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PHONY CAMPAIGN REFORM.(campaign finance reforms)(Brief Article)
The battle to "get money out of politics" often involves putting a lot of money in to politics, a new report from Foundation Watch reveals. Author Eric Williams explains that recent efforts at so-called campaign finance reform were "backed by wealthy individuals and foundations" who hoped to "silence the voice of American business in politics."
Most reform efforts aim at greater "public" (read: taxpayer) funding of political campaigns and seek to lessen or prohibit private funds for political causes. Ellen Miller of the group Public Campaign supports eliminating private contributions to candidates altogether and replacing them with "clean" public money, because that's "the reform that makes all other reform possible."
Yet while Public Campaign decries the influence of private funds in politics, it has accepted its fair share of unclean non-public money. Founded in 1997 with $9 million in grants from the Schumann Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and George Soros' Open Society Institute, Public Campaign received an additional $5 million from Schumann for a four-year "public education" campaign.
Another leading force in the campaign finance reform movement is the Proteus Fund. Proteus operates the Piper Fund (named for its motto, "He who pays the piper calls the tune"), which helped fund "reform" campaigns in 30 states in 1998 to a tune of nearly $3 million. Such largesse requires a great deal of money, but luckily Proteus has rich friends like the Schumann, Ford, and Carnegie foundations, the Open Society Institute, and the Tides Foundation.
In the 2000 elections, both Proteus and Public Campaign supported ballot measures in Missouri and Oregon that would have forced taxpayers to fund elections. Williams found that "clean money" advocates in Missouri spent just over $1.6 million on their campaign, with nearly $1 million coming from the aforementioned advocacy groups.
Even though the Oregon initiative's website, NoBigMoney.com, insisted their goal was to "help reduce the power of wealthy special-interest groups," most of their funding came from, well, wealthy special-interest groups, including $200,000 from Public Campaign and Proteus, and $25,000 from George ...
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