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[Totakeke]

Interesting look into the world of campaign finance based on leaked documents from a barred John Doe investigation from The Guardian. It also leads to a conservative judge, that had help on his re-election, ordering documents on the investigation to be destroyed. And also how a lead paint manufacturing company ended up getting a bill passed to protect themselves from being sued for lead poisoning young children. It's an interesting read.

Scott Walker was under pressure. It was September 2011, and earlier that year the first-term governor had turned himself into the poster boy of hardline Republican politics by passing the notorious anti-union measure Act 10, stripping public sector unions of collective bargaining rights.

Now he was under attack himself, pursued by progressive groups who planned revenge by forcing him into a recall election. His job was on the line.

He asked his main fundraiser, Kate Doner, to write him a briefing note on how they could raise enough money to win the election. At 6.39am on a Wednesday, she fired off an email to Walker and his top advisers flagged “red”.

“Gentlemen,” she began. “Here are my quick thoughts on raising money for Walker’s possible recall efforts.”

Her advice was bold and to the point. “Corporations,” she said. “Go heavy after them to give.” She continued: “Take Koch’s money. Get on a plane to Vegas and sit down with Sheldon Adelson. Ask for $1m now.”

Adelson’s generosity, like that of most of the other major donors solicited by Walker and crew, was made out not to the governor’s own personal campaign committee but to a third-party group that did not have to disclose its donors. In the world of campaign finance, the group was known as a “dark money” organisation, as it was the recipient of a secret flow of funds that the public knew nothing about.

One of the checks made out to the group, for $10,000, came from a financier called G Frederick Kasten Jr. In the subject line of the check, Kasten had written in his own hand: “Because Scott Walker asked”.

Take David Prosser. He was one of the four conservative judges who approved the July 2015 ruling that terminated the John Doe investigation, sacked Schmitz from his position as special prosecutor and ordered the destruction of all the documents that had been collected (later that order was softened a little to a demand that the prosecutors hand in all the documents to the court which would keep them secret under seal).

“David Prosser is in trouble,” Fraley begins. “And if we lose him, the Walker agenda is toast, as could be the Senate GOP majority and any successes creating a new redistricted map. That's not hyperbole.”

By the end of the bitter campaign, some $3.5m was spent by outside lobby groups channeling undisclosed corporate money to support Prosser's re-election – more than eight times the $400,000 the judge was allowed to spend himself. That included $1.5m from WCfG and its offshoot Citizens for a Strong America, and $2m from Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC), all of it in unaccountable “dark money”.

It worked. Prosser was re-elected, with a squeaky-tight margin of just 7,000 votes and after a fraught recount. The following month, Walker boasted to the Republican kingmaker, Karl Rove, “Club for Growth–Wisconsin was the key to retaining Justice Prosser.

Prosser declined to step aside citing a rule change that had been suggested and partially written by WMC itself. The change removed the obligation of supreme court judges in Wisconsin to recuse themselves in cases involving groups that had helped them secure their own elections.

The John Doe files reveal that the billionaire owner of NL Industries, one of America's leading producers of lead used in paint until the ban, secretly donated $750,000 to Wisconsin Club for Growth at a time when Walker and his fellow Republican senators were fighting their recall elections. Also in the same time-frame, the Republican-controlled senate passed, and Walker signed into law, legal changes that attempted to grant effective immunity to lead manufacturers from any compensation claims for lead paint poisoning.

The owner of NL Industries, Harold Simmons, made the undisclosed payments to WCfG in three tranches between April 2011 and January 2012, precisely when the GOP senators and then Walker were facing a fight-to-the-death at the ballot box.

Simmons, who died a year after Walker won his recall election, was a prominent funder of rightwing causes who, along with Donald Trump, was reprimanded by the Federal Election Commission in the 1990s for exceeding legal limits of political campaign contributions. He bankrolled with $3m the notorious Swift Boat smear campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election that erroneously questioned the current secretary of state's Vietnam war record.

Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature made an initial attempt to change the law on the liability of lead paint producers shortly after Walker became governor. As the name implied, Act 2 was one of his opening gambits that he rammed through the legislature in less than a month after he came to office in January 2011.

One of Act 2's key provisions was to tighten tort law to make it much more difficult for lead victims to sue. Under its terms, anyone injured by lead paint who wanted to issue a new lawsuit had to prove that the company they were taking on was responsible for making the specific paint that was on their walls at the time they inhaled the toxin – a practically impossible task given the number of different manufacturers and the layer-upon-layer of paint on the walls of old houses.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...scott-walker-corporate-cash-american-politics

 

[Clockwork]

As a Wisconsin resident I have nothing but disdain for Walker.

 

[Screaming Meat]

This is not the Scott Walker I was hoping for.

 

[Trojita]

This is so corrupt it's disgusting.

 

[SlickShoesRUCrazy]

How I fucking wish we could remove money from politics.

 

[Sephzilla]

Wisconsin could have kicked him out of office but didnt. I hate this state sometimes

 

[MightyKAC]

The worst part of all this is you can show proof like this to pretty much every person that voted for that asshole in the state of Wisconsin and not one of them will give a single significant fuck about it.

Wisconsin is one of those places that shows you exactly how dangerous apathy can be.

 

[MontyMarx]

As a Wisconsin resident I have nothing but disdain for Walker.

Agreed. The guy is a real asshole.

 

[Trojita]

The worst part of all this is you can show proof like this to pretty much every person that voted for that asshole in the state of Wisconsin and not one of them will give a single significant fuck about it.

Wisconsin is one of those places that shows you exactly how dangerous apathy can be.

People care more about fictional welfare queens than corporations that poisoned children with life long debilitating issues bribing public officials through secret money channels.

 

[kirblar]

Also in the files: GOP operatives planned to spread false narratives of election fraud if they lost an election https