Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

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I am not familiar with too much discussion on the role of think tanks in the press, which does give it something of a USP. Geoghegan also conducted many interviews but few of the interviewees are willing to be named, so there is quite a lot of reliance on Steve Bannon, who is the protagonist of every political story in his eyes. Generally though, this is a considered text about democracy behind the scenes, and there are certain recurring protagonists such as Matthew Elliott. The Internet calls for a very different set of political and personal talents: confrontation, wit, defiance, spontaneity and rule breaking. Where Clinton and Blair tried desparately to appera normal for the TV camera, digital politicians intentionally court the lulz. Dark money is an American neologism for an increasingly global phenomenon: funds from unknown sources that influence our politics. Bang up to date, and with references and examples throughout, this book makes the case that British democracy has been deeply undermined by dark money, people playing fast and loose with the rules, and vested interests taking control of the political agenda. If course, much of that has been endemic for a long time, and one could say that it is only the actors that have changed (a little), but the book makes the case that changes in the social and technological landscape have also allowed a much deeper undermining of democracy. Targeted deceitful ads on Facebook are known to have affected the outcome of the EU referendum - and it is this ability to use much smaller amounts of dark money to influence political decisions that this book uncovers.

Where corporate-funded think tanks once provided the ideas for a conservative revolution, now they often appears as one side in a ful-scale assault on an increasingly hyperbolic culture war. I used to wonder about how individuals who want to influence politics. Thanks Peter for explaining one of these ways is to set up or at least fund a think tank. Think Tanks were an American invention (Koch brothers who funded Trump are among the most influential contributors) which have been exported to Britain. The IEA is one of the most famous and influential with the UK government. STEPHEN BANNON: All Cambridge Analytica is the data scientists and the applied applications here in the United States. It has nothing to do with the international stuff. The Guardian actually tells you that, and The Observer tell you that, when you get down to the 10th paragraph, OK? When you get down to the 10th paragraph. And what Nix does overseas is what Nix does overseas. Right? It was a data — it was a data company. The book does go some way to exposing the dirty tactics in politics, that HAVE BEEN THERE FOR MANY A YEAR, and didn’t arrive just prior to the referendum. One does of course have to ask (which the author DOES NOT), “How much ‘dirty money’ from the EU is fed into the media circus in Britain and to what aim? The author might know, he is after all a journalist having worked for the Guardian, and others.This money gets into the political system in an increasing variety of ways, from loopholes in election law and online campaign fundraising through to anonymously funded, agenda-setting pressure groups. In her authoritative book on election finance, Dark Money, American journalist Jane Mayer outlines how US democracy was effectively bought by a cadre of the super-rich and their surrogates, often through faceless political action committees – so-called ‘super Pacs’ – that can spend limitless amounts of money. Peter Geoghegan has been tracing this dark money to its sources and his findings are very worrying. There has been a massive concentration of wealth and power in the past 50 years and those that are donating their cash to political parties expect and demand certain things for their money. Their demands are starting to break our antiquated democratic systems, the fines that are supposed to keep things honest, are paltry compared to the sums sloshing around. Although details of donations have been available from the AEC since 1998, it was only with the establishment of the Greens’ Democracy for Sale research project in 2001 that the public could readily access information on the quantity of money coming from individual donors and from categories of donors such as property developers, the finance sector, clubs and hotels. Well, except maybe it does not uncover all that much - because reading it I found I already knew much of what it was telling me. The information is already out there about dodgy donations, about how the Brexit party avoided scrutiny in the way it solicited donations, how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to mobilise people on false premises etc. etc. It was, in fact, a depressing litany of the constituent parts that create the new British democratic deficit.

This is a book everyone should read, it will open your eyes. The sad thing is that ‘The biggest source of disinformation “is the governing party, and they are the ones charged with changing the law” to protect our democracy.

While he likes to say that they spent a lot of time abiding by regulations, I would beg to differ. Cambridge Analytica did not even have a data protection officer until 2018, right before they shut down. I begged for one for many years. I begged for more time with our lawyers and was told I was creating too many invoices. And for a long time, because I had multiple law degrees, I was asked to write contracts. And so were other — BRITTANY KAISER: The massive problems that came from the data collection, specifically, are where my original accusations come from, because data was collected under the auspices of being for academic research and was used for political and commercial purposes. There are also different data sets that are not supposed to be matched and used without explicit transparency and consent in the United Kingdom, because they actually have good national data protection laws and international data protection laws through the European Union to protect voters. Unfortunately, in the United States, we only have seen the state of California coming out and doing it.