#Americans Elect: you have free choice between Vacuous Billionaire "A" and Vacuous Billionaire "B"

[6338 Dead, 1481 since 1/20/09]

From Salon


FRIDAY, DEC 9, 2011 5:59 PM EST The slick shtick of Americans Elect Just
what Americans yearn for: A high-tech presidential ticket funded by
secret Wall Street money

BY JUSTIN

There’s an increasing amount of buzz around Americans Elect,a peculiar
Internet-based effort to shake up presidential politics. But dig a bit
beneath the surface and there’s reason to be deeply skeptical of the
endeavor.

The basic pitch of Americans Elect goes like this: We’ll go through the
expensive and time-consuming process of getting ballot access in all 50
states. Then we’ll hold an online convention in June in which any
registered voter can participate. Participants will nominate a
presidential ticket including one Democrat and one Republican who will
then enter the general election fray.

Here’s what the group is not so upfront about: It’s fueled by millions of
dollars of secret money, there is a group of wealthy, well-connected
board members who have control over Americans Elect’s nominating process,
and the group has myriad links to Wall Street.

Americans Elect has been getting periodic bursts of support from
prominent commentators.

“What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers,
what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies,
Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated
American political life —remove the barriers to real competition, flatten
the incumbents and let the people in,” wrote Thomas Friedman in July.

And in a Huffington Post column this week titled “2012: The year of the
Independent?” Jon Huntsman bundler Lynn Forester de Rothschild hailed the
group for offering a “revolutionary new way to nominate a bipartisan
ticket to occupy the White House.” Rothschild is also on the group’s
board.

There is little doubt that these kinds of hosannas will intensify as the
election heats up. Americans Elect’s brand of third way-ism tends to be
irresistible to newspaper editorial boards. So here are some facts about
the group to keep in mind.

SECRET MONEY

The group is hoping to raise $30 million for its effort. It has already
raised an impressive $22 million as of last month. So where is all that
money coming from?Americans Elect won’t say. In fact, the group changed
how it is organized under the tax code last year in order to shield the
identity of donors. It is now a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” group whose
contributors are not reported publicly.

What we do know about the donors, largely through news reports citing
anonymous sources, suggests they are a handful of super-rich Americans
who made fortunes in the finance industry. (More on this below.) But it’s
impossible to fully assess the donors’ motives and examine their
backgrounds and entanglements –important parts of the democratic process –
while their identities and the size of their donations remain secret.

In response to critics, Americans Elect official Darry Sragow argues that
the donors fear there will be a backlash if their names are public.
“Cross those who hold power and you are banished to political Siberia, or
targeted not by the Molotov cocktails conjured up by the professor, but
by unresponsive or hostile government actions,” he wrote in a recent
column.

ANTI-DEMOCRATIC RULES

Americans Elect officials often tout their “revolutionary” online
nominating convention, which will be open to any registered voter. But
there’s a big catch. Any ticket picked by participants will have to be
approved by a Candidate Certification Committee, according to the group’s
bylaws.

Among other things this committee will need to certify a “balanced ticket
obligation” –that the ticket consists of persons who are “responsive to
the vast majority of citizens while remaining independent of special
interests and the partisan interests of either major political party,”
according to the current draft of Americans Elect rules. Making these
sorts of assessments is, of course, purely subjective.

And who appoints the members of the Candidate Certification Committee?The
board members of Americans Elect. About whom I’ll have more to say in a
moment.

“It’s probably headed by wealthy, well-meaning centrists who want to set
up an alternative to the two major parties but they’re afraid of the
process getting hijacked. So they’ve reserved for themselves the power to
overrule it,” says Rick Hasen, a professor at UC Irvine law school and
author of a lengthy critique of the group.

In response, Americans Elect’s Sragow has written that some of these
rules are still subject to change. And he has defended the board,
comparing them to the Founding Fathers. “While we don’t mean to put the
board in the company of the Founding Fathers, we’d point out that nobody
picked the Founding Fathers, either,” Sragow argues. “They took it upon
themselves to turn a popular dream into a shared reality. And they, too,
had debates over how much control should be centralized. They knew that
too much power in the hands of too few isn’t real democracy, but that
power too diffuse is anarchy.”

WALL STREET CONNECTIONS

So who is on the Americans Elect board, and where is the money coming
from?

Thomas Friedman reported over the summer that the group is “financed with
some serious hedge-fund money,” which has paid for, among other things,
prime office space in New York and Washington. A spokeswoman for the
group did not respond to a request for comment about Friedman’s report.

At one point over the summer, the group was claiming that none of its
funding comes from “special interests” –a difficult-to-define term that,
if it has any meaning at all, would have to include the hedge fund
industry.

We do know that Peter Ackerman, chairman of the board of Americans
Elect,has given over a million dollars to the group. A wealthy investment
banker, he has been a donor to both President Obama and Republicans over
the years. He was also on the board of the CATO Institute’s Social
Security Choice project, which advocated for a Bush-style scheme to
dismantle and privatize social security.

According to the Guardian,other funders include Melvin Andrews of
Lakeside Capital Partners and Kirk Rostron of an investment firm called
the Mt. Vernon Group. Rostron formerly worked as a director at Merrill
Lynch’s hedge fund group. Another reported funder is Jim Holbrook,
chairman of the Promotion Marketing Association, the trade association
for the marketing industry.

And the list of political operatives who have signed on to the effort –
including former McCain aide Mark McKinnon, Will Marshall of the
Progressive Policy Institute, former New Jersey governor Christine Todd
Whitman, and Bloomberg pollster Douglas Schoen –suggest the group will
promote a kind of pro-establishment, “why can’t we just all get along by
agreeing to dismantle Social Security”-style centrism.

The blog Irregular Times has been providing very close coverage of
Americans Elect,so keep an eye over there as the group continues its rise
to prominence.
--
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution
inevitable” -JFK