Same people, same sources... not right down to your local school board elections.
W. enters my wife’s schoolboard race
Our family gets a close-up look of how big money has taken over politics -- even at the local level
By David Sirota
Friday, Oct 21, 2011 7:45 AM Eastern Daylight Time
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/21/w_enters_my_wifes_schoolboard_race/singleton/CLIPS:
Emily
had thought a “big” contribution meant a few friends joining up to scrape together $500. But, in the last few weeks, news broke that oil CEOs and financial executives were cutting $10,000 and $25,000 checks to her opponent. We found out that notorious front groups like Stand for Children were funneling in tens of thousands of dollars of out-of-state financial industry cash, and we started hearing about serious threats of retribution from big-time professional politicians.
Not surprisingly, many of these donors and politicians are part of the larger national network aimed at undermining traditional public education — a movement that has succeeded in voucherizing the school system in neighboring Douglas County and that has placed Rupert Murdoch-funded voucher activists right here in Denver. All this money and power converging to try to influence an election — while this kind of thing was once confined to national campaigns, the corporate and political elite are no longer restricting their election financing to federal races. At the state level, they have the American Legislative Exchange Council — a sprawling organization designed to fix up corporate campaign contributors with state legislative campaigns and ultimately buy industry-friendly state statutes. At the local level, there are often no campaign contribution limits at all, so the rich are free to dump enormous sums of money into elections.
Koch funded Americans for Prosperity, the 'shock troops' (their words) supporting ALEC members nationwide, and related orgs are going deeper into local politics. Crazy. 2012 is going to be a real mess.
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