Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

Product Information

The new research "casts doubt on pure regulatory solutions that do not reduce concentration, since more lobbying can mitigate regulatory action or even turn regulatory choices into mechanisms to protect entrenched incumbents," the paper says. "If concentration begets political influence, then even a hypothetically economically efficient monopoly offering low consumer prices can still be an undemocratic usurper of political power." KARIM AMER: Exactly. And you look at the level of calculation behind this, and it’s quite frightening. Now, as Emma was saying, a lot of these tactics were born out of our own fears in the United States and the U.K. post-9/11, when we allowed for this massive weaponization of influence campaigns to begin. You know, if you remember President Bush talking about, you know, the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, all of these kinds of industries were born out of this.

This book lifts the lid how the internet combined with undisclosed financing is being used in UK political campaigning. It exposes current campaign finance rules as being open to abuse as they fall behind technological advances and changes in the voters consume information. Most disturbingly, it lays bare how think tanks funnel undisclosed money into research and campaigns aimed at influencing governments position. But Steve was very influential in the development of Cambridge Analytica and who we were going to go see, who we were going to support with our technology. And he made a lot of the introductions, which in the beginning seemed a little less nefarious than they did later on, when he got very confident and started introducing us to white right-wing political parties across Europe and in other countries and tried to get meetings with the main political parties, or leftist or green parties instead, to make sure that those far-right-wing parties that do not have the world’s best interests at heart could not get access to these technologies. heart could not get access to these technologies. JEHANE NOUJAIM: My theory is that it’s got something to do with this film. Maybe we’re doing something right. We were at first — we’ve been stopped in Egypt, but we’ve never been stopped in the U.S. in this way. We’re American citizens. Right? The dark money playbook is straightforward. Take advantage of shady campaign financing; circumvent electoral rules where you can; and draw on a network of supportive think tanks, a receptive media run by a handful of magnates and hard-line caucuses within the long-established political parties. As we shall see, the same strategies and tactics are increasingly employed in the UK and across much of the world. From Vote Leave playing fast and loose with electoral law to the international influence campaign underpinning the rise of the populist right in Europe, politicians and their surrogates are increasingly willing to push the boundaries as far as they will go, and beyond. Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016 after a campaign marred by disinformation and electoral interference. You don’t need to be sensitive to have detected a whiff coming off politics in certain countries in recent years. Brexit is the thing that brought the odour to immediate attention in this part of western Europe, but it didn’t begin with the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, and after reading Peter Geoghegan’s unsparing account of shady money in politics, you would be naive to believe it will end there.

Table of Contents

Now, when we got to this Defeat Crooked Hillary super PAC, they explained to us what they had done, which was to run experiments on psychographic groups to figure out what was working and what wasn’t. Unfortunately, what they found out was the only very successful tactic was sending fear-based, scaremongering messaging to people that were identified as being neurotic. And it was so successful in their first experiments that they spent the rest of the money from the super PAC over the rest of the campaign only on negative messaging and fearmongering.

Concentrated markets are bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for innovation. But this research suggests that the concentration crisis in America is even more than a purely economic problem--it's also a democracy problem," Showalter said in a statement. Digital political parties take a populist message, mix it with a strong leader and the organisational techniques of the Internet age. There are few structures and everyone can participate. Or at least it looks as if they can. The Silicon Valley rhetoric of engagement and empowerment often masks the concentration of power at the top of digital party. So in that sense I learned little that I had not already discovered. All the same it is important to place all this information in one place in an easily accessible format, and so this book does that nicely.

Themes

Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through a shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond. And the thing that’s allowing this to happen is these information platforms like Facebook. And that is what’s so upsetting, because we can actually do something about that. We are the only country in the world that can hold Facebook accountable, yet we still have not done so. And we still keep going to their leadership hoping they do the right thing, but they have not. And why is that? Because no industry has ever shown in American history that it can regulate itself. There is a reason why antitrust laws exist in this country. There’s a tradition of holding companies accountable, and we need to re-embrace that tradition, especially as we enter into 2020, where the stakes could not be higher. Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947 Concluding that "corporate concentration and antidemocratic political influence go hand in hand," Showalter urges U.S. policymakers to recognize the limits of the consumer welfare standard when creating and implementing new regulations for major industries.

This is not a cheery read, but the audiobook I had made compelling reading in mood-regulating small doses. The micro-marketing now possibly on social media can be calibrated to precisely influence a highly specific audience of swing voters. Moreover, behavioural economics (not touched on as such, but alluded to in the book) allows the timing of emotive misinformation to have maximum effect. It was not described as such by Geoghegan, but it put me in mind of a targeted pain relief advert. In hitting the political bullseye, however, all too it feels more like the implantation of a cancer than its removal. AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Steve Bannon in 2018, key to President Trump’s victory and to his years so far in office, before he was forced to — before he was forced out. What was your relationship with Steve Bannon? You worked at Cambridge Analytica for over three years. You had the keys to the castle, is that right, in Washington? Now, on that two-day-long debrief that I talked about — and if you want to know more, you can read about it in my book — they told us — The more we uncovered, the more we became aware of serious concerns about central aspects of how democracy is supposed to function. Some of what we saw was illegal. Even more alarmingly, much of it was not. It is, as Geoghegan concludes, practically impossible to say how much Banks ultimately spent on the Brexit referendum – or indeed the provenance of that money. Banks has also alternately made light of, and angrily rejected, reports of his links to the Putin regime. What is certainly clear is that he was responsible for some of the most noxious campaign content – particularly focused on images of migrants and refugees – and was cavalier about legal distinctions between his insurance business and Leave.EU and the various other Brexit campaigns he funded.CAROLE CADWALLADR: The real game changer was Cambridge Analytica. They worked for the Trump campaign and for the Brexit campaign. They started using information warfare.

As politics becomes increasingly voracious of time and occupies more and more space on digital media, the scope for hidden influence through spending outside of the narrow regulated window in the period before a vote is all too obvious. The new research paper from the American Economic Liberties--entitled Project Democracy for Sale: Examining the Effects of Concentration on Lobbying in the United States (pdf)--was authored by Reed Showalter, an attorney and a fellow at the anti-monopoly group. Northern Ireland political donations are anonymous as a result of the times when announcing your political beliefs could get you assassinated during the Troubles. However during the 2016 referendum the whole UK was a single constituency. Donations to Northern Irish parties could fund campaigns throughout the UK.

Projects

BRITTANY KAISER: I believe it was owned by the Mercer family, that building. And we would come into the basement and use that boardroom for our meetings. And we would use that for planning who we were going to go pitch to, what campaigns we were going to work for, what advocacy groups, what conservative 501(c)(3)s and (c)(4)s he wanted us to go see. US donors might be expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a single election cycle. But for 50 grand pretty much anyone can get a seat with the British prime minister at a lavish Conservative Leader’s Group dinner where discussions are kept strictly private, even if they touch on government policy. CHRISTOPHER WYLIE: It’s incorrect to call Cambridge Analytica a purely sort of data science company or an algorithm company. You know, it is a full-service propaganda machine. Bribery was so endemic in an 1880 by-election in Sandwich that the constituency was subsequently abolished. David Lloyd George shamelessly sold peerages to wartime spivs and profiteers to fund his prime ministerial lifestyle.