For years, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that the tight link between government and big tech is a hallmark of fascism: Unlike fascism’s socialist brother, communism, which has government take over the means of production, fascism, as Hitler and Mussolini practiced it, is an intertwining of private enterprise and government, which each serving the other. Genocidal megalomania is not a prerequisite for fascism, so I’m not calling Biden “Hitler.” However, we should all be concerned when Biden’s spokesman boasts that the White House is flagging “problematic” content for Facebook so it can know what to censor.
Here is Jen Psaki, telling a roomful of admiring “reporters” (read: flacks) that the Biden administration is making sure that only government-approved information ends up in the hands of the social media outlets that are the way many Americans get their news:
In relevant part, she states,
In terms of actions...that we have taken or that we are working to take from the federal government, we’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office, we’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation, we’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect to connected [sic] medical experts with popular who are popular [sic] with their audiences with accurate information and to boost trusted content so we’re helping get trusted content out there....
Some of that “trusted content” came from Olivia Rodrigo, an 18-year-old TikTok star who showed up with Psaki on Wednesday to assure her fans that it’s really important to get a vaccine. Clearly, this is vaccine information from on high. Nobody would ever get vaccine disinformation from an 18-year-old pop singer.
But back to that bit about the White House serving as one of Facebook’s fact-checkers. Glenn Greenwald, a political leftist who nevertheless has tremendous reverence for the First Amendment and a free society (yeah, I know, there’s cognitive dissonance there, but he’s still fighting the good fight), was livid about this latest Biden initiative:
The whole thing smells especially bad because the social media companies effectively destroyed the physical public square. They did this, first, by giving people the sense that their platforms were the precise equivalent of a public square: Places in which people could freely share their opinions. Then, once most of America was on board, the platforms began cracking down on speech, in the same way any tyrannical government does.
The social media outlets were the equivalent of hotels that used to allow Blacks and then suddenly went all Jim Crow on them. It took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to end that pernicious problem with places of public accommodation. The First Amendment should be sufficient to end the denial of Civil Rights in which the tech tyrants – which are acting in a public capacity – are engaged. Instead, we have an administration that is not only allowing their unconstitutional wrongdoing but is complicit in it.
IMAGE: White House and Facebook logo from the public domain.
JOE BIDEN IS A POLITICAL WHORE. HE CAN BE BOUGHT BY ANYONE OR ANY COUNTRY. JUST GIVE HUNTER BIDEN A CALL.
While Biden was championing that idea, though, “dark money” groups were mobilizing to see him elected president. As Breitbart News reported in October 2020, a super PAC backed by Silicon Valley donors and boosted by “dark money” spent substantially to run attack ads against Trump in the final weeks of the White House contest.
70% OF THE HIGH TECH WORKERS IN SILICON VALLEY ARE FOREIGN BORN. BIDEN AND HIS CRONIES WANT TO MAKE IT 110%
Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
The pro-amnesty article’s author is Alida Garcia. She works for Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group as a director of coalitions and policy. Zuckerberg’s group was created to pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty that would have transferred even more wealth from wage earners to investors.
FWD.us supports multiple campaigns to get cheap labor for investors. For example, the group funded the p.r. campaign
Other research finds current legal immigration to the U.S. results in more than $530 billion worth of lost wages for Americans.
While Biden was championing that idea, though, “dark money” groups were mobilizing to see him elected president. As Breitbart News reported in October 2020, a super PAC backed by Silicon Valley donors and boosted by “dark money” spent substantially to run attack ads against Trump in the final weeks of the White House contest.
Big Tech are State Actors
By Leo Goldstein
A ‘state actor’ is a private company that either acts on behalf of the government or has other special relationships with the government, which subject it to constitutional restrictions on government, including the First Amendment. Google’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have been state actors since about 2010. They claimed to be neutral, non-discriminating in their political and scientific views and denied any political bias—until about a year ago. Then they reversed the narrative and said that they are private companies that can discriminate against whomever they want.
