Basic gist of the story... a group called W Spann LLC was formed last March through a Boston attorney, Cameron Casey. Six weeks later, W Spann LLC made a one million dollar contribution to the Super PAC Restore Our Future, a group created by former Mitt Romney political aides (I'm guessing) to support his run for the presidency. Then on July 12th, Casey dissolved the LLC. All of this happened before Restore Our Future submitted its first campaign filing.
No one knows who formed the LLC, no one specifically asked. The address given for the LLC is in a midtown Manhattan office that has no record of a W Spann LLC ever existing there. It appears that this LLC was formed, gave Romney one of his largest single campaign contributions to date, and vanished before any official paper work needed to exist. It appears that nothing illegal occurred here, but for a lot of people, myself included, this doesn't sit well.
The court decision that made such contributions possible, Citizens v. Federal Election Committee, didn't sit well with me either when it was announced after a close 5-4 Supreme Court Decision. For those that don't remember the details, Citizens United, a conservative non-profit determined to return political power to the people, complained that ads for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 should be considered political advertising and therefore should not be allowed to air 60 days before an election or 30 days before a party convention. The FEC disagreed and the ads ran.
Citizens United seized the opening created by the Fahrenheit 9/11 ruling and decided to make Hillary: The Movie, a documentary that heavily criticized Mrs. Clinton. They wanted to air it as a pay-per-view event right before the democratic convention. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the film's airing, calling it political advertising, and the case went to the Supreme Court.
As a big free speech guy, I don't know that I disagree with the general idea of letting Citizens United make a film (assuming the content holds true) and show it before the Democratic Convention. But the Supreme Court ruling also allowed for corporations to get into the political speech game, specifically permitting corporations access to their treasuries to finance said political speech. Super PACs could be formed outside of candidates' campaigns, take funding from corporations, and go to town with independent political advertising. With big business coffers involved, the amount of money that could be potentially spent on influencing an election by legally created "individuals" with no voting power is astronomical. For the 2010 mid-term elections, SuperPACs spent roughly sixty million dollars to influence those elections.
One big critic of Super PACs has been Stephen Colbert. He actually went before the FEC to fight for the right to form his own SuperPAC. On his show, during his quest to form a SuperPAC, he asked his fans to lend their support. He said:
This election, you, the Colbert nation could have a voice, in the form of my voice, shouted through a megaphone of cash.He won and has since formed a SuperPAC to help illustrate the lunacy of corporate electoral influence.
All of this annoyed me before because I know that if cash is king in the political realm, my voice will always be drowned out by corporations whose only real driving motivations are profit based. At least it was nice to know which corporation was shoving the gag ball in my mouth, but now with the actions of W Spann LLC, I won't even get that courtesy. I'll just be walking down the street, step into a local coffee shop to order my signature Berry Mocha Latte Sprinkles with extra whipped, and realize no one can understand me because I didn't realize I had a gag ball in my mouth the entire time. Then I'll choose to leave it in for some reason... but that seems like a topic for my other, underground, NC-17 blog.
There may be people out there who think I'm being paranoid. They may ask me why it matters who donates since free speech doesn't require that you own up to it? In the end, I would respond that given how fundamentally important elections are to our political system, the more transparency the better. Sure, I wish corporations weren't granted free speech specifically concerning elections since they aren't real people and can't vote. Let the people who make up the corporation each individually speak up and vote their own conscience.
And when there are conspiracy stories like this one floating around...
... there's no such thing as too little transparency concerning our electoral process. In my perfect world, we would have publicly financed elections with a nationally unified electronic voting system that was both open to scrutiny and provided paper trails. But for now, I guess I'll have to take secret slush corporations contributing seven figure amounts under the table.
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