificent Crossroads failures -- there's also this. Last weekend, the Koch brothers' fundraising gala "celebrated a crop of new U.S. senators whose victories helped put the Senate back in GOP control. Their bids were lifted by the Freedom Partners network, which had pledged to spend close to $300 million in the run-up to the November elections." Among the grateful beneficiaries were Iowa's Joni Ernst, Arkansas' Tom Cotton, and North Carolina's Thom Tillis.
It's sickening. There's no better desciptive word for it. Just sickening. More than 100 years ago, Congress statutorily prohibited corporate contributions to federal campaigns. And yet in the past few years -- vastly abetted by a Supreme Court as indifferent to the commonweal as any Gilded Age bench -- the financial and industrial powers that be have not only regained their 19th century influence, they have, one could argue, surpassed it.
They've surpassed it not so much in direct bribery -- the old trusts, too, of course, spent liberally -- but in their contributions to public despair. In 1907 -- the year Congress prohibited Koch-like contributions -- Progressivism was in full throttle and the public up in arms. They would tolerate the plutocracy's ownership of the political system no longer. Today? As Harry Reid so well demonstrated in the last election, mention of the Koch et al's political power merely engenders public yawns. What has pervaded the body politic, it seems, is a profound sense of hopelessness: There's no way to stop the plutocracy's insidious intrusions into the public arena, so why worry, when nothing can be done.
It's a kind of mass giving up, and to democracy, it's more dangerous than the Kochs.