Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer- Follow the Money
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2010 07:55:41 -0400 (EDT)
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

If  You’re Deciding Who to Support –or Whether to Vote: Follow the  Money 

In the movie version of the story of Watergate -- “All the President’s Men”
 –  the Nixon administration source who met  Bob Woodward in the 
underground garage to provide him clues -- “Deep Throat” --  famously tells Woodward 
to “follow the money.”   Apparently those lines were never  uttered in real 
life, but it’s good advice in politics  nonetheless. 
The other day,  California’s  Arnold Schwarzenegger – with whom I rarely 
agree – said something that should be  repeated over and over between now and 
the mid-term elections.   Schwarzenegger was referring to  oil company 
financial support for California’s Proposition 23 that would shelve  the state’
s four-year-old climate legislation until the state’s unemployment  rate 
hits 5.5% when he said: 
“Does anyone really believe that these companies, out of the goodness of  
their black oil hearts, are spending millions and millions of dollars to 
protect  jobs?”  He continued. “This is like  Eva Braun writing a kosher 
cookbook.  It’s not about jobs at all, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s about their 
ability to pollute and  thus protect their profits.” 
Huge new Republican “issue advocacy” groups are using secret corporate  
donations throughout the country to savage Democratic candidates.  They are 
joined by the Chamber of  Commerce – which is apparently using money from 
foreign corporations with  interests in outsourcing American jobs to run ads 
that attack Democrats as “job  killers.” 
By their own admission, eighty-five percent of funds directed to  
candidates from Wall Street’s major trade group is going to  Republicans. 
It doesn’t take a great political analysis to understand that these huge  
corporations aren’t investing millions to attack some candidates and elect  
others out of some disinterested concern for the public welfare – or out of a 
 concern for the “future of the American economy.”  Wall Street has never 
been concerned  with the “overall economy” and certainly not with middle 
class jobs.  It has only one concern: its own ability  to make huge amounts of 
money.  It  does it by siphoning off what novelist Tom Wolfe called the “
golden  crumbs.”  Wall Street finds scores  of innovative ways to shave off 
slivers of more and more financial  transactions.  As a result, the  financial 
sector has grown so enormous that has it has fattened like a giant  tumor 
on the American political-economy.   
The denizens of  Wall Street couldn’t have cared less that by concentrating 
a bigger and bigger  share of the nation’s wealth in fewer and fewer hands 
they were undermining the  foundation of true long-term growth: the economic 
demand provided by middle  class consumers who could afford to buy the 
economy’s goods and services.   
Wall Street –  and all of the outsourcers and buy-out artists – have waged 
relentless war on  the American middle class without any concern at all for 
over all “job  creation.”  They would just as soon  fire you or outsource 
you as look at you. They had only one thought: stuffing  their own pockets.  
Now they have the audacity to attack Democrats as “job killers?”  If you 
believe that, I have some very  nice swamp land in Florida to sell you.   
By electing President Obama and the Democratic Congress, everyday people  
fought back against this merciless assault on the American middle class. As a 
 result of Democratic victories in 2008, President Obama and the Democrats 
passed  an unprecedented array of legislation to rein in the power of the 
insurance  companies, big Wall Street banks, and oil companies.  It is not 
surprising that they did not  willingly accept that kind of attack lying down.  
They have fought back ferociously –  trying in vain to stop health care 
reform, Wall Street reform, the regulation of  oil drilling , investments in 
clean energy that threatened the oil company’s  energy monopoly – and the 
list goes on.  Of course, they actually succeeded at stopping major clean 
energy  legislation – and they want to keep it that way. 
Now they have orchestrated a major counter-offensive in an attempt to  
overthrow Democratic control of the House and Senate and stop the President from 
 continuing the assault on their ability to place their own interests above 
the  interest of ordinary middle class Americans.  
The real question before the American people in next week’s mid-terms is  
whether Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, the foreign corporations, the  
insurance companies and oil industry will be able to put one over on middle  
class Americans.   
