This is the part that’s always bad.
IMO “dark money” is the perfect term. Even if it’s in aid of a cause I agree with I still think the concept is sinister and would rather it not exist.
What's the reasoning here? How is that always bad?
There seems to be a lot of potential for abuse in forcing everyone supporting any cause to publicly disclose their identity -- supporters of a given cause could be individually targeted by opponents; people could be intimidated into supporting causes they don't actually favor.
There's a reason we cast secret ballots in elections, and I don't see much of a difference in the risk/reward equation when it comes to donations to nonprofits and social causes, whether political or not.
And what benefit do you get from knowing the identities of everyone donating to a specific cause? Are you going to oppose something you already reject on its merits even more because someone you don't like is donating to it, or change your mind and start supporting it because someone you like does?
EDIT: the post I replied to was edited after my reply to add a lot of context that it now looks like I’m ignoring. Sadly I don’t have the time to address it point by point, so to clarify: this comment is a reply to the first line of the parent comment only.
It's only wrong to those who disagree with the opinion being shaped.
Why?
And what does it mean to "shape public policy"? I see that terminology used frequently in a way that factors out the autonomy and decision-making agency of the actual individuals who constitute the "public", but isn't it up to them to decide whether to accept or reject persuasive discourse in the public sphere on their own terms?
Second, the way you're describing that situation seems very odd. Surely the legislator in question had to make an intentional choice to accept the draft legislation from the corporate representative, make an intentional choice to introduce it into the legislative session, and then the other legislators had to intentionally choose to vote in favor of the bill, then the governor had to intentionally choose to sign it into law.
There are a many processes involving individuals taking intentional actions sitting in between the the corporation proposing the bill and it becoming law, so characterizing those people as having "zero input" seems invalid on its face.
If your complaint is that the intentions and incentives of the people who actually conduct the legislative process may not be aligned with what you consider to be the overall public interest, that's a totally valid argument. But that indicates a problem with the legislative process itself, so it seems very strange to attempt to address it by imposing limits on public discourse far upstream of where the problem is occurring, instead of proposing reforms to the legislative process itself.
Perhaps it makes sense to require disclosure of authorship of all draft bills brought before the legislature, including all incremental revisions made between initial proposal and final voting. Maybe all legislative work should be done in public Git repos, with detailed commit messages being required.
But that's a very different concept from forcing disclosure of the identity of anyone who donates funds to any organization expressing opinions in public discourse.
That’s not what’s on the table—the issue in question is whether paying others to magnify your views with a direct aim at affecting policy is something one should be able to do anonymously. Especially if we restrict this to “paying enough money to buy a substantial amount of an entire person’s time dedicated to promoting your interests” then this very much does not mean forcing everyone who supports a cause to abandon anonymity, but even without that carve-out for small time donors, it still doesn’t.
Are there other sorts of persons?
You get one vote and the other people get one vote. With Dark Money, one side gets access to control a million votes and you get one vote. That's wrong.
> and I don't see much of a difference in the risk/reward equation when it comes to donations to nonprofits and social causes, whether political or not.
NonProfits and Social causes are about fixing issues directly. Giving money to a shelter that supports Runaway Gay Teens or a Pets or the Homeless is not the same. A single person giving millions of dollars to a single organization that is designed to influence the vote and lives of millions of people is not the same thing.
Also, corporations are not people, so a corporation giving to a cause (No matter the cause) should be known by everyone.
No, that's not correct at all. "Dark money" doesn't control anything at all, and is usually just used for outreach and advocacy in an attempt to persuade people to make choices consistent with certain aims or principles.
The "million votes" you're referring latterly to are the aggregation of the "other people's" votes you mentioned formerly, and those people decide for themselves whether the arguments being made by advocacy groups are sufficiently persuasive to factor into how they are casting their votes.
> Also, corporations are not people, so a corporation giving to a cause (No matter the cause) should be known by everyone.
Corporations are just organizational models used by people instrumentally to pursue their goals. They have no concrete existence or any independent moral agency, and so factor out of the discussion entirely.
This is incorrect. Corporations have a concrete existence nd extreme power fully controlled by a tiny board of directors, not by "people" but by "select people" and your attempts to suggest we all use corporations when it's really just a few elite rich people using those corporations is bullshit obfuscation popular among corporatists and plutocrats.
And there are millions of C-corps, S-corps, LLCs, partnerships, and other formal entities used by millions of Americans to organize their business affairs at all levels of scale and complexity. And millions more have their savings invested in the stock market and are responsible for electing the directors who sit on the boards of publicly-traded companies. The idea that corporate structures are only used by "a few rich elite people" is abjectly false.
It's also a tool for those with unpopular-to-power opinions express them without fear of retribution in a society that insufficiently protects them.
When it comes to money, though, those with more of it usually have less to fear from retribution.
In this way, speech through money is a fairly dubious argument. It's, on balance, a definite corrupting force.
Dark money is a good term because it implies a negative thing and that negative thing is a good guess here.
For instance, your very comment is published under a throwaway. Couldn't we say that your comment, being an attempt to influence us, shouldn't be anonymous? After all, perhaps you could stand to personally benefit in some way?
However, anonymity has a cost proportional to its impact. That cost is that the impact of the anonymous act will have no retribution. A person is more likely to act in a negative-sum way with anonymity.
Still, anonymity is essential because it protects the underpowered in their expression. We as a society have said that, on balance, anonymity with speech is good. And I think that's reasonable.
With money as speech, this logic is broken. Money is the purest form of power within our society. Giving money is an expression of power. The more money, the more power to express.
We then get all the negatives of anonymity with none of the benefits. What's more, as those with money can express a lot more than those without, the negatives are amplified.
Another way to think of it is that freedom of expression as a sort of democratic value because it equalizes power. Speech as money removes the equality of it.
To be more concrete, I believe that I can post anonymously but it would be dubious for me anonymously fund a lot of people posting here.
"Dark money" is the alternate term most of the beltway prefers as it keeps them safe from RICO indictments and uncomfortable attention to the hypocritic duality of a country that practically river-dances to democracy.
This is just political bribery with more steps and ceremony.
> Cannon said use of the phrase "dark money groups" when referring to 501(c)(4) organizations "often reveals a stunning level of ignorance." Cannon pointed to the Supreme Court's 1958 ruling in NAACP v. Alabama, which held that the NAACP did not have to provide its membership lists to the state. The court decided that "compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute... a restraint on freedom of association."
Is there numbers on this? Because of how "dark money" is defined (ie. any sort of 501(c) nonprofit), technically any 501(c) charity (eg. even something like NAACP) is "dark money".
People can be wrong and later realize their mistake, it's not something we think about when supporting a cause; how will I be viewed in the future for this? Maybe we should.. Until then, anonymity in donating allows someone to express their opinions as they see the mores of the day to be, now, without fear of retribution, and protected for the distant future when they've realized how wrong they were and changed.
Obsfucated?
Anonymized?