False equivalency watch: Union versus corporate spending

Written by Allison Kilkenny
October 28th, 2010 at 9:56 am

I overheard CNN’s John Roberts worrying his pretty, neatly-coiffed anchor head about the vast amount of cash being pumped into this election cycle from outside entities. He’s right to be concerned. So far, $4 billion has been spent on the midterms, which according to Open Secrets, is enough cash to “run the city of Pittsburgh for two years, [b]uy every resident of Topeka a nice used car, [o]r treat each and every American to a Big Mac and fries.”

Have I mentioned one in eight Americans is on food stamps? Mm’k.

But the strange part happened when Roberts appeared to draw a false equivalency between unions and corporate spending. He kept lumping the two sources together as though unions were spending just as much on the midterms as outside corporate influences. That’s all shades of wrong.

Election 2010 to Shatter Spending Records as Republicans Benefit from Late Cash Surge
This outside money, made considerably easier to raise and spend by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision primarily purchases television, radio and print advertisements. Sometimes, these messages promote a candidate.

But often, they attack politicos. And of this spending, about $176.5 million has come from non-party-committee conservative organizations, through Wednesday. That compares to $81.6 million from non-party-committee liberal organizations. In four U.S. Senate races, outside groups have spent more than the candidates themselves through mid-October.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($34 million), American Action Network ($22.1 million), the Karl Rove-backed American Crossroads ($19.9 million) and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies ($16.2 million) and ranked one, two, three and four among outside organizations spending money on independent expenditures, electioneering communications and other political communication costs through Wednesday. All are overtly conservative organizations.

They’re followed in fifth and sixth place by two liberal labor unions – Service Employees International Union ($15.5 million) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees ($11.8 million).
So the outside corporate influences (Chamber, AAN, American Crossroads -which discloses its donors- and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, which does not,) have thus far spent a total of some $92.2 million dollars on the midterm elections, while unions have spent $27.3 million, less than a third of corporate spending.

Certainly, $27.3 million isn’t chump change, but it’s important to keep these things in perspective. Outside corporate groups are spending way, way, way more than labor unions. Most importantly, while unions must disclose their donors, groups like Crossroads GPS can use virtually unlimited funds from anonymous sources for the sole purpose of undermining the public sector, which of course includes things like federal workers and unions.

This is the first election after the Citizens United ruling, and we’re beginning to see the effect of SCOTUS’s decision. Unfortunately, private business will always be able to outspend labor unions, which is partially why the labor movement has been diminishing over the past few decades. But now the process is really accelerating. Consider these figures from Open Secrets:

In 2006, the federal midterm election cost $2.85 billion, while in 2002, it cost $2.18 billion. The 1998 election cost just $1.61 billion. Races during the 2004 presidential election cycle are tallied at $4.14 billion – only a small fraction more than the predicted cost of the 2010 midterm cycle. The 2008 presidential election cycle, at nearly $5.3 billion, remains the most expensive overall.
Now we’re talking about $4 billion on a mid-term election, a large chunk of it from outside, sometimes anonymous, sources. There’s just no way small, individual donors can compete with that cash machine.

In a democracy, every vote is supposed to have equal weight. But in hyper-Capitalistic America, the rich can buy influence, and the rest of us get left behind. That’s what’s happening here. To frame it as “both unions and corporations” hijacking the democratic process is really misleading. By far, it is corporate spending which has corrupted the political system.