Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

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Now, on the other side, we have voter suppression laws that prevent our vote from being suppressed. We have laws against discrimination in advertising, racism, sexism, incitement of violence. All of those things are illegal, yet somehow a platform like Facebook has decided that if politicians want to use any of those tactics, that they will not be held to the same community standards as you or me, or the basic laws and social contracts that we have in this country. BRITTANY KAISER: Actually, a lot of it started to come when I saw some of Carole’s reporting, because there were a lot of conspiracy theories over what was going on, and I didn’t know what to believe. All I knew was that we definitely did work in the Brexit campaign, “we” as in when I was at Cambridge Analytica, because I was one of the people working on the campaign. And we obviously played a large role in not just the Trump campaign itself, but Trump super PACs and a lot of other conservative advocacy groups, 501(c)(3)s, (4)s, that were the infrastructure that allowed for the building of the movement that pushed Donald Trump into the White House. And this is what was targeted when they were gathering that data out of Facebook to figure out which group you belonged into. They found about 32 different groups of people, different personality types. And there were groups of psychologists that were looking into how they could understand that data and convert that into messaging that was just for you. Concluding that "corporate concentration and antidemocratic political influence go hand in hand," Showalter urges U.S. policymakers to recognize the limits of the consumer welfare standard when creating and implementing new regulations for major industries. The next chapter is about the European Research Group (ERG) who are a very right-wing section of the Tory party who sadly now seems to be in charge of things. He explains just how they are using the expenses system in parliament for us to effectively fund them. A lot of the money and influence on British politics at the moment is coming from America. Most of it is coming from hard right-wing individuals including Christian organisations who are funding populist and far-right groups all over Europe.

Geoghegan clearly despises anyone with any religious association. This bigotry can be seen in his description of the DUP presbyterians (p.77) and of Steve Baker, a born-again Christian (p.110). Even though not relevant to the story at hand, he insists on negatively abusing a person's religious affiliation (Catholic) in an attempt to taint the reader's view (pps. 155, 159, 225). It is, as Geoghegan concludes, practically impossible to say how much Banks ultimately spent on the Brexit referendum – or indeed the provenance of that money. Banks has also alternately made light of, and angrily rejected, reports of his links to the Putin regime. What is certainly clear is that he was responsible for some of the most noxious campaign content – particularly focused on images of migrants and refugees – and was cavalier about legal distinctions between his insurance business and Leave.EU and the various other Brexit campaigns he funded. The willingness to accept anonymous funding makes think tanks the ideal vehicle for companies and business interests to quietly influence government policy.Dark money is an American neologism for an increasingly global phenomenon: funds from unknown sources that influence our politics. A compulsively readable, carefully researched account of how a malignant combination of rightwing ideology, secretive money (much of it from the US) and weaponisation of social media have shaped contemporary British (and to a limited extent, European) politics... Remarkable' Observer, Book of the Week Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through the shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond.

Where corporate-funded think tanks once provided the ideas for a conservative revolution, now they often appears as one side in a ful-scale assault on an increasingly hyperbolic culture war. We are living in an uncertain world at the moment, the coronavirus pandemic has changed people’s and governments priorities, then there is the impending climate change crisis that hasn’t gone away and here in the UK, we are almost about to embark on the disaster that is Brexit. Dark money has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of digital disinformation. It is a truism that politics has been transformed in recent years. But it is not just the outcomes, the election of disruptive authoritarian populists, that have changed. Behind Brexit, Trump and a host of other unforeseen ruptures is a paradigm shift in the nature of political communication. The digital world offers voters the opportunity to live in echo chambers where their political prejudices are confirmed and reinforced daily. We can all choose a tribe now and decide not to hear any voices critical of our choice.The new research paper from the American Economic Liberties--entitled Project Democracy for Sale: Examining the Effects of Concentration on Lobbying in the United States (pdf)--was authored by Reed Showalter, an attorney and a fellow at the anti-monopoly group. And the thing that’s allowing this to happen is these information platforms like Facebook. And that is what’s so upsetting, because we can actually do something about that. We are the only country in the world that can hold Facebook accountable, yet we still have not done so. And we still keep going to their leadership hoping they do the right thing, but they have not. And why is that? Because no industry has ever shown in American history that it can regulate itself. There is a reason why antitrust laws exist in this country. There’s a tradition of holding companies accountable, and we need to re-embrace that tradition, especially as we enter into 2020, where the stakes could not be higher. The absence of a truly representative electoral system or a codified constitution has only added to Britain’s democratic malaise. Regardless of what the country’s post-Brexit future looks like, its broken system needs radical surgery. Without the commitment and enthusiasm of these people who so generously donated their expertise and time, this important project could never have come to fruition. The future The book does go some way to exposing the dirty tactics in politics, that HAVE BEEN THERE FOR MANY A YEAR, and didn’t arrive just prior to the referendum. One does of course have to ask (which the author DOES NOT), “How much ‘dirty money’ from the EU is fed into the media circus in Britain and to what aim? The author might know, he is after all a journalist having worked for the Guardian, and others.