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Last week in the nation’s capital, a quirky baby boomer kamikazed his gyrocopter in front of the Capitol building, causing a slight disruption on the Hill. After everything died down, and the pilot was taken into custody, it was determined that he concocted this elaborate stunt to protest for campaign finance reform. While this guy, a postman named Doug Hughes, may look like the type of dude you’d see interrupting a press conference yelling, “9/11 was an inside job!!” his motive is surprisingly sane.
Campaign finance reform is something that everyone should be talking about. Although this topic is dry as hell, I assure you that you need to pay attention. To understand this concept, we must first understand the difference between a PAC and a Super PAC. A PAC — or Political Action Committee — is an organization that compiles campaign contributions and donates them to campaigns for or against candidates, ballot initiatives and legislation. The great thing about PACs is that they are capped at $5,000 per candidate. PACs are also limited to $15,000 annually for any given national party. This seems reasonable, and undoubtedly falls within the realm of an ideal democratic election process, right? Well, this is where it gets tricky.
In 2010, a nonprofit political group known as SpeechNow.org sued the Federal Election Committee regarding its $5,000 limit to campaign contributions. The group sued on the grounds that the limit was an infringement on their first amendment right to freedom of speech, and they won. That’s right — money is now an exercise of free speech. Now, the FEC can no longer enforce contribution limits. If you’re scratching your head right now, it’s probably because you’re sane, and thus have no idea how this incredible false equivalency came to pass. From the dark recesses of the carnivalesque shit-show that is modern politics emerged the Super PAC.
Now, we face an entirely new demon in the upcoming 2016 elections. Because money is somehow speech (Capitalism-1, Democracy-0), super PACs can donate millions to their preferred candidate. The playing field has just been obliterated. A large corporation or CEO can essentially prop up whoever they want — and the Koch brothers have 900 million reasons for you to be very afraid. That’s right. NINE HUNDRED MILLION dollars of their money will go to the candidate of their choosing in 2016, which is about the same as both the Democratic and Republican Parties budgets combined.
The Koch brothers, for those who don’t know, own the country’s second largest privately owned business, Koch Industries, and are more or less the fathers of fracking. Talk about a conflict of interest — two men now have more “speech” than the other 319 million people that live in the U.S. As of right now, the Koch brothers seem to be interested in backing Scott Walker. Walker is a high-school-educated, incredibly religious, staunch conservative who would likely protect the interests of the Koch brothers for the duration of his presidency. Does that sound like democracy?
If I have done my job, anyone who reads this will be worried about where we are headed as a country. Unfortunately, gyro-kaze postman Doug Hughes failed in his noble attempt to warn us. He took an extreme, yet non-violent approach to alert the public about the need for campaign finance reform, but all he got was a footnote from the robotic purveyors of journalism. As long as they get the who, what, when, where and why … the story itself doesn’t matter. We, the ever-reactionary people of the United States, prefer our news to follow the classical paradigm of our beloved Hollywood films. We need closure — and that’s it. We just want to know why a crazy guy flew a crazy gyro-whatever into the Capitol. Once we got our answer, we moved on, and neglected to even consider striking up a dialogue about something so vital to our future.
Hughes used the wrong venue to get his point across. Our generation, destined to inherit the Earth, is primarily focused on celebrities who flaunt wealth condescendingly in what can only be described as some form of neo-masochism. Isn’t it ironic that some countries have no choice but to bow down to egotistical self-anointed narcissist oppressors, yet we prop them up willingly and enthusiastically? I digress. What he should have done is plaster a “Google super PAC” sign on Kim Kardashian’s ass. Maybe a “Kylie Jenner Campaign Finance Reform Challenge” would have done the trick. Seriously, why are Americans so affixed with various parts of satellite Kardashian’s bodies? I totes, like, hate my generation.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Drew Chowbay at andrew.chowbay@colorado.edu.