I can list half a dozen ways in which they are state actors. The pressure on them from Democrat officials, asserted by Trump in his lawsuit, is one of them. Obamanet, or net neutrality, is another one. But most obviously, they became state actors when federal and state government agencies opened accounts on their platforms and started to use them for interaction with the public. By accepting (and luring) multiple government accounts, they became public forums and state actors.
A few days ago, the Supreme Court refused to review the ruling in Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University v. Trump, No. 18-1691 (2d Cir. 2019). In it, the district court ruled, and the 2nd Circuit Appellate Court upheld, that each tweet from a government account opens a public forum, and the government cannot block citizens from participating in it. Most of the legal wrangling was over whether the @realDonaldTrump account was a governmental one for the purposes of the First Amendment. It was despite being hosted on a putatively private platform.
The state actor doctrine expresses the general principle that what the government cannot do under the Constitution directly, it cannot do indirectly, such as by delegating to private companies. If the government delegates some of its activity to a private company, that company becomes the state actor in respect to that activity and is bound by all Constitutional restrictions on the government.
It is the same as if a municipal government rents a property for a town hall from a private company. The private company cannot ban residents it does not like from going to the town hall or retaliate against anybody for saying certain things at that town hall. It is irrelevant whether the agreement between the company and the city specifically prohibits that. It is a state actor.
Shortly after Barack Obama won the 2008 election, almost all federal agencies opened accounts on Twitter. Some examples: @FBI – Nov 25, 2008; @ODNI, @DeptofDefense, @TheJusticeDept, @FCC, @CDCEmergency – 2009; @FTC – 2010. Only a handful of agencies had such accounts before the 2008 election. By the end of Obama’s second term, almost all government agencies had accounts on Twitter. Twitter users interacted with tweets from many government accounts and discussed them on their own accounts. Thus, all of Twitter became the government’s interactive space – a public forum, participation in which is protected by the First Amendment. Consequently, Twitter became a state actor, prohibited from banning or otherwise discriminating against the users based on their political views. The same logic and conclusions apply to Google’s YouTube, Facebook, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn. Consequently, all their terms of services, content policies, and other documents restricting citizens’ rights under the Constitution, are null and void.
The state actors’ status of these platforms, coming from their endorsement and active use by the US and state governments, benefitted them enormously, far beyond the visitors’ traffic to governmental accounts. The public, political parties, and other entities understood the large presence of the US government on the Big Tech platforms as a guarantee of freedom of speech and equal treatment by the platform owners.
Today, it seems normal for government agencies at all levels to have accounts (interactive public spaces) on three proprietary platforms, owned by non-competing and colluding corporate behemoths on their terms, allowing those behemoths to abuse at will citizens interacting with those agencies. This practice of third-world dictatorships was started by the corrupt and radical Obama administration.
We should expect that the federal government does not engage in viewpoint discrimination and that it provides access to itself as broadly as possible. It should not give one newspaper exclusive coverage of its activities. When there are physical limits, such as the size of the press room in the White House, it invites multiple press outlets which transmit the press conference to all the public. But with the Internet, physical limits have disappeared. By 2008, many government agencies had their own websites. They used or could use RSS and other open Internet protocols to provide updates available to any aggregators, from the top TV network to tiny blogs. They could distribute information directly by email to subscribers. Free and low-cost software was available to host web forums, allowing the visitors to interact with the government content, to provide comments, and to express opinions. There was even an open protocol and software to run social media (from identi.ca to Mastodon). The government received no benefit from opening accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. On the contrary, it incurred large expenses in managing these additional communication channels.
Today, some government agencies rely on Twitter as their exclusive emergency communications channel. Twitter can act as a prosecutor, judge, and executioner by blocking a person in a time of emergency.
The only beneficiaries were the social media companies. The Obama administration did not bother to run a tender or an auction when provided with such a valuable concession. It simply selected friends in Silicon Valley and showered them with gifts, tying them to itself. Another enormous gift to them was net neutrality – a free ride on the consumers’ Internet access fees. This explains why the Democrats were so furious at Facebook and Twitter for allowing Trump to win the 2016 election, and why Big Tech was working so hard to undo his victory.
