Slate has dubbed the 2010s as the decade of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that paved the way for unlimited, anonymous corporate election spending. In 2010, the year of Citizens United, the largest political donors were Robert and Doylene Perry ($7.5m for Republicans); in 2019, it was Sheldon and Miriam Adelson ($122m).

Ray Metcalfe ("two term Alaska state legislator, Alaska's 2016 Democratic Party Nominee for U.S. Senate, and whistle-blower whose actions resulted in the indictment of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens") has published model legislation that builds on the 9-0 Supreme Court decision in the corruption case of Virginia Governor McDonnell, a precedent Metcalfe interprets to mean that "While Citizens United guaranteed corporations the right to exercise political speech through political spending, Citizens United did not guarantee corporations the right to receive political favors in return.."

Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's is riding around the country in a rainbow colored van, stamping $1 bills with messages like "not to be used for bribing politicians," as a way of raising consciousness about the impact of money in politics in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court verdict, which opened the doors to infinite campaign financing by special interests. — Read the rest

Mike from Mother Jones sez, "For our upcoming "dark money" print package, we chartified the known
galaxy of outside political spending groups by their size. As you can see,
we ended up with red giants and blue dwarfs."

If Citizens United was the Big Bang of a new era of money in politics, here's the parallel universe it formed: rapidly expanding super-PACs and nebulous 501(c) groups exerting their gravitational pull on federal elections.

The Eighties were a more innocent time when the people of Cleveland overlooked the ecological impact of releasing 1.5 million party balloons into the air once.

Cleveland's thrilled and joyous citizens united to inflate and release 1,500,000 helium party balloons into the sky. — Read the rest

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's personal library is up for auction at Bonhams. Included are 1,000 books she collected throughout her entire career, photos, and ephemera. Along with annotated textbooks, classics like Catcher in the Rye, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and works by Nabokov, Tolstoy, and De Tocqueville, there's a slew of books written by her Supreme Court colleagues and inscribed to her, including works by Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Neil Gorsuch. — Read the rest

Last month, UCLA's Dr. Christopher Lake, an unvaccinated anesthesiologist, spoke at an anti-vax rally, telling the Kool-Aid-drunk crowd, "They want to force a vaccination or medication or treatment into my body that I don't want. So they're telling me, 'Take the jab or we take your job.' — Read the rest

In early 2020, the Denver-based Extraction Oil & Gas company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, hoping to reorganize or otherwise free itself from $1.7 billion in debt. (Because making a billion dollars suddenly disappear is a privilege reserved for corporations, which are people, except when they're not.) — Read the rest

Bernie Sanders' record-setting fundraising isn't just notable for how much he raised, it's also notable for how he raised it — Sanders is the only leading candidate in the Democratic leadership race for 2020 who hasn't taken any money from billionaires.

As Joe Biden cruises towards his latest (and final?) humiliating defeat in a Democratic primary, The Senator from MNBA is talking a big game about how he will reverse his decades-long dependence on massive cash infusions from America's richest, worst people to sustain his political career.

Propublica and Politico have teamed up for a long, beautifully reported expose on the Conservative Majority Fund and other PACs that senior Republican operators founded to solicit millions from donors (many of them elderly and on low, fixed incomes), allegedly to combat racist, far-fetched Obama plans they claimed were in the offing, but almost all of the money ended up in their own pockets.

The same disinformation campaigns that epitomize the divisions in US society — beliefs in voter fraud, vaccine conspiracies, and racist conspiracies about migrants, George Soros and Black Lives Matter, to name a few — are a source of strength for autocracies like Russia, where the lack of a consensus on which groups and views are real and which are manufactured by the state strengthens the hand of Putin and his clutch of oligarchs.

HR1, the first bill that the new Democratic House of Representatives will vote on, is omnibus legislation that takes on some of the most pervasive scourges of representative democracy: vote suppression, oligarchic campaign financing and gerrymandering.

0.5% of Americans given $200 or more in campaign contributions, accounting for 66% of all campaign funding, but that's nothing: only 0.0001% give $10,000 or more, and their donations are 38% of all the money sloshing around in US electoral campaign coffers.

PBS premieres Dark Money on Monday October 1. It's a sobering look at how the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC is trickling down to local politics. John S. Adams, a Montana-based reporter profiled in the film, says, "This is scary stuff, but I think this is the proving ground for the American experiment."

Many of today's "red" states have historically had strong trade union movements — think of Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin — but after Citizens United opened the floodgates to dark money from the super-rich in state politics, the states saw their legislatures fill up with ideologue Republicans who passed anti-union laws designed to weaken labor and allow employers to pay their workers less, cut their benefits, fire them more easily, and subject them to less safe, less dignified working conditions.

When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy quit yesterday, it was a nightmare for liberals: now Trump was going to get to appoint a second judge, and he'll be replacing a judge who cast deciding votes for marriage equality and habeas corpus rights for Gitmo prisoners.

The Obama-era Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule was intended to prevent companies with a history of wage-theft and unsafe working conditions from getting federal government contracts; the GOP in the Senate and House passed a bill rescinding this rule and then Trump signed it, eliminating any possibility that companies that endanger and steal from workers will be excluded from receiving your tax dollars.

My latest Locus column, "Let's Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech," looks at how science fiction can make us better critics of technology by imagining how tech could be used in difference social and economic contexts than the one we live in today.

Editor's note: I've known Shahid Buttar for years, in his capacity as an activist organizer, drawing on his background as a constitutional lawyer and his deep commitment to a just world to help start effective grassroots groups across America; now Shahid has taken leave from EFF to challenge Nancy Pelosi — a consistent force for more surveillance and profits over people — for the Democratic nomination to Congress in California's 12th District. — Read the rest