Activity tagged "US politics"

Listened to:
"How Fact Checking Fails" (Podcast).
Mike Masnick in Techdirt. Published .
There’s been plenty of conversation over the past decade about how unprepared the mainstream media was for the shifts that have happened in politics and political discourse, especially when it comes to finding… well… the truth. As we move towards the 2024 election, the challenges of reporting and fact checking are once again in the spotlight, and this week we’re joined by NYU Journalism Professor and Jay Rosen to talk about the state of modern journalism, and how fact checking so often fails.
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Public Citizen just released a must-read report on the cryptocurrency industry’s spending this election cycle.

Nearly half of all corporate money contributed this cycle has come from cryptocurrency backers!

Key Findings In 2024, crypto corporations have poured over $119 million directly into influencing federal elections, primarily into a non-partisan super PAC dedicated to electing pro-crypto candidates and defeating crypto skeptics. Crypto corporations are by far the dominant corporate political spenders in 2024 as nearly half (48%) of all corporate money contributed during this year’s elections ($248 million so far) came from crypto backers. Koch Industries is a distant second place in 2024. The privately held conglomerate owned by Charles and, formerly, the late David Koch, contributed $25 million to its Koch-controlled Americans for Prosperity Action and $3.25 million toward electing Republicans to Congress. Direct corporate election spending at this scale is unprecedented. Crypto corporations’ total spending in the past three election cycles – $129 million – already amounts to 15% of all known corporate contributions since the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United, which total $884 million. 92% of the corporate crypto spending is from 2024. Since Citizens United, the crypto corporations are now second in total election-related spending, trailing only fossil fuel corporations, which have spent $176 million over the past 14 years, including $73 million from Koch Industries. The crypto sector’s Fairshake PAC and its affiliates have received nearly $114 million directly from corporate backers, far more than any other outside spender this cycle. Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity Action, a hybrid PAC, is a distant second, having received nearly $26 million, primarily from Koch Industries. Fairshake’s corporate backing is unprecedented. Though unlimited corporate contributions have been enabled since 2010 by Citizens United, this newcomer is already second only to the super PAC dedicated to electing Republicans to the U.S. Senate in terms of corporate money received. That super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, has received nearly $119 million directly from corporations over the past 14 years, largely from fossil fuel corporations but including many other sectors, including crypto, tobacco, and for-profit prisons.
"Big Crypto, Big Spending: Crypto Corporations Spend an Unprecedented $119 Million Influencing Elections".
Rick Claypool in Public Citizen.
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That's the whole purpose of the post-monopausal female in theory. Did your in-laws and particularly your mother-in-law show up in some huge way? She lived with us for a year. Right. So I didn't know the answer there. Right. No. So that's this weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman. Yeah. It's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the hyperneoliberal approach to work and family. My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship. It was still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California. She took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year. Okay. So it was just one of these things where it's like this is what you do. So biology professor PhD. Yes. Drops what they're doing. Yeah. To immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant. Painfully economically inefficient.. Can I just propose a really- Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it? Because that is the thing that the hyper liberalized economics wants you to do. The economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is to a ultimately going to unwind and collapse upon itself. abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market I think it's the oriented way of thinking about what's good and what's desirable. If people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good. I think that entire sort of, to me, that's sort of the root of our political problem.

It's always the women who are expected to stop "prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society". I wonder if anyone suggested to Vance that he should stop prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society, and take a sabbatical from his investment job to care for their newborn while his wife did her clerkship. Or his father-in-law?

Also, it's pretty wild that Vance saw the options to be: 1) MIL leaves her professorship to be a live-in nanny; 2) MIL pays for their childcare. Vance was a principal at Mithril Capital and partner at the Revolution investment firm at the time. Meanwhile, Usha Vance would have been making (ballpark) $70-100k as a SCOTUS clerk, and would safely have been able to expect several hundred thousand dollars in signing bonuses alone the following year when she joined a law firm.

"JD Vance in 2020 agreed grandmothers raising children is 'whole purpose of the postmenopausal female'".
Clare Olson in Heartland Signal.
While appearing on "The Portal" podcast in April 2020, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) agreed with host Eric Weinstein's claim that "postmenopausal females" exist just to help take care of children.
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Crossposting a comment I made on HackerNews about Follow the Crypto, since I'm seeing a lot of this kind of whataboutism:

The real story here is how much power individuals have over our political landscape. George Soros, for example, has injected more than $125M into the midterm race in 2022[1]. To be clear, this is not a partisan issue; the Kochs raised over $70M last year[2].

I fully agree with you that the broader problem is Citizens United and the ability for corporations and the super wealthy to pour this much money into politics. In fact, I mention this here: FAQ.

I think projects like mine would be extremely valuable for all industries, and I'm enormously grateful to groups like OpenSecrets that do excellent work making a far broader swath of the data more legible. But I am one person without the research team, time, or funding that would be necessary to analyze the data this deeply across industries, and so I focus on crypto (the subject of much of my research and writing).

The code is all open source, and I would be delighted if other projects like this one sprung up. It seems it would be a bit more productive to actually shine a light all the kinds of spending that happen throughout industries and across individuals, rather than using that other spending as a sort of whataboutist argument to dismiss projects like this one that (necessarily) focus on a subset of spending.

If you want to be critical of super PACs, crypto spending is literally a drop in the bucket and completely missing the forest for the trees. There is a story here, but crypto ain't it.

As this project highlights, crypto is far from a "drop in the bucket" when it comes to super PAC fundraising this cycle. The industry has dramatically ramped up its spending compared to previous election years, which is a large part of why I felt it was important to keep an eye on the spending.