Through massive  amounts of unregulated advertising once again allowed by 
the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case they have tried to  convince 
everyday voters that up is down and black is white.  They have argued that 
government  restraints on their recklessness and greed actually costs ordinary 
people their  jobs and livelihood, when it is patently obvious to anyone who 
looks even  casually at the economic history of the last two decades that just 
the opposite  is true. 
Their main tool in this mendacious attempt to convince people that what  is 
bad for them is good for them has been simple repetition. If you repeat 
often  enough that health care reform has “death panels” or that preventing 
Wall Street  from running wild will “kill jobs,” some percentage of the 
population will  believe it. 
If everyday people pay attention only to the misinformation embedded in  
their thirty-second spots, they will succeed.   They will not succeed if 
enough  everyday Americans are convinced to follow the  money. 
Most Americans  instinctively understand one thing very well.  There may be 
some people who actually  donate huge sums of money to political candidates 
for altruistic or purely  ideological reasons.  But they are  the 
exception.  Most big PACs and donors to these new  “issue groups” hope to get 
something very concrete in return.  
Of course you might say, what about labor unions, don’t they want  
something in return too? 
Yes they do.  Labor unions  hope to get outcomes that tend to benefit most 
Americans – a higher minimum  wage, labor law reform that makes it easier 
for middle class people to organize  in the work place, better safety on the 
job, and health care for everyone. They  want those things because they are 
responsive to the millions of everyday  Americans that are their members.  
But the interests of Wall Street banks, insurance companies and Big Oil  do 
not flow to such a widespread constituency.  In fact, their interests are 
very  particular and often lie in direct opposition to the public welfare. It 
made a  lot of sense for those Wall Street speculators to want to be free 
to make  reckless investment bets, take home millions and lay off the down 
side to the  rest of us.  But that wasn’t so good  for us. 
It makes sense  for big oil companies to stop investment in alternative 
energy sources, since  the price we pay them for their oil will go higher and 
higher the more we are  dependent on their scarcer and scarcer fossil fuels.  
It makes sense for insurance companies to oppose the new health insurance  
reform law that requires them to pay 80% to 85% of the premium dollars they  
receive in medical care, since that will restrict the amounts they can pay 
to  have armies of bureaucrats to reject claims, or CEO salaries or profits 
to their  owners on Wall Street.  But from our  standpoint, it obviously 
makes no sense at all that health insurance premiums  have have been allowed to 
increase three times faster than wages or that we pay  out 50% more per 
person on health care costs than any other country on earth,  and get results 
that rank 37th internationally.   
To find out whether a candidate  is for you or against you, all you have to 
do is follow the money.  If candidates are backed by big Wall Street  
banks, insurance companies and Big Oil they’re not on your side.       
If the corporate interests are successful, one of the hardest things to  
take will be the idea of a bunch of smug CEO’s, Wall Street traders and  
advertising men, chuckling over their martini’s at their club on the Upper East  
Side in Manhattan, about what chumps middle class Americans must be – and 
how  easy it was to sell them a bill of goods. 
Don’t let a bunch of Wall Street sharpies and corporate CEO’s play you  
for a chump. 
They want to convince you that, since the economy hasn’t yet emerged from  
the ditch they put it in, you should throw out the incumbents and hand them 
back  control over the American economy. 
Better yet, they  figure, why not make you so sick of politics that you 
just stay home so they can  make off with everything they want – out of the 
pockets of middle class  Americans – while you sleep through the election and 
never know what hit  you. 
Don’t let them. 
Go walk precincts for your local Democratic candidates, make phone calls,  
reach into your jeans and make another donation – and for your own sake, 
VOTE.  
Robert Creamer is  a long-time political organizer and strategist, and 
author of the recent book:  “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” 
available on _amazon.com_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Your-Mother-Straight-Progressives/dp/0979585295/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206567141&sr=8-1
) . 

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