In an article on Jonathan Turley’s blog, entitled Government Agencies Should Reconsider Using Facebook And Twitter and posted on October 15, 2016 (before Trump’s election win), a contributor mentioned anti-conservative censorship by Facebook and Twitter and noticed the loss of privacy by citizens interacting with the government on these platforms. One passage sounded prophetic:
Therein lies the risk that perhaps government agencies as a whole or individual officials will run afoul of a social medium’s content expectations and these entities will effectively suffer filtering or worse blackouts,” and warned against “relegating the citizenry to a future where only a few social media companies control the information.
70% OF THE HIGH TECH WORKERS IN SILICON VALLEY ARE FOREIGN BORN. BIDEN AND HIS CRONIES WANT TO MAKE IT 110%
Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
The pro-amnesty article’s author is Alida Garcia. She works for Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us group as a director of coalitions and policy. Zuckerberg’s group was created to pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty that would have transferred even more wealth from wage earners to investors.
FWD.us supports multiple campaigns to get cheap labor for investors. For example, the group funded the p.r. campaign
Other research finds current legal immigration to the U.S. results in more than $530 billion worth of lost wages for Americans.
While Biden was championing that idea, though, “dark money” groups were mobilizing to see him elected president. As Breitbart News reported in October 2020, a super PAC backed by Silicon Valley donors and boosted by “dark money” spent substantially to run attack ads against Trump in the final weeks of the White House contest.
Silicon Valley Insiders Added to Biden Transition Team
ALLUM BOKHARI
After an election year in which the tech giants repeatedly interfered in the election against President Donald Trump, Joe Biden is now rewarding Silicon Valley by appointing insiders to a range of roles in his transition team.
Shortly after election night, the Financial Times reported that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is being considered to lead a key tech task force inside the White House.
As Politico recently reported, four more Google and Facebook employees.
Corporate Donors Dominate Push to Give Amnesty to 4.4M Illegal Aliens
JOHN BINDER
Multinational corporate executives, who often serve as the biggest donors for the nation’s political class, are the driving forces behind an amnesty plan passed by House Democrats and nine House Republicans.
Last week, the House passed H.R. 6, known as the “Dream and Promise Act of 2021,” to provide potentially 4.4 million illegal aliens with amnesty and put them on a track for American citizenship. All 218 House Democrats voted to support the amnesty and nine House Republicans joined them, including:
· Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE)
· Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL)
· Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA)
· Rep. David Valadao (R-CA)
· Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI)
· Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
· Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ)
· Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL)
· Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL)
The amnesty’s biggest backers are a series of multinational corporations and their executives who often provide campaign cash to lawmakers.
In a March letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the corporations’ executives urged the Senate to pass the expansive amnesty.
“This important legislation has our strong support and we ask that you and your colleagues consider and pass it in the immediate weeks ahead,” the executives wrote.
The full letter can be read here:
Schumer McConnell Letter by John Binder
Those who signed off on the letter include tech conglomerates like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM, Uber, and PayPal. Also lobbying for the amnesty is the United States Chamber of Commerce, Visa, Marriott International, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, Chobani, Starbucks, General Motors, Target, and Hilton.
A flooded U.S. labor market has been well documented for its wage-crushing side effects, so much so that economist George Borjas has called mass immigration the “largest anti-poverty program” at the expense of America’s working and lower-middle class. The biggest winners are corporations and investors who can not only keep the cost of labor low, but also have a steady stream of consumers to buy their products and services.
Other research finds current legal immigration to the U.S. results in more than $530 billion worth of lost wages for Americans.
Recent peer-reviewed research by economist Christoph Albert acknowledges that “as immigrants accept lower wages, they are preferably chosen by firms and therefore have higher job finding rates than natives, consistent with evidence found in US data.”
