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Tuesday, July 27, 2021 9:25:53 PM
Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Have a Problem With Corporations Getting Involved in Politics When He’s Suckling at the Corporate Teat
A super PAC allied with the Senate minority leader took in a whopping $475 million from corporate donors last year alone.
By Bess Levin
April 6, 2021
By Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Links
Earlier this week an extremely testy Mitch McConnell sent a warning to corporate America. Angry that companies like Delta, Coca-Cola, and Major League Baseball had had the audacity to criticize Georgia’s highly restrictive new voting law, the Senate minority leader issued a vague but nevertheless ominous threat about what might happen to naughty little multinationals that failed to keep their traps shut. “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex,” he seethed. “Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling. From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”
Obviously, at no time during his rant did the Kentucky lawmaker mention that his entire existence in Washington has been made possible by, and works at the behest of, the very corporations he thinks shouldn’t be allowed to speak out against voter suppression and other injustices. As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote last year, “Nobody has done more than [McConnell] has to engineer the current campaign-finance system, in which billionaires and corporations have virtually no spending limits, and self-dealing and influence-peddling are commonplace.” In 2003, McConnell, then the Senate majority whip, personally filed a suit against laws that limited companies’ ability to spend money to influence elections, demanding that the Supreme Court strike down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. While the court ended up upholding most of the constitutionality of the BCRA, McConnell was undeterred and got his wish several years later. Per The New Yorker:
-
Armed with funding from such billionaire conservatives as the DeVos family, McConnell helped take the quest to kill restraints on spending all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2010, his side won: The Citizens United decision opened the way for corporations, big donors, and secretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and often untraceable cash into elections.
=
“McConnell loves money, and abhors any controls on it,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of campaign-finance-reform group Democracy 21, told Mayer. “Money is the central theme of his career.” Just how much money has McConnell happily accepted from the corporations whose mouths he’d now like to wire shut? Funny you should ask! In the last five years alone, the minority leader has received $4.3 million .. https://popular.info/p/mcconnell-versus-the-first-amendment .. in corporate cash to fund his campaigns. Meanwhile, a super PAC he’s aligned with took in more than 100 times that in 2020 alone:
Robert Maguire
@RobertMaguire_
In 2020, Mitch McConnell's allied super PAC raised more
than any other super PAC in existence -- $475 million --
from corporate CEOs and even corporations themselves,
like Chevron, Mountaire Corp, and Koch Industries
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
@stltoday
‘Stay out of politics,’ Republican leader McConnell tells U.S. CEOs, warns of ‘consequences’ https://buff.ly/3rMcZGs
Image
12:52 PM · Apr 6, 2021
2.7K 145 ...link to Tweet
As Esquire’s Jack Holmes wrote on Monday, McConnell “has done as much as anyone alive today...to get large corporations as much clout as possible in our politics. The McConnellian Ideal would see corporations directly elect their senators.”
So how does the Kentuckian get away with telling corporations to butt out without choking on his own hypocrisy? Obviously, the thing that people need to understand here is that in order to feel guilty about being a colossal hypocrite, one must be able to experience shame, an emotion that has long since been sucked out of McConnell’s body. Which is why on Tuesday, he was able to say this with a straight face:
More tweets
That’s right, everyone, important clarification here! McConnell is fine with corporations donating gobs of money in order to have an undue influence on politics, but when they start speaking out about injustices suffered by real Americans, they’ve gone too far.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/04/mitch-mcconnell-corporate-donors
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Transportation Secretary Failed to Sever Financial Ties to Construction Company
Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, served for about two years on the board of Vulcan Materials. Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times
By Eric Lipton May 28, 2019
WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao failed last year to cash out her stock options in one of the nation’s largest suppliers of highway construction materials, despite a promise she had made to do so in a signed ethics agreement when she joined the Trump administration.
Ms. Chao had served for about two years on the board of directors of the company, Vulcan Materials, an Alabama-based supplier of rock aggregate, which is used in road construction and many other building projects. The board position paid Ms. Chao $110,000 plus $151,000 in stock options in 2016, according to a filing by the company.
As part of her ethics agreement, Ms Chao said that by April 2018 she would take “a cash payout for all of my vested deferred stock units” from Vulcan, effectively ending her financial relationship with the company.
But a financial disclosure report released this month by her husband, Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who is the Senate majority leader, showed that Ms. Chao had somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Vulcan stock. She owned this stock because in April 2018 Vulcan paid her for her stock options in the company’s stock instead of cash, the company said in a statement. Details of her continued ownership of Vulcan stock were reported on Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal.
More - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/us/politics/elaine-chao-stock-divest.html
A super PAC allied with the Senate minority leader took in a whopping $475 million from corporate donors last year alone.
By Bess Levin
April 6, 2021
By Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Links
Earlier this week an extremely testy Mitch McConnell sent a warning to corporate America. Angry that companies like Delta, Coca-Cola, and Major League Baseball had had the audacity to criticize Georgia’s highly restrictive new voting law, the Senate minority leader issued a vague but nevertheless ominous threat about what might happen to naughty little multinationals that failed to keep their traps shut. “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex,” he seethed. “Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling. From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”
Obviously, at no time during his rant did the Kentucky lawmaker mention that his entire existence in Washington has been made possible by, and works at the behest of, the very corporations he thinks shouldn’t be allowed to speak out against voter suppression and other injustices. As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote last year, “Nobody has done more than [McConnell] has to engineer the current campaign-finance system, in which billionaires and corporations have virtually no spending limits, and self-dealing and influence-peddling are commonplace.” In 2003, McConnell, then the Senate majority whip, personally filed a suit against laws that limited companies’ ability to spend money to influence elections, demanding that the Supreme Court strike down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. While the court ended up upholding most of the constitutionality of the BCRA, McConnell was undeterred and got his wish several years later. Per The New Yorker:
-
Armed with funding from such billionaire conservatives as the DeVos family, McConnell helped take the quest to kill restraints on spending all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2010, his side won: The Citizens United decision opened the way for corporations, big donors, and secretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and often untraceable cash into elections.
=
“McConnell loves money, and abhors any controls on it,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of campaign-finance-reform group Democracy 21, told Mayer. “Money is the central theme of his career.” Just how much money has McConnell happily accepted from the corporations whose mouths he’d now like to wire shut? Funny you should ask! In the last five years alone, the minority leader has received $4.3 million .. https://popular.info/p/mcconnell-versus-the-first-amendment .. in corporate cash to fund his campaigns. Meanwhile, a super PAC he’s aligned with took in more than 100 times that in 2020 alone:
Robert Maguire
@RobertMaguire_
In 2020, Mitch McConnell's allied super PAC raised more
than any other super PAC in existence -- $475 million --
from corporate CEOs and even corporations themselves,
like Chevron, Mountaire Corp, and Koch Industries
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
@stltoday
‘Stay out of politics,’ Republican leader McConnell tells U.S. CEOs, warns of ‘consequences’ https://buff.ly/3rMcZGs
Image
12:52 PM · Apr 6, 2021
2.7K 145 ...link to Tweet
As Esquire’s Jack Holmes wrote on Monday, McConnell “has done as much as anyone alive today...to get large corporations as much clout as possible in our politics. The McConnellian Ideal would see corporations directly elect their senators.”
So how does the Kentuckian get away with telling corporations to butt out without choking on his own hypocrisy? Obviously, the thing that people need to understand here is that in order to feel guilty about being a colossal hypocrite, one must be able to experience shame, an emotion that has long since been sucked out of McConnell’s body. Which is why on Tuesday, he was able to say this with a straight face:
More tweets
That’s right, everyone, important clarification here! McConnell is fine with corporations donating gobs of money in order to have an undue influence on politics, but when they start speaking out about injustices suffered by real Americans, they’ve gone too far.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/04/mitch-mcconnell-corporate-donors
-
Transportation Secretary Failed to Sever Financial Ties to Construction Company
Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, served for about two years on the board of Vulcan Materials. Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times
By Eric Lipton May 28, 2019
WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao failed last year to cash out her stock options in one of the nation’s largest suppliers of highway construction materials, despite a promise she had made to do so in a signed ethics agreement when she joined the Trump administration.
Ms. Chao had served for about two years on the board of directors of the company, Vulcan Materials, an Alabama-based supplier of rock aggregate, which is used in road construction and many other building projects. The board position paid Ms. Chao $110,000 plus $151,000 in stock options in 2016, according to a filing by the company.
As part of her ethics agreement, Ms Chao said that by April 2018 she would take “a cash payout for all of my vested deferred stock units” from Vulcan, effectively ending her financial relationship with the company.
But a financial disclosure report released this month by her husband, Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who is the Senate majority leader, showed that Ms. Chao had somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Vulcan stock. She owned this stock because in April 2018 Vulcan paid her for her stock options in the company’s stock instead of cash, the company said in a statement. Details of her continued ownership of Vulcan stock were reported on Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal.
More - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/us/politics/elaine-chao-stock-divest.html
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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