Albert’s research also finds immigration “raises competition” for native-born Americans in the labor market. Similarly, research from June 2020 on U.S. wages and the labor market shows that a continuous flow of mass immigration exerts “stronger labor market competition” on newly arrived immigrants than even native-born Americans, thus contributing to the wage gap.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), likewise, has repeatedly noted mass immigration cuts Americans’ wages.
In 2013, CBO analysis stated that the “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan would “slightly” push down wages for the American workers. A 2020 CBO analysis stated “immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
Every year, about 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals get temporary visas to fill U.S. jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
BIDEN'S TECH INFESTED ADMINISTRATION
companies like Amazon and Airbnb, are also expected to join the Biden transition team:
A recent report outlines the number of Big Tech executives that are expected to join Joe Biden’s transition team in the coming weeks. The team includes insiders from the entire range of Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe.
A report published by Protocol has revealed that a huge number of Big Tech executives are expected to join Joe Biden’s presidential transition team, with Protocol stating there’s “definitive Silicon Valley representation and thought leaders on tech issues involved in shaping the future of the federal government. ”
Notable tech execs joining the transition team include:
Ÿ Tom Sullivan, Amazon’s director of international tax planning (State Department)
Ÿ Brandon Belford, Lyft’s senior director to the chief of staff (Office of Management and Budget)
Ÿ Divya Kumaraiah, Airbnb’s strategy and program lead for cities (Office of Management and Budget)
Ÿ Will Fields, Sidewalk Labs’ senior development associate (Treasury Department)
Ÿ Nicole Wong, former Google and Twitter, former Obama Deputy Chief Technology Officer (Office of Science and Technology Policy)
Ÿ Martha Gimbel, senior manager of economic research at Schmidt Futures (Council of Economic Advisers)
Ÿ Linda Etim, senior adviser at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (team lead for International Development)
This comes after Silicon Valley companies intervened in the election on behalf of Joe Biden. In addition to Twitter and Facebook both burying the New York Post’s reporting on the Biden family’s financial ties to Ukraine and China, Google also suppressed conservative news sources.
Six months before the election, following a major change to its core search algorithm, clicks and impressions to Breitbart News from Google searches for “Joe Biden,” dropped to zero and stayed their through election day. Prior to Google’s update, clicks and impressions from the search term saw a normal pattern of activity.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
The Biden administration is eliminating an office that was recently created to protect many millions of American graduates — including Biden’s young voters — from government-fueled corporate discrimination in hiring, pay, and workplace rights.
The worker-rights office was announced January 13 by President Donald Trump’s deputies and canceled January 26 by Biden’s deputies.
The short-lived office was intended to document and expose the corporate discrimination against Americans that is fueled by the huge Occupational Practical Training (OPT) program.
In 2019, the OPT program provided work permits to 400,000 foreign graduates so they can take the jobs and opportunities needed by graduates — including Biden’s voters — under rules that make foreign workers much cheaper to hire and easier to manage than American graduates are. OPT workers are foreign, temporary, contract workers — not immigrants.
The Biden cancellation is bad news for the many college students and graduates who pulled the lever for Biden in November 2020, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which fights the replacement of American graduates. “Biden was selected by the corporatocracy [which sees] no role for American graduates,” he said. American graduates “are not needed” by employers who can import many compliant, cheap, and disposable foreign workers, he said.
Correspondingly, the cancellation was celebrated by the immigration lawyers who help Fortune 500 CEOs import foreigners to take the jobs needed by young Americans, including many debt-burdened black and Latino graduates.
Thx @MDVisas for passing along some good news for F-1 students. Good example of how rolling back obscure Trumpy immigration changes will look. pic.twitter.com/6EHuRoqgGV
— Greg Siskind (@gsiskind) January 26, 2021
On the same day, the administration canceled another graduate protection plan leftover from the Trump administration.
The plan — which was blocked by corporate insiders in Trump’s White House — was to halt the award of work permits to the spouses of the almost one million H-1B foreign contract workers who have jobs in the United States. This H4EAD program was created by President Barack Obama — not by Congress — and it added another 250,000 foreign contract workers who compete for jobs against American graduates.
The cancellation was celebrated by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. He is a Twitter spokesman for the investor-backed American Immigration Council, which is a spinoff of the American Immigration Lawyers Association:
Great news! DHS has formally withdrawn the Trump administration's attempt to strip work authorization from spouses of individuals on H-1B visas, as well as a planned proposed rule on provision waivers of unlawful presence. https://t.co/GztUv3w8Aj
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) January 26, 2021
Biden’s officials have also canceled a recent move by the Department of Labor to limit the outsourcing of U.S. jobs via the huge H-1B program. They are also expected to undermine other Trump regulations that help protect American graduates from the H-1B program.
The administration’s actions match the demands of its corporate donors and cheerleaders, such as the major universities that help deliver the OPT work permit to fee-paying foreign graduates.
Biden’s team is also backed by many corporate employers of OPT and H-1B workers, including Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Apple, Amazon, Deloitte, Microsoft, and their trade groups. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group praised the preservation of the H4EAD program, which has helped keep married H-1B contract workers from leaving the United States:
We commend the Biden-Harris Administration for taking immediate action to turn the page from the Trump-Pence Administration’s disastrous immigration policies, and to do right by more than 100,000 hardworking immigrants who are contributing to the United States every single day in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
The FWD.us group also praised the Biden team for dropping a draft “unlawful presence” rule that would require the foreign student to go home after they get credentials from U.S. colleges. Without the rule, many foreign graduates overstay their visas and work as white-collar illegal aliens in the jobs needed by American graduates.
The Trump administration announced the OPT office on January 13.
The agency “is currently unable to evaluate the impact OPT has had on U.S. workers and foreign students who have obtained work authorization through the programs,” said the January 13 message from the Student and Exchange Visitor Program within the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
“To remedy this, SEVP is announcing the development of a new unit — the OPT Employment Compliance Unit — that will be dedicated full-time to compliance matters involving wage, hours, and compensation … the first report will be published on ICE.gov by July 31, 2021,” said the statement. It continued:
For example, if the unit were to detect evidence that an employer is using OPT in a discriminatory manner (e.g., as a means to hire only foreign nationals, or only individuals of certain nationalities to the exclusion of others), or in a manner that negatively impacts wages, this unit may notify DOL and the U.S. Department of Justice of such evidence, where HSI is unable to address such matters, so that the evidence can be investigated further.
…
The loss of employment many U.S. workers have faced since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as employers lay off significant portions of their workforce (while still, in some cases, seeking to hire more foreign workers), makes this work particularly timely.
On January 26, Biden’s deputies announced they would cancel the transparency program:
After conducting an additional review of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s optional practical training (OPT) compliance effort, the program determined that it is already performing much of the work outlined in the Broadcast Message. As such, the creation of the new unit is not necessary at this time.
Before Trump’s arrival, the federal government released minimal information about the huge OPT program. In 2018, Trump’s deputies released some limited information, allowing Breitbart News and the FBI to expose widespread fraud.
But the federal government provides little information about the jobs and wages lost to the OPT program. The federal website provides some basic data about annual numbers, the major OPT employers, that the universities which profit from the OPT program. But the agency provides little data about the operation of the program, the wages paid to OPT, workers, the many small companies that use OPTs to fill Fortune 500 outsourcing contracts, or about reported hiring discrimination against Americans.
However, many foreign and American workers tell Breitbart News that the OPT program — and its sister program, the Curricular Practical Training (CPT) program — provides the workforce for the lowest level of the Fortune 500’s labor pyramid.
The OPT and CPT workers — plus many white-collar illegal aliens and overstays — work long hours at meager pay because they hope to get promoted into full-time jobs and then into the H-1B program. They want to get into the H-1B program because it allows them to eventually get green cards.
The one million-plus foreign workers in this Green Card Workforce displace many American graduates from vital gateway jobs in science, software, accountancy, or health care. The flood of labor in this hidden pyramid also cuts salaries for college graduates — and boosts stock prices for investors and older Americans — including the parents and teachers of the American graduates.
For example, a group of economists estimated in January that Trump’s recent curbs on corporate use of H-1B contract workers nicked the stock market value of Fortune 500 companies “by about 0.45% — representing a total loss of around $100 billion.”
Other evidence suggests that the Fortune 500’s reliance on many foreign contract workers is sidelining qualified Americans, damaging corporate innovation, helping China, and also diverting investment, jobs, and wealth from central states to the coastal states.
But this hidden labor market is rarely covered in corporate media, such a Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, or in the pro-migration New York Times.
However, Lynn and his member of American professionals are trying to raise awareness of how the OPT program pushes young Americans out of good careers.
“The OPT work permit masquerades workers as ‘students,’ so employers are under no obligation to pay them fair market wages,” Lynn noted, adding:
The Biden Administration is under the false delusion that these international students are the best and brightest in the world, so deserve to stay here permanently. Research by the [left-wing] Economic Policy Institute shows that the majority of these students are not the best and brightest, and are entering low-ranked US universities with low entrance requirements [to get work permit]. Universities profit because international students pay full freight tuition, while American students are graduating with immense student loan debt and having to now compete with OPT work-permit holders.
The ICE data shows that the OPT program delivers many foreign workers into Fortune 500 jobs, where managers have a lot of freedom to hire within their own ethnic networks. For example, since 2003, Amazon has hired 12,173 people via the program, while Deloitte has hired 5,799 foreign graduates, and Apple has hired 2,667 people.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, nonracist, class-based, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
Migration allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, and impose tight control pay cuts on American professionals.
Migration also helps corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine Americans’ labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.
Wall St. & CEOs are waving skewed polls (& checks) to urge politicians to jump back into the amnesty waters.
Polls show (& pols know) that voters strongly prefer economic policies to help blue/white-collar Americans get good jobs
IOW, pocketbook politicshttps://t.co/fMtpvV1GYW
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) January 23, 2021
Report: Biden’s Campaign Benefited from Record Amount of ‘Dark Money’
HARIS ALIC
President Joe Biden’s successful 2020 White House bid benefited from an extensive record-breaking amount of “dark money,” according to a new report.
Bloomberg News noted earlier this week that outside political groups—not officially associated with Biden’s campaign, but working to support his chances at victory—spent and raised more than $145 million from anonymous donors.
“That amount of dark money dwarfs the $28.4 million spent on behalf of his rival, former President Donald Trump,” Bloomberg reported. “And it tops the previous record of $113 million in anonymous donations backing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.”
The money, while significant, was only a fraction of the $1.5 billion spent on Biden’s behalf this last cycle. The president, himself, raised more than $1 billion through his own campaign committee, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
A further $578 million was raised by Super PACs and other political groups. This figure includes the $145 million in “dark money” that was raised by political non-profits that are not required by law to disclose their donors.
Generally, such non-profits either raise the money and spend it themselves or transfer it to larger Super PACs working on a candidate’s behalf. Although Super PACs are not allowed to coordinate directly with the campaigns of specific candidates, there is no limit to how much they can raise on that candidate’s behalf, provided they disclose every donor. Political non-profits, however, often act as a shield since they too can raise unlimited amounts of money without having to disclose their donors.
During the 2020 election cycle, such practices heavily benefited Democrats. The Center for Responsive Politics notes that more than $326 million in “dark money” was spent to aid Democrats this last cycle. Meanwhile, only $148 million was used to support Republican groups.
Democrats, including Biden, accepted the help from “dark money” groups, even as they argued in favor of tighter regulations on campaign spending. Biden, in particular, unveiled a proposal last year that specifically called for an “end [to] dark money groups.”
While Biden was championing that idea, though, “dark money” groups were mobilizing to see him elected president. As Breitbart News reported in October 2020, a super PAC backed by Silicon Valley donors and boosted by “dark money” spent substantially to run attack ads against Trump in the final weeks of the White House contest.
No comments:
Post a Comment